One "wedge issue" I will not compromise on

[Christian Liberty]

There's occasionally discussion of "wedge issues" on here, things that divide the liberty movement. Anarcho-capitalism vs minarchism, gay marriage, intellectual property, "lifeboat" scenarios, Rand Paul, and... abortion.

In general, I'm willing to let the wedge issues go. I mean, I'll discuss them, to enhance my own understanding of theory and to sharpen each other. But I wouldn't really fight over most of them. If you're a minarchist, alright, I think you're inconsistent, but you're not my enemy. If you think government recognized gay marriage is a lesser evil than the alternative, again, I disagree and think you're inconsistent, but if its not that big a deal for you, it isn't for me either. There are extreme situations where the NAP is stretched, and while I think they're worth discussing, I'm not going to fight with you because you hold an imperfect position on one issue. There are a few situations where I disagree with the NAP at a personal level too (ie. person is suddenly overcome with temporary depression and is about to jump off the bridge, its technically a violation of the NAP but I'm going to rescue them and hope they get themselves back together.) IP, well, I still have mixed feelings anyways. But even if I come to a position at some point (And hopefully I will) I won't divide with anyone over it.

But abortion is in a different category for me, and I feel that its actually inaccurate to describe this as a "wedge issue." Sometimes I'm tempted into focusing less on this issue than I should, because many pro-lifers are hypocrites. But ultimately, they don't matter. The bottom line is this, if you think its in any way "OK" to murder a child in the womb, you're no more in the same movement as me than a neocon.

Now, I can understand the radical anti-statist ("anarchist") saying that he doesn't want state regulation on abortion because he doesn't want state regulation on anything. Fair enough. But then, he shouldn't want state regulation on murder either, including "murder" of abortion doctors. Here's the unfortunate reality, the State exists. I do not want it to exist. But as long as it does, as long as it illegitimately holds a monopoly on law and justice, it has an obligation not to let the weakest and most vulnerable people among us (the unborn) be murdered without sanctions against the killers. Period.

And if you have a problem with that, I don't think we're in the same movement.

Period.

[belian78]

How coincidental that it's the quintessential wedge issue.

[Christian Liberty]

How coincidental that it's the quintessential wedge issue.

No, its actually not. Its a debate between those who oppose all aggression, and those who support at least some murder. This issue is foundational.

And, I don't really care that its going to alienate a lot of people. I'm not a utilitarian, and I do not play utilitarian games. Right is right, wrong is wrong.

[gwax23]

Your so regressive and delusional. A woman or gender confused or gender neutral or none of the above has the right to murder the child and then burn the carcass to heat a government run hospital paid for by the common people for the common good. If not how could said hospital provide sub par care to self entitled drug addicts? It is a human right as dictated by the central and all knowing authority of the UN. Everyone with a heart and brain knows this.

Also if you even so much as think you going to drive the endangered waki waki toad fish into extinction you have another thing coming! Any good human being will defend this helpless 2mm by 2mm aquatic life form that brings so much joy to the world. Any encroachment into its natural breeding grounds will mean the full threat of the law on you. Jobs and economic development will have to wait, we have no time for your heartless "capitalism" the waki waki toad fish is at stake for gods sake! So as you can see we have real issues to worry about not some worthless unborn nonhuman aborted a month and a half before the due date because everyone knows motherhood and being a parent are so 2 generations ago....

[acptulsa]

Lord God in Heaven...


...I'm...I mean, I'll...my...I...I...my...I...me...I...I'm not going to fight with you because you hold an imperfect position...I...at a personal level too...I'm...I...I...I...I...

...me, and I feel...I'm...I...are hypocrites. But ultimately, they don't matter. The bottom line is...me.....

...I...I...Period.

And if you have a problem with that, I don't think we're in the same movement.

Period.

...please grant us the strength.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01UipbZL3ww

[mad cow]

It's pearls of wisdom like this,delivered by FreedomFanatic at a rate of over one thousand a month that makes this such a great site.

Oh yeah,if any of you Yahoos think that you are going to come in here defending Pol Pot without me and FF jumping down your throats,you got another think coming!

[Keith and stuff]

I am confused. Are you saying you are an anarchist that thinks both doctors and women should go to government jails if they participate in abortions? Please explain.

[oyarde]

It's pearls of wisdom like this,delivered by FreedomFanatic at a rate of over one thousand a month that makes this such a great site.

Oh yeah,if any of you Yahoos think that you are going to come in here defending Pol Pot without me and FF jumping down your throats,you got another think coming!
Pol Pot's party still held a seat at the UN in 1979 , after they had all fled like the murderous commie cowards there were . I did a little free lance work against them on my vacation time . Of course , that was when I was younger and still thought humanity worth saving ..... oh yeah , fuck Pol Pot .

[TaftFan]

Lord God in Heaven...



...please grant us the strength.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01UipbZL3ww
Thanks for that excellent troll material. I haven't done it in years, but that inspired me. Check out the first comment: http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/03/24/matt-harvey-gets-his-wish-will-rehab-from-tommy-john-surgery-in-new-york/

[oyarde]

How coincidental that it's the quintessential wedge issue.
Well yeah . It is simple , yet complicated . Murder is murder . Even worse of the defenseless . It is not a Fed govt issue though . I would not do it, I do not approve of it..... I am also not a young female , therefore , I cannot put myself in that position .....

[qh4dotcom]

I would never abort a child but I am more pro-mind my own business than I am pro-life.

If a woman not related to me is that determined to kill her unborn child, there is nothing I can do to stop her so I might as well just mind my own business.

and I recall last election 99% of the electorate voted for the pro-choice presidential candidates Romney and Obama....so if you voted for Romney or Obama then shut up, you have no credibility to talk like a pro-lifer.

[Christian Liberty]

I am confused. Are you saying you are an anarchist that thinks both doctors and women should go to government jails if they participate in abortions? Please explain.

You might as well ask me whether I'm an anarchist who thinks that murderers like Ted Bundy should go to government jails if they participate in abortions.

Ideally the government should be replaced by purely free market organizations. Abortion is murder and should not be legal. These statements only contradict each other to statists who don't understand that "No State" and "no law" do not necessarily coincide.

Well yeah . It is simple , yet complicated . Murder is murder . Even worse of the defenseless . It is not a Fed govt issue though . I would not do it, I do not approve of it..... I am also not a young female , therefore , I cannot put myself in that position .....

I didn't say its a FedGov issue. Constitutionally its not. Ideally no governments in the statist sense of that term would be involved at all. If FedGov is going to exist whether I like it or not, I endorse decentralization. But this thread is not about decentralization, this thread is about the topic of whether "pro-choice" and "pro-life" libertarians have enough in common to really be part of the same movement. At the Federal level we can avoid it by saying its decided by the states, but then at the state level we are going to end up fighting over it and there's ultimately no avoiding it unless you want pro-lifers to stand by and support government protected (Which is ultimately what it is, its not like the government will allow private citizens to stop it) murder, which should not happen, and will not happen at least for me.

[Christian Liberty]

I would never abort a child but I am more pro-mind my own business than I am pro-life.


OK, does this also apply to newborns? Rebellious teenagers? Abortion-doctor killing vigilantes?

If a woman not related to me is that determined to kill her unborn child, there is nothing I can do to stop her so I might as well just mind my own business.

See above questions.




and I recall last election 99% of the electorate voted for the pro-choice presidential candidates Romney and Obama....so if you voted for Romney or Obama then shut up, you have no credibility to talk like a pro-lifer.

Yes, most pro-lifers are hypocrites. So what? For what its worth, I was 17 in 2012 and thus did not vote. I supported Gary Johnson at the time despite his abortion stance, but if I was faced with those choices again and had the opportunity to vote, I might not bother at all.

[Mini-Me]

The underlying disagreement over abortion is, "When does personhood begin?" Is an unborn baby* a human being with rights of its own, or is it just a soulless sack of tissue and organs? At what point does a baby become a human being with rights? Is it at conception, like the religious crowd insists? Is it when brain waves start? Is it when a heartbeat starts? Is it when the baby is viable? Is it when the head is fully out, like many partial-birth abortion doctors might insist? Or is it when the head and full body is out AND the mother admits it's a human being, like Kermit Gosnell thinks, which is what we seem to be moving toward (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?446264-GOP-candidate-Some-groups-contemplate-infanticide&highlight=infanticide)? Is it after they can talk and walk and say, "Stop trying to kill me" in a complete English sentence? Is it only after they start receiving taxpayer-funded benefits, because the government demands a future return on its investment? ;)

That is the crux of the debate, and at least within a certain spectrum, there's a reasonable difference of opinion. On the one hand, I think the full-blown pro-choice view that "It has no rights unless the head is out" is absolutely barbaric and literally insane. On the other hand, I think the full-blown religious pro-life view that "A zygote is a human being with rights" is so difficult to substantiate in non-religious terms that it's only given pro-choicers an excuse to call pro-lifers insane religious zealots in turn and completely tune out the cold hard truth of what second-plus-trimester abortions (at least) really are. (I think it's sadly kept us from making real gains and saving real lives in the most obvious cases.) Their denial of reality probably makes it some type of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, but yeah. Saying life begins when the head comes out requires an insane belief in some kind of legalistic magic, but there's some sensible disagreement at least between whether life begins at conception, with brain waves, with a heartbeat, etc. At least within this realm, it's a totally legitimate wedge issue even within the liberty movement.

*"CALL IT A FETUS," screams one half of the crowd. ;)

It's fair to say you won't support or vote for anyone who's pro-choice. I'm ambivalent about this myself, mainly because nothing almost ever changes on this issue no matter what anyway. :( Still, dividing the liberty movement over the abortion issue is kind of pointless anyway, at least at the federal level: Even the pro-choice segment of the liberty movement is pretty much united behind Ron Paul's Constitutional logic (because he's correct). Roe vs. Wade was an unconstitutional decision with twisted logic of the worst kind: It used the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to imply a general right to privacy from the Fourth Amendment (shaky ground already), then assumed out of hand that laws against abortion violate that right, because abortion is practiced in private. However, if their argument held water, it would by extension make almost all laws against violent criminal acts "unconstitutional," because almost ALL crime, including almost all murder, is also committed in private. We can still prosecute crime committed in private once we have probable cause for a warrant to gather evidence, then enough evidence for an indictment, then enough for a conviction, etc. It doesn't require a police state, Fourth Amendment violations, or an invasion of privacy. (In the case of abortion: You had a huge bulge yesterday from a third trimester baby, and you no longer have a huge bulge today, nor do you have a baby, and you can't account for it. That's probable cause, just like: You had an infant in your home yesterday, and someone close to you noticed you don't have the infant today, and you can't account for it. Same deal.)

If we're talking about the state level, and we've already arrived at a consensus over when personhood begins* (which we won't for a long time if ever, unfortunately), I think Walter Block's evictionism argument is at the very least a solid libertarian rejection of the full-blown pro-choice view: If you have an unwanted guest in your home (and your body is your temple), you kick them out. You don't chop them into pieces first and blow them out the air-conditioning unit, and you don't jam scissors into the back of their head first before kicking them to the curb. This is ESPECIALLY true if you invited the guest in (the usual case), and it's ESPECIALLY true if the guest is an innocent baby, but it's also true if a [body] thief broke in one night and put it there (the oft-cited but truthfully rare case of "but what if she was raped?"). If you're really so cold-hearted that you can't bear the personal sacrifice associated with helping sustain the baby's life, you push it out and hope someone else will sustain it...you don't burn it to death with chemicals before showing it the door. (Or is abortion done the way it is out of fear that some of the babies might actually be viable, and facing the truth might have some uncomfortable implications?)

*We haven't really come to such a consensus though, and you haven't specified the state level, so the whole issue goes back once again to the question, "When does personhood begin?"

[Christian Liberty]

The underlying disagreement over abortion is, "When does personhood begin?" Is an unborn baby* a human being with rights of its own, or is it just a soulless sack of tissue and organs? At what point does a baby become a human being with rights? Is it at conception, like the religious crowd insists? Is it when brain waves start? Is it when a heartbeat starts? Is it when the baby is viable? Is it when the head is fully out, like many partial-birth abortion doctors might insist? Or is it when the head and full body is out AND the mother admits it's a human being, like Kermit Gosnell thinks, which is what we seem to be moving toward (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?446264-GOP-candidate-Some-groups-contemplate-infanticide&highlight=infanticide)?

That is the crux of the debate, and at least within a certain spectrum, there's a reasonable difference of opinion. On the one hand, I think the full-blown pro-choice view that "It has no rights unless the head is out" is absolutely barbaric and literally insane. On the other hand, I think the full-blown religious pro-life view that "A zygote is a human being with rights" is so difficult to substantiate in non-religious terms that it's only given pro-choicers an excuse to call pro-lifers insane religious zealots in turn and completely tune out the cold hard truth of what second-plus-trimester abortions (at least) really are. (I think it's sadly kept us from making real gains and saving real lives in the most obvious cases.) Their denial of reality probably makes it some type of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, but yeah. Saying life begins when the head comes out requires an insane belief in some kind of legalistic magic, but there's some sensible disagreement at least between whether life begins at conception, with brain waves, with a heartbeat, etc. At least within this realm, it's a totally legitimate wedge issue even within the liberty movement.

*"CALL IT A FETUS," screams one half of the crowd. ;)

It's fair to say you won't support or vote for anyone who's pro-choice. I'm ambivalent about this myself, mainly because nothing almost ever changes on this issue no matter what anyway. :( Still, dividing the liberty movement over the abortion issue is kind of pointless anyway, at least at the federal level: Even the pro-choice segment of the liberty movement is pretty much united behind Ron Paul's Constitutional logic (because he's correct). Roe vs. Wade was an unconstitutional decision with twisted logic of the worst kind: It used the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to imply a general right to privacy from the Fourth Amendment (shaky ground already), then assumed out of hand that laws against abortion violate that right, because abortion is practiced in private. However, if their argument held water, it would by extension make almost all laws against violent criminal acts "unconstitutional," because almost ALL crime, including almost all murder, is also committed in private. We can still prosecute crime committed in private once we have probable cause for a warrant to gather evidence, then enough evidence for an indictment, then enough for a conviction, etc. It doesn't require a police state, Fourth Amendment violations, or an invasion of privacy. (In the case of abortion: You had a huge bulge yesterday from a third trimester baby, and you no longer have a huge bulge today, nor do you have a baby, and you can't account for it. That's probable cause, just like: You had an infant in your home yesterday, and someone close to you noticed you don't have the infant today, and you can't account for it. Same deal.)

If we're talking about the state level, and we've already arrived at a consensus over when personhood begins* (which we won't for a long time if ever, unfortunately), I think Walter Block's evictionism argument is at the very least a solid libertarian rejection of the full-blown pro-choice view: If you have an unwanted guest in your home (and your body is your temple), you kick them out. You don't chop them into pieces first and blow them out the air-conditioning unit, and you don't jam scissors into the back of their head first before kicking them to the curb. This is ESPECIALLY true if you invited the guest in (the usual case), and it's ESPECIALLY true if the guest is an innocent baby, but it's also true if a [body] thief broke in one night and put it there (the oft-cited but truthfully rare case of "but what if she was raped?"). If you're really so cold-hearted that you can't bear the personal sacrifice associated with helping sustain the baby's life, you push it out and hope someone else will sustain it...you don't burn it to death with chemicals before showing it the door. (Or is abortion done the way it is out of fear that some of the babies might actually be viable, and facing the truth might have some uncomfortable implications?)

*We haven't really come to such a consensus though, and you haven't specified the state level, so the whole issue goes back once again to the question, "When does personhood begin?"

Hmm... Interesting arguments. I agree that its a state-level issue and that we shouldn't divide at the Federal level over it. I'm not saying that I couldn't work with anyone on any issue at all if they believed in abortion so much as I'm criticizing the "We shouldn't argue over it because its a 'wedge issue'" crowd if you know what I'm saying.

As for religious arguments, I take the position that you cannot know ANYTHING without a religious foundation of some kind, so I kind of dismiss the argument that my position is religious. The position that human life of any kind is of inherent worth is itself religious, and an implicit denial of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" evolution.

[Mini-Me]

As for religious arguments, I take the position that you cannot know ANYTHING without a religious foundation of some kind, so I kind of dismiss the argument that my position is religious. The position that human life of any kind is of inherent worth is itself religious, and an implicit denial of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" evolution.

The problem with viewing things this way (the "Sola Fide" way, basically) is that you lose the ability to communicate effectively with people who believe differently and derive (or at least believe they derive, in your own opinion) their morality from another source entirely.

We've all been impacted by religious morality in one way or another, but we also derive morality from our internal conscience (empathy, which is reinforced by religious arguments like "WWJD") and reason. In the absence of proof, it's really a matter of opinion which came first: Conscience and reason, or religion. Now, I for instance believe that if there's any universal basis for the morality of human interaction, it has to be based on self-ownership, because every competing secular standard is not reciprocal, not parsimonious, and relies upon the existence of very particular established authorities...in other words, Occam's Razor frowns heavily upon the arbitrary morality of "positive rights," but it's perfectly consistent with the idea of "negative rights." If we agree on the existence of universal morality, then it would stand to reason that someone rightly owns my body (and therefore has a right to control it, etc.). If so, "I own me" is simply the null hypothesis, and any counterargument requires sufficiently greater evidence to establish as a more reasonable alternative. Since all counterarguments (secular ones at least) are more arbitrary, they fail to convince. Does universal morality exist? I can't prove it, but I can take it on faith, and everything else follows from there.

[Christian Liberty]

The problem with viewing things this way (the "Sola Fide" way, basically)

SF is one of my favorite posters here:)


is that you lose the ability to communicate effectively with people who believe differently and derive (or at least believe they derive, in your own opinion) their morality from another source entirely.


If there isn't a common source, I'm not really sure what communication there is to be had. I mean, if I agree with the NAP, and you agree with the NAP, but we agree with it for different reasons, we can still have a discussion on what the NAP implies in situation X. But if I believe in the NAP, and you don't, there is absolutely no way either of us can prove our points without an appeal to an outside authority. It is what it is.

We've all been impacted by religious morality in one way or another, but we also derive morality from our internal conscience (empathy, which is reinforced by religious arguments like "WWJD")

"What Would Jesus Do" first requires believing in Jesus. Secularists more often quote the Golden Rule, but without a belief in Christ (Or someone else who said the same thing) there's no basis for this. I agree we should have empathy, but why? Without a belief in some higher power, your standard that we should have empathy is just as good as someone else's standard of why we shouldn't. I've even heard some liberals say that killing a dolphin is morally equivalent to killing a 5 year old based on raw intelligence. How do you know? Of course, I'm a human exceptionalist, but I have REASONS for this worldview. Without a religious foundation, there are no reasons.


and reason. I for instance believe that if there's any universal basis for the morality of human interaction, it has to be based on self-ownership, because every competing secular standard is not reciprocal, not parsimonious, and relies upon the existence of particular established authorities...in other words, Occam's Razor frowns upon the arbitrary morality of "positive rights," but it's perfectly consistent with the idea of "negative rights."

Why is the simplest answer right?

Why must a secular standard be reciprocal? Natural Law, a common secular basis for morality, necessarily implies rape and murder, because these things happen in the natural world. Not to mention that according to secularism people are really just another part of nature. Rejecting secular, Darwinian standards, or accepting them, has dramatic implications for morality, based on that religious decision. you can't just ignore that.

[Mini-Me]

We're getting off topic here, but it's your thread, so...


SF is one of my favorite posters here:)

If there isn't a common source, I'm not really sure what communication there is to be had. I mean, if I agree with the NAP, and you agree with the NAP, but we agree with it for different reasons, we can still have a discussion on what the NAP implies in situation X. But if I believe in the NAP, and you don't, there is absolutely no way either of us can prove our points without an appeal to an outside authority. It is what it is.

"What Would Jesus Do" first requires believing in Jesus. Secularists more often quote the Golden Rule, but without a belief in Christ (Or someone else who said the same thing) there's no basis for this. I agree we should have empathy, but why? Without a belief in some higher power, your standard that we should have empathy is just as good as someone else's standard of why we shouldn't. I've even heard some liberals say that killing a dolphin is morally equivalent to killing a 5 year old based on raw intelligence. How do you know? Of course, I'm a human exceptionalist, but I have REASONS for this worldview. Without a religious foundation, there are no reasons.
I continued to edit my post above while you were responding, so you probably missed the bolded part below:

We've all been impacted by religious morality in one way or another, but we also derive morality from our internal conscience (empathy, which is reinforced by religious arguments like "WWJD") and reason. In the absence of proof, it's really a matter of opinion which came first: Conscience and reason, or religion.
Understand that Christianity is only one of many (nearly all) religions containing the Golden Rule across a myriad of cultures, many older than monotheism. From a secular perspective, this is evidence that the Golden Rule is probably baked into our instinctual sense of fairness and empathy, and it was only clarified and articulated by religious texts, not necessarily handed down as something entirely novel by divine inspiration. You're free to disagree, but the point here is that there's no logical reason why you have to be right.

As far as dolphins go, you're right: We CAN'T absolutely prove one way or another that dolphins have rights with respect to human behavior. The fact that we do have empathy for animals (especially those most intelligence and/or most like us) is a hint in what I believe to be the right direction, but it's not proof. There are a LOT of things we can't prove (see Kurt Gödel), and that can be a little scary, but we have no choice but to accept that (or live in denial): We have to use our best judgment, justify things the best we can (with the humility to consider the severity of the implications in case we're wrong), and once we get to the point of infinite regress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_Trilemma), we have no choice but to use a circular argument or take some axiom on faith.

Now, you believe having a religious foundation gives you an airtight reason for your morality (God invented it, and not just God, but your specific version of God), but you're using special pleading for your specific religious faith over all other faith-based claims (overtly religious or otherwise). Everyone except absurdists and nihilists take some things on faith, i.e. the same basis as your belief in God and the Bible; the biggest difference between you and them is that you're more effective at fooling yourself about the certainty and exceptionalism of your faith-based beliefs. Most other world religions use the same special pleading as well, so "presuppositional apologists" of any faith aren't exactly going to win any ground among people who don't already - for completely circular reasons - believe in their particular axioms.

I take leaps of faith when I have to (e.g. universal morality exists), but as far as I'm concerned, faith in the Bible in front of you is not just a single leap of faith...it's at least four leaps of faith, two of which are highly suspect from a probability standpoint. It requires:
faith that a very particular ancient religious book is true while others of similar claimed origin are not (red flag)
that it could not have possibly been manipulated by human hands like everything else in the world (red flag; can only be resolved by circular belief in something very specific)
that your senses are correct in conveying you the content of its text (requires a priori faith in your senses; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)
and that your logical reasoning, etc. is correct in interpreting the text's meaning (requires a priori faith in your ability to reason; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)
Not everyone is willing to make all those leaps of faith, but you can still sometimes find an alternative common ground. That brings us back to why we got on this tangent:
You said, "As for religious arguments, I take the position that you cannot know ANYTHING without a religious foundation of some kind, so I kind of dismiss the argument that my position is religious." Now, you can dismiss the existence of secular morality if you want, but you have to understand that the people you're debating with often don't and won't. If you insist on debating people using your faith rather than theirs, you're going to find yourself at an impasse, and you won't have the tools necessary to convince them to change their minds.

If you want to effectively debate someone on a political or moral issue when they come from a different worldview, you need to first find common ground where you can, then work with the common ground that actually exists instead of the common ground you wish was there. In the case of morality, "universal morality exists" is a common enough basis for conversation that you and I can still converse about the NAP, even if we arrive at it differently. You and I don't have to prove it to one another using a common set of axioms or circular beliefs, because we already agree on it. We can have meaningful discussions using it as a common basis without one or the other demanding further justification (up to the point of infinite regress or realizing that our axioms or circular justifications don't coincide).


Why is the simplest answer right?
Are you familiar with Occam's Razor? The simplest answer isn't necessarily right, but if multiple (or many) explanations are all consistent with the evidence, Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is probabilistically more likely to be correct. As a result, the more complex answer requires greater evidence to accept over the simpler one.

There are at least two reasons for this: First, by observation, universal laws tend toward simplicity and elegance. Second, the more constants you add to a proposed "equation," the less likely you'll have the correct value for all of them from the standpoint of probability. The more variables you add, the less likely it is that your "test data" was sufficient to properly characterize their relationship under all circumstances. Complexity is error-prone. The more complicated your solution is, the more equally complicated alternatives there are...and if your 3-billion-variable solution only fits the data as well as someone else's 5-variable solution, and a plethora of other 3-billion-variable solutions exist that fit the data just as well, the burden is on you to justify not only the addition of all the variables (and/or constants, etc.) but also why the particular relationship your solution describes is any more likely to be correct than that of any of the other 3-billion-variable solutions.


Why must a secular standard be reciprocal? Natural Law, a common secular basis for morality, necessarily implies rape and murder, because these things happen in the natural world. Not to mention that according to secularism people are really just another part of nature. Rejecting secular, Darwinian standards, or accepting them, has dramatic implications for morality, based on that religious decision. you can't just ignore that.

A universal secular standard doesn't HAVE to be reciprocal, but it does have to be universal (tautologically). If it's not reciprocal as well, there needs to be sufficient evidence to justify the messiness and inequality of non-reciprocal morality. I mean, if you're going to say that a very particular cabal of elites thousands of miles away has more of a right to decide what to do with my life, my body, my labor, etc. than I do, then you have to justify more than just why their power to decide is more important than me being the [obviously] biggest stakeholder. You also have to justify WHY the correct equation for universal morality specifies these very particular people and organizations and not others. The common justification is "Democracy says so," but that adds even more variables like the kind of election (plurality, range voting, etc.) and thresholds, and again, "Why this version and not another?" The claim that some other particular person or group is greater than you are, better than you are, and that they have the right to your life/labor/etc. (and you don't) is so complex and arbitrary that it requires a heck of a lot more justification than the null hypothesis that "if anyone owns my body, it's me." Moreover, why does their authority over people suddenly stop at some arbitrary national boundary? That's another arbitrary element requiring justification, and things just get more and more strained and arbitrary from there. In short, no such justification really exists, especially on a universal level, and Occam's Razor simply tips the balance in favor of the simplest and least arbitrary hypothesis. Once you consider fallibility and the potentially disastrous implications of, "What if you're wrong?" it becomes even more obvious that sticking with self-ownership is the safer bet: Even if self-ownership isn't "the right answer," it's close enough to a least common denominator that it's likely to be a lot less wrong than all of the other wrong answers.

On the subject of universality, self-ownership is an inherently universal standard, and it's easily applicable to all situations under all civilizations that have ever existed or ever could exist. It's applicable to cave men, hermits living alone, and highly interconnected global societies. (Moreover, except for the behavior of government, almost every society has based the morality of ordinary human interaction on a similar principle in practice as well.) In contrast, the statist idea of positive rights primarily applies under extremely limited sociopolitical circumstances assuming a certain level of socioeconomic development, and it requires an untold number of arbitrary specifics. (Find two socialists who agree in the slightest about exactly how everything should be run, such as how much each person of 6 billion or so people should rightly receive from the fruits of your labor. Their distributions are all going to be a whole lot different, and for the most arbitrary of reasons.) It's kind of absurd to argue it can compete with self-ownership as a universal standard for morality, when its particulars demonstrate it's far from universal. ;)

Pure ideological international communists could conceivably get around the limitless arbitrary nature of most utilitarian morality (since they might satisfy a spatial universality criterion), but such a moral system inherently requires the international centralization of power, i.e. a particular institutional basis. After all, how else will an absolutely moral communist know right from wrong? How will he know how much of his product he should distribute, and to whom? The need for international organization to create an external authority/arbiter with a bird's eye view is inherently built into the international communist moral system itself, just so that individuals can have any idea of what's "right" and "wrong." Therefore, the moral system itself must somehow justify why some people and not others have the right to oversee and administrate the whole thing...something that's basically impossible to do even remotely correctly, especially considering every human implementation inevitably ends in absolute despotism and inequality of the worst sort. (The implications of the "What if we're wrong?" question are absolutely dire in this case.) Or if the "one true universal communist morality" requires an AI to tell everyone what to do (what software version does it mandate?), how on earth were people before the advent of AI supposed to live morally? This would seem to defeat the temporal universality of international communist morality, because it simply couldn't have applied as a universal moral basis over all time periods.

In other words, socialist morality adds a TON of variables without effectively justifying the addition of bottomless complexity and trivialization of stakeholders (individuals), and it even violates any reasonable notion of universality. However, it's worth noting that there are still unknowns under any moral standard: For the secular NAP, what are the rights of dolphins? Dogs? Cats? Bacteria? The NAP is also quiet regarding verbal and emotional abuse, etc. The Bible may offer an answer for those, and it may even answer "When does life begin?" However, does it answer, "What about Siamese twins?" There are other unknowns that apply to both the Bible and NAP as well. For instance, at what point does physical contact become assault, between "pushing someone away from an oncoming train" and "punching a hole in someone's head?" The latter scenario is extreme enough that we can distinguish between the two using objective criteria (e.g. permanent harm), but comparing two actions closer on the spectrum illustrates how difficult it is to escape from subjectivity entirely.

There are always going to be sticky moral issues that human beings will need to resolve to the best of our limited ability using judgment calls. That's a bit scary, since we won't be able to prove everything, but that's no reason to say, "Well, if you can't prove absolutely everything based on your axioms, your moral standard is worthless." Nobody can. We COULD use "might makes right" as an alternative null hypothesis to "self-ownership," i.e. reject the notion that universal morality exists altogether...but the societal implications are so dreadful that almost everyone would rather just assume, "Okay, let's say there's such a thing as right and wrong, and take it on faith. Now we just have to figure out which is which and when and hopefully come to an agreement."

Is Occam's Razor a foolproof way of separating the wheat from the chaff? No, of course not. It's just a probabilistic argument, so it's fallible. Still, from an outside perspective, it's nevertheless better at probabilistically distinguishing between competing secular moralities than any non-circular standard is at distinguishing between competing religious moralities! Also, as far as self-ownership is concerned, you might be interested in reading about Hans-Hermann Hoppe's "Argumentation Ethics." (http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Argumentation_ethics) It's another imperfect argument that fails as a full-blown "proof" but strongly "winks and nudges" in the direction that self-ownership is the most logical basis for morality around. At the very least, it's the most logical basis that human beings are ever likely to agree upon...which once again brings us back full circle to the reason we're talking about this.

[acptulsa]

that your senses are correct in conveying you the content of its text (requires a priori faith in your senses; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)
and that your logical reasoning, etc. is correct in interpreting the text's meaning (requires a priori faith in your ability to reason; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)

No, he isn't. He's also mixing in a blind faith in a number of clergymen, living and dead, going back to Calvin and beyond, who tickle his human and rather elevated sense of self-worth just right. And most of them have been disputed by people both reasonable and intelligent (and in the case of Calvin, even by those people themselves on further reflection). Even so, he has faith in them just as he has faith in God, even though faith in God is not misplaced, but faith in man is.

So don't accuse him of dreaming all this stuff up on his own.

[T.hill]

You might as well ask me whether I'm an anarchist who thinks that murderers like Ted Bundy should go to government jails if they participate in abortions.

Ideally the government should be replaced by purely free market organizations. Abortion is murder and should not be legal. These statements only contradict each other to statists who don't understand that "No State" and "no law" do not necessarily coincide.


I didn't say its a FedGov issue. Constitutionally its not. Ideally no governments in the statist sense of that term would be involved at all. If FedGov is going to exist whether I like it or not, I endorse decentralization. But this thread is not about decentralization, this thread is about the topic of whether "pro-choice" and "pro-life" libertarians have enough in common to really be part of the same movement. At the Federal level we can avoid it by saying its decided by the states, but then at the state level we are going to end up fighting over it and there's ultimately no avoiding it unless you want pro-lifers to stand by and support government protected (Which is ultimately what it is, its not like the government will allow private citizens to stop it) murder, which should not happen, and will not happen at least for me.

Are you a Rothbardian monocentric natural law anarchist? As opposed to a polycentric law anarchist, that is.

[anaconda]

The life vs. choice issue is way way down on my list of priorities. I can, however, fully appreciate its importance to others, and is an exceptionally valid debate, even from a completely secular perspective. Presently, I am far more concerned with all of us breaking bread in a FEMA camp in the very near future.

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

I have mixed feelings on it, but what really grinds my gears is seeing news stories about someone having their fifth abortion, like it's some kind of regular medical event for them. Also there's so much irony in republicans who complain about abortions, then complain about families with tons of kids collecting benefits.

[MRK]

. . . .

[Warlord]

who cares what you think FF... you seem to have a high opinion of yourself

[UWDude]

So, life sentences for all those women who had abortions, I guess.

Let's get those medical records public, and start making more prisons!
Imagine the boost to the economies of the local towns, where all those murdering women are thrown in jail!
Imagine the rejoicing for all the pro-lifers! Finally justice!
And lets not forget those murderers who now are pro-lifers, they can finally pay society for their crimes!

My mom is one of those, she feels strongly abortion is equivalent to murder... ..yet, she doesn't think what she did is the same as some guys killing an adult for some money... ...much less killing a child.

So, in conclusion, when somebody says abortion and murder are equivalent... ..they are using hyperbole I know even they don't believe.

[DamianTV]

Being on the same page only requires that people respect the equal rights of others, and recognize that our rights are only limited by those same equal rights. If this turns into the prophetic pissing match of "I have the right to tell you what to do but you dont have the right to tell me what to do", then we have truly abandon the very foundation of what a Right actually is.

[KingNothing]

No, its actually not. Its a debate between those who oppose all aggression, and those who support at least some murder. This issue is foundational.

And, I don't really care that its going to alienate a lot of people. I'm not a utilitarian, and I do not play utilitarian games. Right is right, wrong is wrong.

I agree with you but plenty of rational, logical, people make an argument that, at an early enough state, a fetus is just a collection of cells and not a human.

Is a morning after pill abortion? If not, when does killing the cells become abortion?

The issue is extremely complicated and is not cut-and-dry. All I can say is what I would do in a given situation, and that is to cherish all life, in every possible form. I can't make those calls for anyone else.

[Christian Liberty]

So, life sentences for all those women who had abortions, I guess.

Let's get those medical records public, and start making more prisons!
Imagine the boost to the economies of the local towns, where all those murdering women are thrown in jail!
Imagine the rejoicing for all the pro-lifers! Finally justice!
And lets not forget those murderers who now are pro-lifers, they can finally pay society for their crimes!

My mom is one of those, she feels strongly abortion is equivalent to murder... ..yet, she doesn't think what she did is the same as some guys killing an adult for some money... ...much less killing a child.

So, in conclusion, when somebody says abortion and murder are equivalent... ..they are using hyperbole I know even they don't believe.

Your mom may not believe it. I do.

No, I don't support making everyone's medical records public and arresting millions of people for what they did in the past, nor do I support putting millions of people in prison for doing something that is currently socially accepted, but I do support a changed culture to the point where abortion IS seen as murder by the vast majority of people and acting accordingly.


who cares what you think FF... you seem to have a high opinion of yourself

Obviously you do, or you would not have responded.


The life vs. choice issue is way way down on my list of priorities. I can, however, fully appreciate its importance to others, and is an exceptionally valid debate, even from a completely secular perspective. Presently, I am far more concerned with all of us breaking bread in a FEMA camp in the very near future.

Yeah, that's a major concern for me too.


Are you a Rothbardian monocentric natural law anarchist? As opposed to a polycentric law anarchist, that is.

I don't honestly know. I'm certainly not a "natural law" anything, and I believe natural law leads to murder and oppression. I tend to believe in only a single system of law in a given territorial area, but that's less because I think the alternative would be "wrong" and more because I don't understand the alternative.

No, he isn't. He's also mixing in a blind faith in a number of clergymen, living and dead, going back to Calvin and beyond, who tickle his human and rather elevated sense of self-worth just right. And most of them have been disputed by people both reasonable and intelligent (and in the case of Calvin, even by those people themselves on further reflection). Even so, he has faith in them just as he has faith in God, even though faith in God is not misplaced, but faith in man is.

So don't accuse him of dreaming all this stuff up on his own.

This is a false accusation to begin with and you don't know it.


We're getting off topic here, but it's your thread, so...


I continued to edit my post above while you were responding, so you probably missed the bolded part below:

Understand that Christianity is only one of many (nearly all) religions containing the Golden Rule across a myriad of cultures, many older than monotheism. From a secular perspective, this is evidence that the Golden Rule is probably baked into our instinctual sense of fairness and empathy, and it was only clarified and articulated by religious texts, not necessarily handed down as something entirely novel by divine inspiration. You're free to disagree, but the point here is that there's no logical reason why you have to be right.

True. but if NO religion is true, simply the fact that many religions have this particular rule is no reason to abide by it.


As far as dolphins go, you're right: We CAN'T absolutely prove one way or another that dolphins have rights with respect to human behavior. The fact that we do have empathy for animals (especially those most intelligence and/or most like us) is a hint in what I believe to be the right direction, but it's not proof. There are a LOT of things we can't prove (see Kurt Gödel), and that can be a little scary, but we have no choice but to accept that (or live in denial): We have to use our best judgment, justify things the best we can (with the humility to consider the severity of the implications in case we're wrong), and once we get to the point of infinite regress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_Trilemma), we have no choice but to use a circular argument or take some axiom on faith.


Ultimately, you have to take an axiom on faith, which is my point.

Now, you believe having a religious foundation gives you an airtight reason for your morality (God invented it, and not just God, but your specific version of God), but you're using special pleading for your specific religious faith over all other faith-based claims (overtly religious or otherwise). Everyone except absurdists and nihilists take some things on faith, i.e. the same basis as your belief in God and the Bible; the biggest difference between you and them is that you're more effective at fooling yourself about the certainty and exceptionalism of your faith-based beliefs

I am very certain that my axioms are accurate, but a certain degree of that certainty is internal. Nonetheless, I have enough good reasons to believe Christianity that an open minded person could be convinced. The absolute absudity of secularism is a good start.


Most other world religions use the same special pleading as well, so "presuppositional apologists" of any faith aren't exactly going to win any ground among people who don't already - for completely circular reasons - believe in their particular axioms.


Not if Christianity is the "last worldview standing" as it were.

I take leaps of faith when I have to (e.g. universal morality exists), but as far as I'm concerned, faith in the Bible in front of you is not just a single leap of faith...it's at least four leaps of faith, two of which are highly suspect from a probability standpoint. It requires:How do you know you "have to" assume that universal morality exists. And even if you make the assumption, how do you know what it is?



faith that a very particular ancient religious book is true while others of similar claimed origin are not (red flag)
[/QUOTE]

Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled in the New Testament is one proof of this. The fact that over 40 authors wrote the Bible yet without any internal contradictions is another.


that it could not have possibly been manipulated by human hands like everything else in the world (red flag; can only be resolved by circular belief in something very specific)
[/QUOTE]

Ican't verify this ATM but I've heard that the Bible's manuscripts have been carefully enough protected that if any other ancient book (ie. the iliad or the odyssey) had that much it would never even be questioned as to its accuracy, in fact, there are more variations of the illiad than there are of the Bible.


that your senses are correct in conveying you the content of its text (requires a priori faith in your senses; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)
[/QUOTE]

Or anything else, for that matter.




and that your logical reasoning, etc. is correct in interpreting the text's meaning (requires a priori faith in your ability to reason; this is a leap of faith everyone must make before believing religion)



Again, or when reading and interpreting any text. This one isn't a problem either.


Not everyone is willing to make all those leaps of faith, but you can still sometimes find an alternative common ground. That brings us back to why we got on this tangent:
You said, "As for religious arguments, I take the position that you cannot know ANYTHING without a religious foundation of some kind, so I kind of dismiss the argument that my position is religious." Now, you can dismiss the existence of secular morality if you want, but you have to understand that the people you're debating with often don't and won't. If you insist on debating people using your faith rather than theirs, you're going to find yourself at an impasse, and you won't have the tools necessary to convince them to change their minds.


I've never encountered anyone that can actually defend secular morality under any kind of scrutiny. Maybe you can. You've certainly got me beaten at an intellectual level, whereas most people I debate frankly don't (This would be IRL, most of this forum is probably smarter than me.) So if I want to change a secular person's mind about whatever, I'd probably start by showing them how little they actually know.

If you want to effectively debate someone on a political or moral issue when they come from a different worldview, you need to first find common ground where you can, then work with the common ground that actually exists instead of the common ground you wish was there. In the case of morality, "universal morality exists" is a common enough basis for conversation that you and I can still converse about the NAP, even if we arrive at it differently. You and I don't have to prove it to one another using a common set of axioms or circular beliefs, because we already agree on it. We can have meaningful discussions using it as a common basis without one or the other demanding further justification (up to the point of infinite regress or realizing that our axioms or circular justifications don't coincide).

In your case, yes, because we both agree that the NAP is true. But what if someone didn't believe the NAP was true, rather, they believed in legal positivism? Now, I could show them how inconsistent their belief was (few would say the Jews should have just gotten on the trains because "the law said"). But, while we both agree that "universal morality exists" we don't have any common ground on which to discuss such morality, so what common ground is there? Unless the universal morality is in some sense the same (for what its worth, our universal moralities are likely different as well once you get past the NAP) there is no common ground. It would be a waste of time, for instance, for me to try to convince you that homosexual sex is immoral, because I believe that on religious grounds and your "secular" (ie. non-theistic religion) morality does not have such scruples.



Are you familiar with Occam's Razor? The simplest answer isn't necessarily right, but if multiple (or many) explanations are all consistent with the evidence, Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is probabilistically more likely to be correct. As a result, the more complex answer requires greater evidence to accept over the simpler one.

When you're talking about morals or ethics, you cannot rightly assume that there IS a right answer without making a presupposition.





A universal secular standard doesn't HAVE to be reciprocal, but it does have to be universal (tautologically). If it's not reciprocal as well, there needs to be sufficient evidence to justify the messiness and inequality of non-reciprocal morality. I mean, if you're going to say that a very particular cabal of elites thousands of miles away has more of a right to decide what to do with my life, my body, my labor, etc. than I do, then you have to justify more than just why their power to decide is more important than me being the [obviously] biggest stakeholder. You also have to justify WHY the correct equation for universal morality specifies these very particular people and organizations and not others. The common justification is "Democracy says so," but that adds even more variables like the kind of election (plurality, range voting, etc.) and thresholds, and again, "Why this version and not another?" The claim that some other particular person or group is greater than you are, better than you are, and that they have the right to your life/labor/etc. (and you don't) is so complex and arbitrary that it requires a heck of a lot more justification than the null hypothesis that "if anyone owns my body, it's me." Moreover, why does their authority over people suddenly stop at some arbitrary national boundary? That's another arbitrary element requiring justification, and things just get more and more strained and arbitrary from there. In short, no such justification really exists, especially on a universal level, and Occam's Razor simply tips the balance in favor of the simplest and least arbitrary hypothesis. Once you consider fallibility and the potentially disastrous implications of, "What if you're wrong?" it becomes even more obvious that sticking with self-ownership is the safer bet: Even if self-ownership isn't "the right answer," it's close enough to a least common denominator that it's likely to be a lot less wrong than all of the other wrong answers.

On the subject of universality, self-ownership is an inherently universal standard, and it's easily applicable to all situations under all civilizations that have ever existed or ever could exist. It's applicable to cave men, hermits living alone, and highly interconnected global societies. (Moreover, except for the behavior of government, almost every society has based the morality of ordinary human interaction on a similar principle in practice as well.) In contrast, the statist idea of positive rights primarily applies under extremely limited sociopolitical circumstances assuming a certain level of socioeconomic development, and it requires an untold number of arbitrary specifics. (Find two socialists who agree in the slightest about exactly how everything should be run, such as how much each person of 6 billion or so people should rightly receive from the fruits of your labor. Their distributions are all going to be a whole lot different, and for the most arbitrary of reasons.) It's kind of absurd to argue it can compete with self-ownership as a universal standard for morality, when its particulars demonstrate it's far from universal. ;)

Pure ideological international communists could conceivably get around the limitless arbitrary nature of most utilitarian morality (since they might satisfy a spatial universality criterion), but such a moral system inherently requires the international centralization of power, i.e. a particular institutional basis. After all, how else will an absolutely moral communist know right from wrong? How will he know how much of his product he should distribute, and to whom? The need for international organization to create an external authority/arbiter with a bird's eye view is inherently built into the international communist moral system itself, just so that individuals can have any idea of what's "right" and "wrong." Therefore, the moral system itself must somehow justify why some people and not others have the right to oversee and administrate the whole thing...something that's basically impossible to do even remotely correctly, especially considering every human implementation inevitably ends in absolute despotism and inequality of the worst sort. (The implications of the "What if we're wrong?" question are absolutely dire in this case.) Or if the "one true universal communist morality" requires an AI to tell everyone what to do (what software version does it mandate?), how on earth were people before the advent of AI supposed to live morally? This would seem to defeat the temporal universality of international communist morality, because it simply couldn't have applied as a universal moral basis over all time periods.

In other words, socialist morality adds a TON of variables without effectively justifying the addition of bottomless complexity and trivialization of stakeholders (individuals), and it even violates any reasonable notion of universality. However, it's worth noting that there are still unknowns under any moral standard: For the secular NAP, what are the rights of dolphins? Dogs? Cats? Bacteria? The NAP is also quiet regarding verbal and emotional abuse, etc. The Bible may offer an answer for those, and it may even answer "When does life begin?" However, does it answer, "What about Siamese twins?" There are other unknowns that apply to both the Bible and NAP as well. For instance, at what point does physical contact become assault, between "pushing someone away from an oncoming train" and "punching a hole in someone's head?" The latter scenario is extreme enough that we can distinguish between the two using objective criteria (e.g. permanent harm), but comparing two actions closer on the spectrum illustrates how difficult it is to escape from subjectivity entirely.

There are always going to be sticky moral issues that human beings will need to resolve to the best of our limited ability using judgment calls. That's a bit scary, since we won't be able to prove everything, but that's no reason to say, "Well, if you can't prove absolutely everything based on your axioms, your moral standard is worthless." Nobody can. We COULD use "might makes right" as an alternative null hypothesis to "self-ownership," i.e. reject the notion that universal morality exists altogether...but the societal implications are so dreadful that almost everyone would rather just assume, "Okay, let's say there's such a thing as right and wrong, and take it on faith. Now we just have to figure out which is which and when and hopefully come to an agreement."

Is Occam's Razor a foolproof way of separating the wheat from the chaff? No, of course not. It's just a probabilistic argument, so it's fallible. Still, from an outside perspective, it's nevertheless better at probabilistically distinguishing between competing secular moralities than any non-circular standard is at distinguishing between competing religious moralities! Also, as far as self-ownership is concerned, you might be interested in reading about Hans-Hermann Hoppe's "Argumentation Ethics." (http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Argumentation_ethics) It's another imperfect argument that fails as a full-blown "proof" but strongly "winks and nudges" in the direction that self-ownership is the most logical basis for morality around. At the very least, it's the most logical basis that human beings are ever likely to agree upon...which once again brings us back full circle to the reason we're talking about this.

Unfortunately, I do NOT think most people will ever be willing to agree on self ownership. I've talked to a lot of people, even Christians (Thus, they claim to believe the Bible and thus we have that common ground as well) and they do NOT agree with self-ownership because they want to control some thing or another. Short of killing all the control freaks (Which I do not endorse) there's simply no way everyone is going to agree on the NAP and self-ownership, because most people are control freaks.

As for democracy, "majority rules" seems like a fairly simple basis for morality to me. Its EVIL, but its not complicated, and probably has fewer variables than self-ownership does. Of course, I'm talking direct democracy rather than "representative" democracy, but it doesn't matter. I'd argue that Occam's Razor makes "majority rules" the simplest moral system. That said, I still believe that its wrong.

[Occam's Banana]

[snip]

Bravo! Another excellent post, as per usual. I especially like the brief Gödel reference ...

I have always wanted to challenge on Gödelian grounds some of what might be called the "arch-deductionism" around here, but have balked at the prospect, given that many of the most prospective discussants seem apt to miss the forest for the sake dwelling upon the particulars of their favorite trees - Christianity, "scientific" atheism (or atheistic scientism, as the case may be), "monistic" Rothbardianism, etc.

And even on those occasions when "meta" considerations are touched upon, the forest always seems to end up getting burned down in the course of heated (and essentially semantic) squabbles over things like what "faith" or "religion" is (or is not) ...

[fisharmor]

The underlying disagreement over abortion is, "When does personhood begin?"
.... On the other hand, I think the full-blown religious pro-life view that "A zygote is a human being with rights" is so difficult to substantiate in non-religious terms that it's only given pro-choicers an excuse to call pro-lifers insane religious zealots in turn and completely tune out the cold hard truth of what second-plus-trimester abortions (at least) really are.
...there's some sensible disagreement at least between whether life begins at conception, with brain waves, with a heartbeat, etc. At least within this realm, it's a totally legitimate wedge issue even within the liberty movement.

I don't think there's sensible disagreement at all.

Once early in my marriage my wife was using a paper bag in the middle of the road as an analogy for something (don't recall what, it isn't important). She stated as part of her soliloquy "...because you don't just drive over a bag in the middle of the road" and I added "yeah, because there might be a baby in it".
She blinked a couple times, incredulously, and said "Well, I was going to go with a bag of nails, but, sure, there could be a baby in it."
I was recalling an actual case I heard about in New Orleans when I was a kid, wherein someone had found an abandoned baby in a paper bag.

I had assumed driving over a road obstacle would have a negative effect on someone else, and my wife assumed driving over a road obstacle would have a negative effect on her. But neither of us thought that driving over the bag would be a good idea.

Abortion proponents say exactly that. "I don't know what's in that bag, I admit freely to not knowing what's in that bag, but I'm not turning this wheel or hitting the brake - I'm driving straight the eff over it."

The ones that claim to know when life begins are even worse, because they have put the thought into it and realize that they can't drive over a bag with a baby in it, but they've come up with a cockamamie, totally subjective definition of when life begins strictly to be able to support abortion.

If one can say with a straight face that one either doesn't care when life begins or has a subjective definition for it, then that is irreconcilable with libertarian thought. And I don't see what can be sensible about it.

[idiom]

Forget the unborn, according to the NAP we are well within our rights to evict infants into the street in the dead of winter.

So any moral requirement that thinks others have a claim on you, no matter how in need they are, is outside of the NAP.

Move the debate to children, figure out why you can't let children die, then worry about why you can't let a foetus die.

[Jamesiv1]

the reality for as long as we've stood on two feet is that there will be abortions, no matter how you or anyone or *everyone* feels about it.

to me it's a matter of whether or not you want to make it happen with a coat-hanger, or allow it to happen in a doctor's office.

Imagine your 15-year old sister gets knocked up, and she has decided she doesn't want to have it - for whatever reason. Maybe she doesn't even tell you or your parents about it. Coat-hanger or clinic?

You find out about it after the fact. Are you going to label her a murderer and throw her in prison?

me... I would rather it be a clinic, and leave the judgement call to God.

[specsaregood]

Is a morning after pill abortion?

There is no way to know. If conception hasn't occurred then its not an abortion. If conception has occurred then yes it is.



If not, when does killing the cells become abortion?

I would say, as soon as you can tell that conception has occurred.

[fisharmor]

Imagine your 15-year old sister gets knocked up, and she has decided she doesn't want to have it - for whatever reason. Maybe she doesn't even tell you or your parents about it. Coat-hanger or clinic?

Do you know anything about a guy named Kermit Gosnell?
I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, since there was a media blackout on him.

I think you ought to read a little bit about his clinic, and how long he was allowed to operate that clinic.

[I<3Liberty]

I think a lot of people would agree with the OP, but it's a lack of audience appeal and rhetoric that's destroying the whole anti-abortion argument. The largest group behind the anti-abortion movement are more traditional catholic Christians that still oppose things like contraceptive use, sterilization, sex for other reasons besides procreation, egalitarian marriages, etc. What they need to do to win this argument and actually protect the unborn is keep their personal opinions to themselves and be publicly pro-contraception and family planning. Agreeing that women should have proactive forms of choice while promoting contraception research and education in place of abortion, would actually make the anti-abortion folks palatable.

Contraception and sex ed is also far more economical as you're paying a tiny fraction of what a "welfare baby" would cost. I don't believe the anti-abortion republicans have come to terms with the costs of now having 4,000-some? babies born each day that would have otherwise been aborted. These kids are likely to end up in the foster care system and would easily deplete current resources at that rate. Considering the average costs to raise a child, that will add an additional $960,000,000 per day their plan goes correctly and every one of the 4,000 babies are born instead of aborted via the black market. Tell me, where are we going to get that kind of money? What you would pay to take care of 1 welfare child, is more than enough to fund an entire long-lasting highly efficient contraception study.

[Spikender]

Wow, FreedomFanatic sure has lost a whole lotta rep recently.

Is he really getting that unpopular?

Jeez.

[Working Poor]

No, its actually not. Its a debate between those who oppose all aggression, and those who support at least some murder. This issue is foundational.

And, I don't really care that its going to alienate a lot of people. I'm not a utilitarian, and I do not play utilitarian games. Right is right, wrong is wrong.

You are still my friend but I just don't think you can make abortion illegal. Too many people see it as a right. I am not saying it is right but you won't win and any movement against it will not win how ever unfortunate it is.

Because I know how hard headed and hearted people are about this wedge issue I think the more we make a big deal of it and keep it in the political arena the worse the fight will get and abortion will still go on abortion has been around probably almost since the beginning of humans it was just not something people made a political issue of or spoke much about until the last half of the past century.

I think the real issue is sexual morals and men are just as much a part of the problem as women. If you don't like abortions then take responsibility for your actions and teach your children to respect their bodies and life by your example this is how you fight and win the abortion issue. Don't just expect that they will have sex expect that they won't have sex and when they get to the age of puberty do not abandon them because they still need you in their life to guide them.

[Mini-Me]

This post is ENORMOUSLY long, and I spent way too much time writing it. Your last post broke my browser, so I wouldn't be surprised if this one causes permanent damage. ;)


True. but if NO religion is true, simply the fact that many religions have this particular rule is no reason to abide by it.
From where I sit, the Golden Rule provides a "good enough" justification for itself: I treat people the way I would like to be treated, because it's how I would like to be treated. If I can assume other people are like me*, following the Golden Rule makes the world a better place than not following it, and if I'm lucky, maybe other people will make the same choice.

*So, can I assume other people are like me, at least in non-political contexts? Well, yes and no: On the one hand, there are obvious counterexamples, such as masochists. On the other hand, the prevalence of the Golden Rule throughout various cultures and religions, as well as my personal experiences with the vast majority of people, indicate that for the average person, "treating others as you would like to be treated" is indeed close to what you might call "universally preferable behavior" in the context of individual interaction (for the record, I'm not a Stefan Molyneux fan). Does that make it a moral truth? Well, that depends largely on how you define morality (more on this later).

Things start getting messier in the realm of politics, because everyone's subjective preference of of "how they would like to be treated" starts to diverge and become highly context-sensitive. For this reason, it becomes necessary to find a more objective estimate of universal morality governing personal boundaries. For the reasons I gave in the last post (such as ruling out clearly non-universal solutions like "positive rights"), in addition to my own subjective conscience and interpretation of the Golden Rule, I've concluded self-ownership is by far the best default guess I can make, assuming universal morality exists at all (more on that question later). Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics also nudge in the same direction: His "proof" is fatally flawed in a lot of ways, but the underlying observation is nevertheless more thought-provoking than "might makes right."

Could I be wrong? Sure, I could. I accept fallibility, and I'm okay with not having all the answers. I've made peace with the realization that there's no strict constructionalist proof for morality. It would be nice if there was, but I've found ways to sleep at night without it making my head explode.


I am very certain that my axioms are accurate, but a certain degree of that certainty is internal. Nonetheless, I have enough good reasons to believe Christianity that an open minded person could be convinced. The absolute absudity of secularism is a good start.
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Not if Christianity is the "last worldview standing" as it were."
You say you're "very certain" of your axioms, but you say an "open minded" person could be convinced. "Very certain" and "open minded" don't tend to fit well together, at least not at the same time. How can you be sure how an open-minded person would think? Can you truly say you've ever had experience with an open mind yourself, when you consciously and subconsciously limit your thought patterns to cut doubting thoughts short, under an indoctrinated lifelong fear of hell?

Then again, maybe I'm assuming too much. On the subject of open-mindedness, may I ask you how many times you have radically changed your religious worldview to or from Christianity? How much time have you spent as anything other than a professing Christian? It takes an open mind to overcome lifelong political indoctrination, but it takes far more open mindedness and courage to overcome lifelong religious indoctrination when you're told from little on to squash evil doubtful thoughts or you'll go to hell. Unless and until you completely break free of that yourself and rediscover Christianity independently years down the road, you're still thinking inside the box too much to understand what it means to be open minded. Moreover, if you're a presuppositional apologist (which I'll assume for the remainder of the post - correct me if I'm wrong), that's just about the polar opposite.

As far as I know, the only way to cleanly rule out all other worldviews is if you view things from the standpoint of a presuppositional apologist, and this particular "process of elimination" won't convince anyone who isn't doesn't already hold the same view. Christianity is only the "last worldview standing" if you cheat, and by the same standards, I could become a presuppositional apologist for Ancient Egyptianism and call that the last worldview standing. To give a closer comparison, you could have been a presuppositional apologist for Islam rather than Christianity, and then you never would have given Christianity a fair shot. Why isn't this the case? Why aren't you a Muslim presuppositional apologist? Simple: Vegas odds say you were born into a Christian family, not a Muslim one, so you let your bias do the talking, and you probably had never even heard of Islam until your mind had already closed. You can rationalize this post-hoc by saying that you were just one of the lucky ones who were saved by God's grace, and isn't that awfully convenient for you (more bias), but Muslims could say the same thing if it fit their theological fancy, and their religious grounds would be just as strong as yours. Ultimately it all comes down to which sect of humans beat the others to your indoctrination...unless that is you've decided Christianity is superior to Islam by secular standards of reasoning available to anyone (something you just kind-of-sort-of tried to argue without saying it outright when you invoked open-mindedness), but conceding that would be detrimental to your claim they don't exist and don't affect your judgment.

For that reason, if you want to convince other people to adopt your viewpoint, you'll have to convince them by their own standards or a shared standard, not your own. I'd prefer to do the same with you, except I can't: Your worldview is explicitly constructed to redirect all of your considerable intelligence toward reinforcing your brainwashing in a closed feedback loop. There IS no escape from presuppositional apologism within its own framework, because a clever but short-sighted human being designed it on purpose as a mental trap/cage. In turn, Christians with a desire for certainty jumped straight into the trap precisely because there's no escape within the context of its own logic. My only choice is appealing to a shared basis of secular reasoning, which you possess and utilize but disguise in this context.

That's quite unlike rational arguments based on our flawed understanding of the natural world, under which people have been convinced to believe in or disbelieve in Christianity (and vice versa), along with many other religions. I know this from personal experience as well: I've gone from indoctrinated Catholic, to vaguely Protestant on my way to deism, to agnostic, to maybe even atheist-leaning agnostic, to optimist agnostic with a degree of confidence in the existence of a transcendental God of some sort...all or at least mostly based on secular arguments. I don't have all the answers, but I'd prefer to be uncertain and honest than fool myself into more certainty than I can really justify.

Where I think you go wrong - and where I've gone wrong in the past - is by taking the position that if an argument isn't absolutely insurmountable (by any means necessary, even by cheating as presuppositional apologists do ;)) then it holds no value. However, consider the case of a juror weighing in on a murder trial. Has the prosecutor proven the defendant guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt? You have imperfect information, and the prosecutor is probably well short of a mathematical proof. Assume nothing has been presented to disprove the prosecution's theory (scientific falsification has failed), and the evidence is overwhelming...and yet there may be some conceivable far-fetched scenario in which the defendant could have been framed. What do you do? You have to weigh the evidence based on loosely Bayesian reasoning about probabilities.

Probabilistic reasoning isn't exactly ideal, but it's how ordinary people use subjective reasoning tools to estimate the truth value of objective statements like "John killed Jane with the candlestick in the kitchen." You use the same tools in day-to-day life when you don't have [what you believe to be] a holy book to hand down an absolute final answer from on high. You don't consider "secular" reasoning to be absurd in those contexts (although you could handwave its existence away with a convenient assumption that it's subservient to religion). Why then is it so confusing that other people consider it just as valid an approach for estimating the truth value of metaphysical (moral) statements as well, based on internal evidence like conscience combined with external evidence like the ubiquity of cross-cultural references to the Golden Rule, etc.?

When you say "secularism is absurd" and limit the statement to only secularism, you're showing bias. I'm not interested in debating this issue, but consider the mental gymnastics that young Earth creationists must go through in order to convince themselves a literal reading of Genesis is scientifically plausible. When you have to go so far out of your way to explain why modern scientific tools and common sense propose a far longer timeline than an old holy book, you sacrifice the credibility it takes for other people to believe you've given other worldviews a fair shake and ruled them out using any criteria they would consider reasonable. In doing so, you lose the ability to change their minds.

Is secularism absurd? Perhaps, but pretty much every belief system incorporates absurdities. Existence is absurd. Look at the cosmological argument for instance. We have three options:
There's a "first cause," an "unmoved mover" outside the system: Absurd? This is only solvable by handwaving and invoking a transcendental entity whose reason for existence is somehow itself, for reasons we cannot further explain. We can call this entity God by convention, but there's no reason it has to be the Christian God or even a sentient entity at all. It's just something that "is" for no reason, which evades further explanation by virtue of being outside our comprehension. We're talking about a hypothetical entity that by definition does not obey the laws of logic, so it's a tossup whether we call this absurd (because it doesn't obey logic) or not (because by definition it logically wouldn't). Unfortunately, even if this is the solution, we still can't be certain of its specific parameters. (For the record, I lean toward this solution.)
Time exists forever backwards in an infinite but non-cyclical causal chain: To the best of my understanding, this is absurd and doesn't provide a proper explanation. Even if infinite causal regress within the universe or multiverse exists, we're still left asking, "Why does the infinite chain itself exist? Why does anything exist?"
Time exists forever backwards in a circular causal chain: This isn't absurd in and of itself, but it violates the third law of thermodynamics. So, either the first solution is correct, or there's a context we haven't recognized under which the third law of thermodynamics simply doesn't hold. (We believe it because all empirical observations we've ever made are consistent with it, and it seems logical, but the hypothetical existence of some higher-dimensional interactive phenomena between universes with radically different rules might break it; as far as I know, it only holds within our current universe.) Even if this is the case, we're still with the question of, "Why would this universe/multiverse exist in a stable time loop with these specifics? Why not other specifics? Why does anything exist at all?"
When you look at the apparent absurdity of every possible solution, it seems it's a total miracle the universe exists at all. (This by the way is why I'm not an atheist.) However, claiming this is (or has to be) proof of the Christian God in particular would be totally missing the mark with special pleading.

Moreover, truth can exist with or without a sentient God, let alone a personal God or a Christian God: Does 2 + 2 = 4 because God says so, or does God say 2 + 2 = 4 because it's an inherently true property of reality, regardless of reality's reason for existing? If your argument is that God can "just be," anyone else can make the same argument about any other transcendental truth.

The same applies to secular morality, especially reciprocal morality: We can take a leap of faith that God created us equal in terms of self-ownership, implying personal boundaries are reciprocal, or we can skip the God part altogether and take a leap of faith that personal boundaries are reciprocal just because (i.e. assume they're transcendental truths in and of themselves, just as we'd assume of God). We can also refuse to take any leap of faith at all, but the alternatives are as follows:
The correct interpersonal boundaries are nonreciprocal...which is simply too bizarre for anyone to ever make universal sense of, especially when it comes to agreeing about specifics. Who gets to own everyone? The tallest, prettiest, smartest, strongest, smelliest, or meanest?
There is no such thing as proper interpersonal boundaries. Anything goes...but even if that's true, I would still personally prefer not being eaten alive by the Lord of the Flies, so "anything goes" includes trying to establish sensible boundaries even if they aren't universal moral truths in a purely metaphysical sense.
Whether secular morality can exist or not depends on how much you cheat with definitions:
If you define morality as a cosmological truth dictated by God, no secular standard will ever measure up, but that's asserting your own conclusion that God creates morality (as opposed to the most compatible alternative, "God clarifies morality"). If so, we can arbitrarily pick Christian morality, but we could also pick Muslim morality, or Jewish morality, or Hindu morality, etc., or if we really want to be sadistic, Ancient Egyptian morality.
You can also define morality in utilitarian terms, such as, "Greatest good for the greatest number of people." That sounds like a reasonable definition and a noble goal on the surface, but it creates so much unlimited subjectivity that every single person will disagree on almost every detail, and you'll have some people killing other people to harvest their organs for a bunch of people in need, while the person they killed was curing cancer, while Stalin is going around getting rid of all the undesirables, because it's just so obvious they're the problem. Everyone's coming up with their own arbitrarily different moral equations with a purely subjective basis and solving them (some incorrectly, because they're bad at math), and nobody stops to consider the consequences of the question, "What if I'm wrong?" It's kind of a dead-end, to put it politely. ;)
You can also define morality as some universal set of rules and boundaries that enable harmonious interaction between people. This appears to be a vague definition at first, but the inclusion of the word "universal" indicates we're trying to satisfy some notion of universal morality, assuming it exists. This rules out inherently non-universal standards, and it lets us quickly arrive at a pretty good default guess. Does universal morality exist at all? A better question is...does it even matter that we know for sure?

How do you know you "have to" assume that universal morality exists. And even if you make the assumption, how do you know what it is?
We don't have to assume universal morality exists and take it on faith. We just "might as well." Think about it: Does universal morality exist? Maybe it does, or maybe it doesn't, but we can make a pretty easy flowchart encapsulating both cases. Here's the heading: "Do you believe universal morality exists?" Here are the two boxes:
YES: Then we can agree for the sake of discussion that universal morality exists, debate specifics under this assumption using whatever other shared basis for discussion we can find, and/or move on with our lives.
NO: Then why bother arguing about moral standards? If they don't exist, they don't MATTER. If they aren't universal, and they're culturally relative, then arguing about them is in itself an act that changes the culture, so anything goes, and the specifics don't MATTER. Moreover, any argument for a universal standard would still be just as good as an argument for something else (for the same reasons). EDIT: Actually, your example of direct democracy below defies this categorization, because it defines the culture as "the majority" and specifically defines universal morality to be the whim of the majority, so it presents a corner case where morality is relative but still "matters." That said, there are a lot of immediate objections to that too, so I'll handle the case separately below.
Since the answers don't even matter in the second case, the only case it makes sense to spend time considering is the first case. Remember the question, "What if I'm wrong?" If I assume universal morality doesn't exist, I might be missing something important (and if we all assume it, the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket anyway, so it's a bad thing to assume if we value our sanity and survival). If I assume universal morality does exist, the worst thing that can happen if I'm wrong is I'll waste some of my own time considering something that doesn't matter. Therefore, it's worth taking a leap of faith that universal morality exists. I could be wrong, but then if I am, nothing matters anyway, so who cares? ;) I concentrate on the only case that matters, because it's the only case that matters.

I'm repeating myself now, but I'll retread the ground of how I use all the tools available to make a best guess that's better than a blind guess:
First (or maybe this came later, but it makes sense to put first), I rule out all non-universal standards as tautologically inapplicable, which pretty much rules out every form of morality based on "positive rights." Also, I'm most concerned about the question of proper interpersonal boundaries, because this is actually a pressing matter for harmonious existence with other human beings on Earth. This is what gives the question of "ought" practical meaning beyond the academic and metaphysical, so it's where I direct my focus. I could consider religious standards, but they're only "universal" by fiat, not for any externally logical reason: They include a lot of nonviolent offenses against self/God/gods which aren't really relevant in the context of defining proper interpersonal boundaries. Worse, they also all disagree with each other in these "parochial" particulars, and there's no logical reason to prefer one over the other, except by indulging in the same secular reasons I would use to pick self-ownership over all of them. Plus, there's no way we'll ever build a consensus based on which religion to pick, so our best bet for the purpose of interpersonal boundaries is to find a least common denominator.

Overall, it "just so happens" that self-ownership and the Golden Rule are the closest things we have to least common denominators between differing religions and secular beliefs. There might be other potentially universal moral systems I'm not thinking of, but Occam's Razor and the curious principle underlying Argumentation Ethics both offer further empirical evidence that self-ownership has some sort of moral value beyond "might makes right." There are still a lot of blanks to fill in (e.g. verbal abuse and malicious inaction), so I then turn to what almost every world religion that has every existed says about the Golden Rule (least common denominator again). If even one of them is divinely inspired, that's further evidence in favor of the Golden Rule...and if not, the ubiquity across time and cultural boundaries are still evidence that the Golden Rule represents something significantly more universal than just a personal subjective view of morality. (It's not proof for the same reason popularity contests aren't proof, but it's not exactly the daily whim of the majority either: Since it's been used as a basis for peaceful interaction for thousands of years among people who either thought it up independently or were somehow divinely inspired, it demonstrates significant value worth seriously considering, especially compared to a moral vacuum.) Using my own conscience and a bit of Bayesian reasoning, it's really not so hard to arrive at the tentative conclusion that self-ownership, the NAP, and the Golden Rule are the most logical guesses available for discerning what universal morality may be.

(As a side note, I could always make like a utilitarian and argue that deontological principles are ironically superior for the long-term well being of the greatest number of people from even a subjective utilitarian point of view. That's not an argument for "having the right answer" in a metaphysical sense, but it's a useful pragmatic argument for establishing, enforcing, and living by a moral standard nevertheless. Since most people are utilitarians anyway in a political sense, we're going to have to argue this point and beat them at their own game whether our morality is universally and metaphysically correct or not.)

Is this process fallible? Yes, of course. Is there any alternative that's less fallible (such as the process of believing in the Bible)? If so, I'm not seeing it. How can I sleep at night knowing I can't prove universal moral truths by strict construction? AMBIEN. (Just kidding about the last part.)


Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled in the New Testament is one proof of this. The fact that over 40 authors wrote the Bible yet without any internal contradictions is another.
I'd argue that prophecies and Biblical consistency are both more a matter of opinion and interpretation than anything else. Given the "right" interpretation, you can say the same thing about not only Christianity but all other religions: No internal contradictions, and all prophecies were fulfilled (except the ones that haven't been...YET! Dun, dun dun...). It's a nice enough property, but I can't really agree it's exceptional, and if other people couldn't make the same argument about their own religion (given the "right" interpretation), there would be a whole lot less religions around today.

Also, there are external contradictions to worry about: Remember again what I said about the mental gymnastics required to reconcile a literal Genesis with real-world experience. You can make the contradictions go away when you squint hard enough and look at things sideways, but the sheer effort involved doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence from people who don't already share your views. Instead, it makes it appear to outsiders as though you could convince yourself of anything using the most elaborate rationalizations just to make it fit a book. (Again, I'm not interested in debating Creationism here. I'm just pointing out why you're not going to convince anyone new using the approach you take.)


I can't verify this ATM but I've heard that the Bible's manuscripts have been carefully enough protected that if any other ancient book (ie. the iliad or the odyssey) had that much it would never even be questioned as to its accuracy, in fact, there are more variations of the illiad than there are of the Bible.
I wasn't really referring to tampering with the manuscripts centuries down the line, but at least as far as the Old Testament goes, you never know whether there may have been two or three totally different versions of a book without many extant copies, then the correct ones were extinguished, and the wrong ones proliferated. Still, there are a lot of other areas where things could have gone wrong, or at least differently from the perfection you assume (because I suppose it's always possible that God intended us to use our brains to make sense of mixed sources too):

What if the Bible wasn't divinely inspired at all? In this case, authors may have written based on their personal convictions, the desire to reshape the morality of their time (early Judaism), and the desire to expand upon the existing mythology (later Judaism and Christianity). When you realize you view the holy books of all other religions (also internally consistent, from a certain point of view) in exactly this way, is it really so surprising that others view your own as such? In the words of Mark Twain,

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
If you permit the existence of supernatural entities like God, Satan, etc., you also have to consider the absolute worst case scenario: The Bible was inspired by something that wasn't human...but wasn't the one true God either. Hopefully that's not the case, but there are a lot of passages I've read with moral revulsion, thinking, "Why would an all-loving God with superior morality to mine be speaking more like Stalin than Jesus here? Why would the one true God possess qualities to be completely awful in humans? Just to give one example, self-absorbed narcissistic tyrants demand worship from others, but good and loving people are simply above that. Why would a loving God be more petty and spiteful than people? Why would he behave at times more like the worst among us than the best among us?" The obvious copout is, "God is above us, so we can't judge him by any standard. He's so unknowable to us that we can't make sense of his morality in earthly terms, and our concept of good and evil is flawed. Just trust what the book says, because its morality is superior to yours." Maybe that's true, or maybe that's what a demonically inspired ancestor of Fred Phelps wanted us to think when he wrote it. How would we know the difference? It's an excuse, not a reason, and someone could make the same argument about Moloch being above our judgment and reasoning! An actual explanation might be, "The passages illustrating a God more like Stalin than Jesus were part of the Bible's corruption." I mean, if that's reasoning enough to doubt the integrity of other religions (viewed on an equal basis, without Christian presupposition), why not your own? That said, GunnyFreedom and jmdrake have half-convinced me in the past that with the right theological interpretation, certain "questionable" passages aren't really as bad as they sound. For the record, I tend to deeply respect their versions of Christianity, even though I don't adhere to them. Among others, they give me hope for the future of Christianity: I don't think their views are foolproof (nobody's are; you can't prove the Bible's divinity the same way I can't prove anything about secular morality), but they're defensible enough to respect at least.

What if the Bible was divinely inspired to a degree, but the authors exaggerated the extent of divine influence? They could have filled in the blanks based on their own personal convictions as above, or the whole thing could have been influenced by a mixture of sources (as above...), including preexisting oral and written accounts. What if the Bible was divinely inspired to a degree, but there was a time lapse between the epiphany and "pen to paper?" The same thing could have happened.

What if entire books of the Bible were divinely inspired, but others were not? False books could be made consistent enough to avoid blatant contradictions, yet they would fill in the blanks with wholly human-inspired beliefs (at best). Consider the fact that the corrupt Catholic Church - which Reformed theologians so despise - settled on the Biblical canon hundreds of years after Jesus's death based on an opaque process which - by all secular reasoning - could very easily have been influenced more by, "How do we get rid of the contradictions in the way that best helps us maintain our power?" than, "What books were divinely inspired?" This process wasn't without controversy, and from an external point of view, there's no more reason to believe God inspired the correct choice for Biblical canon than to believe God inspired the correct choice for <insert any/every other religious canon here>. The same goes for the Torah before it...exactly what human process led to the decision that those books were the divinely inspired ones? Some or all divinely inspired books could have been thrown out, while many false books could have been kept.

If you believe Jesus was the Son of God (axiomatically, because you consider it self-evident perhaps?), it stands to reason the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are pretty historically reliable (but there's disagreement of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Gospels). That said, they weren't the only four Gospels written either. Consider the Gospel of Thomas for instance: "PURE GNOSTICISM! HERESY!" Perhaps, but how do you know Gnosticism is a heresy...because a bunch of long-dead Catholic bishops hellbent on maintaining their power and the Apostolic Succession said so, and the biblical canon they later handpicked (possibly for that specific purpose) may not be entirely consistent with it? There was a huge diversity of belief in the early Christian Church until centralized power clamped down on its competition. If the Catholics went wrong with the indulgences, theology, etc., who's to say they didn't go wrong a whole lot earlier? Who's to say they ever got much of anything right at all?

From a secular point of view - considering the Bible like you'd consider any other holy book - any combination of these things could have happened to heavily distort whatever divinely inspired truth was supposed to be inside of it. There are more unknowns than knowns, really. On top of all that, there are a lot of different people with radically different theological interpretations. For what it's worth, if I took the Bible at face value as the complete, undiluted, unaltered Word of God, I'd be inclined to side with these guys, at least on the question of Calvinism: http://pfrs.org/calvinism/calvin09.html

I want to clarify something at this point: This discussion originally began because I stressed the importance of debating abortion in nonreligious terms with the nonreligious if you ever want to make any headway, but it's gotten a bit off track. At this point I'm essentially defending disbelief, but I want to be clear I'm not exactly arguing against Christianity either, so to speak. I do think Biblical inerrance, literal Biblical theology, and especially Calvinism are flat-out wrong, but by and large I find Christianity to be a perfectly reasonable worldview. I don't think there's such a thing as being "too smart" or "too wise" to be a Christian...but you are too smart to be as self-certain as you are, and you owe it to yourself to gain some broader perspective and a respect for others' beliefs.


Or anything else, for that matter.
...
Again, or when reading and interpreting any text. This one isn't a problem either.
You're right when you say that taking those two assumptions on faith are not problems, and that they're necessary for a secular worldview as well. However, my point here was to clarify something that Sola Fide and Theocrat always refused to acknowledge: Faith in your senses and reason comes BEFORE faith in the Bible in a chronological sense. You must trust them first to believe you're getting an accurate representation of what the Bible says. Realistically speaking, you probably also first put your faith in another human being who told you, "This is the Word of God. Believe it, or you're going to Hell." ;) As a result, whenever the Bible contradicts the consensus reality we experience on a day-to-day basis, a reasonable person must side with their senses and reason, because doubting those means doubting the basis by which you arrived at the Bible in the first place. If the tools you use to experience the world are suspect, so is the Bible itself. (Reflect again upon Genesis interpretations from this perspective.)


I've never encountered anyone that can actually defend secular morality under any kind of scrutiny. Maybe you can. You've certainly got me beaten at an intellectual level, whereas most people I debate frankly don't (This would be IRL, most of this forum is probably smarter than me.) So if I want to change a secular person's mind about whatever, I'd probably start by showing them how little they actually know.
I wouldn't say I have you "beat." I've had a little more time to absorb a wider variety of ideas, but you're a good bit more intellectually advanced and engaged than I was at your age, and you've broken entirely free of mainstream political indoctrination a few years sooner too (but I'm not sure what your family is like either...plus, you had the advantage of Ron Paul being more popular earlier in your life). However, your religious indoctrination has been a lot stronger, and you probably never had a clever agnostic ex-girlfriend to challenge your beliefs and certainty before you got too way too sophisticated for your own good. ;) From my viewpoint, you just use your vast intelligence to reinforce a fortress of rationalizations to lock yourself further into a presuppositionalist mindset (a trap). In that sense, your intelligence may be a liability in this context, because the smarter and more sophisticated someone is, the more effectively they can convince themselves of anything they want to believe strongly enough. Still, you're also young enough and inquisitive enough that there's "hope."

When it comes to certainty, there's pretty much only one thing I know for sure: "I think, therefore I exist," as René Descartes said. It's technically possible that I'm just a brain in a jar being fed external stimulus from a totally alien outside world. It's even technically possible that my mind is the only thing in all of existence, has no reason for existing beyond absurdity, and that it's dreaming everything else up and trying to make sense of something that never will...and similarly, from your perspective, the same could be true for you. These are very bizarre possibilities, and they're just two out of a potentially infinite number of realities, so I'd consider them pretty unlikely. I don't take the position of philosophical skepticism, but...I can't disprove it either.

Epistemology is tricky like that, because almost every truth we hold dear is technically fallible, even some of the most obvious ones. It's a field of philosophy that will always be discussed and perhaps refined but never solved completely. On the balance, I believe the arguments I laid out above are sufficient to rule out certain forms of morality from consideration as universal moral standards (by refuting their universality), so that narrows the field. I'd also like to think my arguments for accepting the Golden Rule, self-ownership, and NAP are probabilistically superior to the argument of absolute ignorance: "Well crap, I don't have absolute moral proof, so I haven't the foggiest idea whether it's wrong to kill someone and make a dress out of their skin or not. 50/50 shot, right? It rubs the lotion on its skin..."
If not, and if you haven't read into Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics, now would be a good time to do so. I'll come right out and say that his precise argument is deeply flawed and relatively easy to refute as a proof, but the underlying insight of his argument is so unique (that people arguing about an issue have already performatively acknowledged that argumentation is superior to force) that I can't help but think somewhere, someday, someone is going to reformulate it into a far more defensible argument based on the same underlying observation.

All that said, I can't claim divine authority behind any of my beliefs, at least not that I know of. You can, but understand that claimed authority is not the same as actual authority, which you know very well considering you disagree with e.g. Muslims and every other religion on Earth that isn't yours. If your reason for falling back on divine authority in the absence of provable secular morality is, "If this really is the Word of God, it's the final say, and that's better than what you have" that's a pretty big if...and you'd have to concede the same thing for other mutually exclusive religions as well, leaving you back at square one.

What exactly do you mean that nobody can defend secular morality under any scrutiny? Do you truly hold the position that without your Christianity, you would adhere to no morals whatsoever and demonstrate a complete lack of conscience? Can you really not comprehend why a nonreligious person would strive to be a moral person, even in the absence of certainty regarding what that precisely means? That's really what this all comes down to. Everyone except psychopaths has a conscience, and it's a mishmash of subjectivity (concepts of fairness, empathy, etc.) and cultural influences. There may be no way to eliminate subjectivity entirely, but we can make special effort to eliminate inconsistencies and absurdities (which true universal morality wouldn't have) using the most objective means available to us, then use all the other tools available to make the best of what's left. How is that not a more fruitful approach than assuming, "I can't prove it's wrong, so let's start eating babies?" Do you truly hold the opinion that morality has absolutely no inherent value or meaning whatsoever apart from being God's decree? If not, why would it be so surprising that nonreligious people would be drawn to that value and meaning for its own sake? If some compelling universal moral truth exists, wouldn't it be more surprising if nonreligious people were strangely incapable of finding value in it under any context whatsoever? (It's worth reiterating here that few people adhere to self-ownership on a political scale, but it's mainly due to indoctrination. At a small interpersonal scale, most people tend to implicitly understand the interpersonal boundaries it presents.)

Ultimately, if your standard for defending secular morality under scrutiny is, "I need irrefutable proof or an ancient claim of divine authority," I will fail miserably...but by the same token, if I demanded that you prove the divinity of the Bible, you would also fail miserably. You can argue, "I can prove my own beliefs within the context of my own belief system, but you can't," but that's really only because secular philosophy is more self-conscious and conservative about taking leaps of faith. If I really wanted, I could claim a belief system that boldly asserts whatever conclusion I want as an "absolute truth," and so it would "prove" whatever argument I wanted by default (within its own axiomatic framework), but that would be cheating, and it wouldn't do anything to persuade someone who didn't already believe the same thing. In the end, honestly defending and justifying a belief is always going to end up back at the same Münchhausen trilemma I mentioned in my last post (and this happens a lot faster for intangible beliefs). Infinite regress (requiring further justification for each justification) can only be solved by either:
Circular reasoning: The theory and proof support/corroborate each other. This is cheating of course, so the best way to mitigate the possibility of being wrong is to ensure that our circular beliefs don't contradict consensus reality in a way that requires extraordinary effort to justify.
Axiomatic reasoning: These are bedrock principles we can be sure are true, because they're "self evident" for some reason. This is also cheating, because it can be considered asserting your conclusion even more directly than with circular reasoning. In reality, I might consider axioms to be principles we agree to take on faith when we can't imagine the alternative.
Both of those solutions have the potential to be error-prone for obvious reasons, and I tend to side with fallibilism:

The failure of proving exactly any truth as expressed by the Münchhausen trilemma does not have to lead to dismissal of objectivity, as with relativism. One example of an alternative is the fallibilism of Karl Popper and Hans Albert, accepting that certainty is impossible, but that it is best to get as close as we can to truth, while remembering our uncertainty.
This is part of the reason why I think it's so important to consider the ramifications of the question, "What if I'm wrong?" If only the Bolsheviks considered that question before getting rid of all the "undesirables!" :rolleyes:

Back to axiomatic reasoning, I mentioned Kurt Gödel in my last post. If you haven't looked him up, you really should: In the early 20th century, Albert North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell wrote the Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a complete and consistent set of mathematical axioms that could be used to prove any mathematical truth...and in 1931, some young upstart named Kurt Gödel shocked the world by actually proving it was impossible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorem

The best explanation for ordinary dummies like us is probably in the first article:

In 1930, Gödel's completeness theorem showed that first-order predicate logic itself was complete in a much weaker sense—that is, any sentence that is unprovable from a given set of axioms must actually be false in some model of the axioms. However, this is not the stronger sense of completeness desired for Principia Mathematica, since a given system of axioms (such as those of Principia Mathematica) may have many models, in some of which a given statement is true and in others of which that statement is false, so that the statement is left undecided by the axioms.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems cast unexpected light on these two related questions.

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem showed that Principia could not be both consistent and complete. According to the theorem, within every sufficiently powerful logical system (such as Principia), there exists a statement G that essentially reads, "The statement G cannot be proved." Such a statement is a sort of Catch-22: if G is provable, then it is false, and the system is therefore inconsistent; and if G is not provable, then it is true, and the system is therefore incomplete.

Gödel's second incompleteness theorem (1931) shows that no formal system extending basic arithmetic can be used to prove its own consistency. Thus, the statement "there are no contradictions in the Principia system" cannot be proven in the Principia system unless there are contradictions in the system (in which case it can be proven both true and false).
Later, more proofs were created that expanded beyond self-referential statements. Ultimately, the result is that any mathematical system capable of expressing all true statements (i.e. it's complete) cannot be consistent, and any consistent mathematical system cannot be complete. This means that there are mathematical truths that will never be provable within a self-consistent system...yet still true. (Today, mathematicians use the ZFC system, which is believed to be consistent...but for the record, I'm NOT conversant in set theory.)

While Gödel's theorems dealt specifically with mathematics, they demonstrated in the general sense that it's possible for true statements to exist that are unprovable, even provably unprovable. If this is true in mathematics, the purest form of logical human reasoning which has allowed for the establishment of so many proofs (within the limits of axiomatic truth), it stands to reason it's true in other contexts as well, where proofs themselves are inherently more nebulous and hard to come by. By extension, could the same be true about morality?

For all we know, there may be universal moral statements that are also true but unprovable...but if this is the case, how do we arrive at them? If we're going to arrive at unprovable truths, we have no choice but to use imperfect means to arrive at tentative conclusions, which is how I arrive at self-ownership and the NAP. It's pretty much how you arrive at Biblical belief too...just with a different balance of self-consciousness and self-certainty. ;)

Actually, I'll go farther. I suspect that without knowing it, you yourself have chosen self-ownership over other interpretations of Biblical morality because of essentially secular reasons (the same kind I use). Moses killed a man for working on a Sunday, and he killed Jews regressing to paganism (worshipping a golden calf) in a horrific way, by pouring boiling metal down their throats. They committed nonviolent crimes, and he killed them. Was this wrong? Surely it wasn't right for Moses but wrong for you, which would violate the meaning of universal morality! Why don't you advocate or even commit these atrocities? "Thou shalt not kill?" What about "Whoever does this and that blah blah blah shall be put to death?" Why do you resolve this in favor of "Thou shalt not kill" and decide the rest belongs to a different context? I recognize you can defend your choice with Biblical reasoning, but the apparent contradiction can be resolved in more than one direction through MORE than one interpretation, and you silently gravitated toward the reasonable interpretation. New Covenant? Perhaps, but it's still more a convenient excuse for choosing the sane interpretation than a mandate. When you first came to your conclusion, did you REALLY honestly consider all possibilities from an unbiased standpoint and use the Bible to settle the matter, or did you retroactively search for Biblical reasons to justify the common sense solution you wanted to believe was superior (for all the right secular reasons)?

(continued)

[Mini-Me]

In your case, yes, because we both agree that the NAP is true. But what if someone didn't believe the NAP was true, rather, they believed in legal positivism? Now, I could show them how inconsistent their belief was (few would say the Jews should have just gotten on the trains because "the law said"). But, while we both agree that "universal morality exists" we don't have any common ground on which to discuss such morality, so what common ground is there? Unless the universal morality is in some sense the same (for what its worth, our universal moralities are likely different as well once you get past the NAP) there is no common ground. It would be a waste of time, for instance, for me to try to convince you that homosexual sex is immoral, because I believe that on religious grounds and your "secular" (ie. non-theistic religion) morality does not have such scruples.
Religious morality defines crimes against God/self, so it comes down to, "Either you believe what the book says, or you don't." There are secular reasons not to be a libertine of course, and I'm not promiscuous out of self-respect for instance...but I don't want to turn into Rorschach from Watchmen either. I suppose "squick value" also helps reinforce the Christian opinion on homosexuality, as well as utilitarian ideas of "Culture above all!" and "You must reproduce!" From a secular perspective, those human ideals (rather than divine inspiration) probably led to religious prohibitions on homosexuality in the first place...but in the end it really just comes down to whether you believe the religion and/or book is infallible. Unlike condemnation of murder for instance, there's little practical reason for a secular-minded person to find great moral fault with homosexuality. It's too alien to me to really understand the appeal, so I just let it all go and say, "Whatever floats your boat." Even from a secular perspective I do think some things about the gay community are deeply self-destructive, but that's a different story entirely. Since I don't make the argument that "self-destructiveness equals sin," I'm not sure if it's relevant.

It's definitely easier to debate practical morality in the context of interpersonal behavior and boundaries than it is to debate religious morality though: As you said, you can refute the universalism of legal positivism, or at least demonstrate a contradiction between positivism and a person's conscience. Similarly, if you're debating a utilitarian, you can argue in favor of the NAP on consequentialist grounds. You may or may not "win," depending on your debating skills versus their own, and also depending on their open mindedness, but given enough time and exposure you can make inroads. Sometimes this takes a little luck, like catching someone during a brief window of open-mindedness after something has shocked them into disillusionment.

Here's a key point I just realized while thinking about this: Most people seem to believe in a deontological form of morality on an individual basis (even when their behavior may show weakness and opportunism), but they gravitate toward utilitarian morality in a political context. I think a lot of this comes from indoctrination telling them that "The Golden Rule doesn't work at the level of nation-states," etc., and they don't even consider that there might be a need to reconcile their two moralities. Once someone has been thoroughly convinced on utilitarian grounds to accept an argument though, principled deontological arguments for the same conclusion will begin to make a heck of a lot more sense to them as well, and their resistance against accepting them will drop. (That said, rational arguments don't work on most people anyway. Most people form their beliefs by following social cues, and they'll adopt rationalizations later. The average person holds shallowly understood beliefs that are deeply seated and tied to their identity politics, and the only way to change them is by changing the environment around them.)

It may seem futile sometimes, but pervasive propaganda works on Boobus, and sufficient evidence and argumentation works on the open-minded and intelligent. Since this post is ridiculously long anyway, I'll include an account of how I've been convinced to radically change my political worldview not once but twice:

I started out as your garden-variety neoconservative follower (except I was indoctrinated against private gun ownership, so...even worse), and I was disillusioned over a period of time by the Bush administration's disrespect for the Bill of Rights (it's the supreme law of the land, so why is it being ignored?), the undue influence corporations have over the law (the RIAA and copyright extremism was part of what got the ball rolling), and the cognitive dissonance between "let's be fiscal conservatives and push for an infinite amount of military spending." I briefly considered libertarianism on my way to becoming a social democrat, but I thought the libertarians were totally insane for all of the reasons the average liberal does. ;) I started paying a lot more attention to the problem of poverty, and I spent a few years coming up with ideas for universal healthcare and education and testing them against my economic knowledge. Every time something turned out to be unworkable, I'd redo it all and make it more complicated to sidestep the flaw (thereby creating new ones). Meanwhile, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi got the majority leader positions in the Senate and House (and I was all, "Isn't he supposed to be one of the most corrupt?"), and all of the Democrats I helped elect in 2004 and 2006 broke all of their promises to end the wars and restore the Bill of Rights. "We're going to wait for the Presidency (yay, go Barack!)" Pelosi seemed to say. Yeah, sure...so, it became pretty clear that both major party establishments were worthless, so I gravitated toward the Kucinich side of things.

Then I heard about Ron Paul and his kooky ideas about gold back in May 2007, and I thought, "This guy seems pretty honest, but he's kind of weird and far-out. I'll take Kucinich and Gravel over him...except you know, with the way things are going, I'm really starting to think gun control is a bad idea." A few months later, I thought, "You know, he IS honest. Maybe if I write him a letter that's convincing enough, he'll see the light and change his mind about some of his fringe thoughts? It'd be more useful than writing to any of these other assholes." I had a grasp on some basic economic theory from courses I took in the past and a decent mind for it (hence finding flaws in my universal healthcare and education plans), so I brushed up using basic economic references in addition to this page here: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-gold.htm
I got to work writing my essay to explain to Ron Paul in the most compelling terms why he should reconsider his monetary ideas, but the deeper I got into my essay, the more contradictions I found, and the less and less the basic assumptions underlying Keynesianism made sense to me. I spent probably a week trying to fix it, but things just got worse and worse for my argument until I finally realized, "Holy crap, he's right." That opened up the floodgates, and for a brief moment my mind was opened enough to seriously reevaluate all of my beliefs next to his. After reading increasingly libertarian works including Bastiat's The Law (though not the whole thing...why did I get distracted?), it only took a few months before, one by one, I became far more satisfied with utilitarian libertarian arguments than liberal/socialist arguments on a number of issues...and as for the Constitution, the correct viewpoint was clear once I stopped emotionally rejecting it.

Before I knew it, the moral arguments for Natural Law and libertarianism started to become so self-evident I thought, "Why didn't I think of this before?" Then I realized I actually had once, by entertaining some vaguely libertarian notion that the only legitimate use of "power" (vaguely defined) might be to balance the scales against those who abuse it. I had also always rejected moral relativism as a general concept for reasons of conscience and the above argument that "if it's true, nothing matters anyway." In other words, I had always wanted to be a moral person, but even after learning of Kohlberg's Moral Stages in high school, I had never really understood what it meant to view everything from a consistent or principled moral basis...until suddenly, all the different things I had learned over my life stopped contradicting each other and started reinforcing each other, and everything fell into place.

I'm not sure where this quote comes from, but there's a quote that says, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." I've seen Christians use that as an additional excuse to cling to the Bible, because without it, something terrible might fill the void if they aren't careful. (Always ask, "What if I'm wrong?" That said, I just realized you can flip this around into Pascal's Wager, but that's not really helpful, since it teaches us to pick the religion with the worst hell we most want to avoid. ;)) Thinking for yourself and considering an entirely different basis for your worldview DOES carry that danger, and it once led me toward socialist beliefs in my arrogance. However, if I had never done it, I'd still be cheering on neocons, and what then? The sad truth of the matter is that thinking for yourself is error-prone, but so is assuming your indoctrination taught you all the right answers.


Unfortunately, I do NOT think most people will ever be willing to agree on self ownership. I've talked to a lot of people, even Christians (Thus, they claim to believe the Bible and thus we have that common ground as well) and they do NOT agree with self-ownership because they want to control some thing or another. Short of killing all the control freaks (Which I do not endorse) there's simply no way everyone is going to agree on the NAP and self-ownership, because most people are control freaks.
...annnnnnnnd that's where the propaganda and social conditioning comes in. People have been indoctrinated into the wrong answers, and except for those few capable of thinking for themselves (and willing to do so) after the right stimulus, we're going to have to change this with social conditioning of our own: If we make it "cool" to be (or pretend to be) libertarian, and we make them feel like powerful winners because of it, their identity politics will shift, and so will their allegiances. Then, they'll memorize shallow rationalizations like before, and given a long enough time, their identity politics will be just as stubborn in our favor as they are today to our detriment.


As for democracy, "majority rules" seems like a fairly simple basis for morality to me. Its EVIL, but its not complicated, and probably has fewer variables than self-ownership does. Of course, I'm talking direct democracy rather than "representative" democracy, but it doesn't matter. I'd argue that Occam's Razor makes "majority rules" the simplest moral system. That said, I still believe that its wrong.
Thankfully, direct democracy as a universal moral standard is rife with a lot of the same problems as the pure ideological international communist morality I criticized in my last post:
"Majority rules" over what geographical area, and why? Are we talking an international majority? If so, how were people before the creation of an international democracy expected to live morally, especially during eras where geographically distinct communities occasionally interacted via trade? How was James in the year 1000 supposed to know what was moral and what was not? Heck, since we don't have an Asari e-democracy going, how are WE supposed to know what's moral and what's not on a daily basis? In short, this standard is simply not applicable to all time periods, so it isn't temporally universal.
Since this is a direct democracy, how do we decide what gets on the ballot? Is it morally necessary to create a preliminary ballot containing millions of pages of proposals from everyone on earth who chose to submit one? Is the "one true morality" really going to be something this bizarre and absolutely impossible to live by in practice?
How is this consistent with the interpersonal morality we use on a day to day basis when we make individual decisions? Are all individual decisions morally wrong, and do we need international consensus before we interact in any way? If it's right to decide some things autonomously but not others, where do we draw the line? I mean, how can anyone on earth know if their actions are moral or not before hearing the whim of the majority?
If the majority changes their mind, how can we infer a universal moral norm from their conflicting decisions? This fails yet another temporal universality criterion. In fact, it's not a universal form of morality at all, and it isn't capable of making categorical moral statements about anything: It's pure cultural relativism. I suppose that doesn't automatically equate to the usual "morals are meaningless," since the majority requirement objectively defines the meaning of the culture morality is relative to. The existence of this viewpoint is an "unknown unknown" I didn't think to consider in my arguments above. However, aside from the practicality and temporal universality objections above, the cultural relativity leads to another one below:
Since the majority can change their mind, what is the moral behavior when the majority has been silent on a matter for a certain length of time? What if a proposal is currently in the works that would change the morality of some behavior; is the correct morality governed by the old decision or the yet-to-be-completed new decision? What if the decision has been made, but people don't have the results yet? What's moral then?
So...yeah, majority rules fails pretty epically as "the one true universal standard of morality," whether in part or in whole. It's totally anathema to anything remotely resembling universal morality, and even if we allow for "relative morality IS the universal truth," it has a lot more variables, practical issues, and limitless complications than you'd think at first glance.

[Occam's Banana]

Off-topic, but:

Is it just me, or did FF's post #28 (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?447647-One-quot-wedge-issue-quot-I-will-not-compromise-on&p=5467102&viewfull=1#post5467102) break the browser rendering on this thread? Everything on my end got funky after that one.

EDIT: So it's not just me. Apparently, Mini-Me is getting the same thing. Weird.

[Mini-Me]

Forget the unborn, according to the NAP we are well within our rights to evict infants into the street in the dead of winter.

So any moral requirement that thinks others have a claim on you, no matter how in need they are, is outside of the NAP.

Move the debate to children, figure out why you can't let children die, then worry about why you can't let a foetus die.

You make a good point in general that requires addressing, but your specific example doesn't actually fall outside the NAP. There's a difference between:
letting someone die when there was no express or implied agreement to do otherwise (this may be a stranger within eyesight at one extreme, or it may be someone on the complete opposite side of the world at another extreme)
letting someone die after implicitly or explicitly taking responsibility for their well-being
killing someone yourself (as in abortion)
The latter two are probably a lot more similar to each other in most cases than the first two, because evicting infants into the street in the dead of winter is an awful lot like "killing them yourself." There's a difference between someone who is cold-hearted but within their rights saying, "I don't want this baby to be my problem anymore, so I'm going to drop it off at a shelter" and someone who wants to commit murder in all but the most technical sense saying, "I'm going to pretend to all the world that this baby is in good hands, and I'm going to hide it away from anyone else who might save it, but then I'm going to sit and watch it starve or freeze to death because I can." When you take a baby into your care, and it's exclusively under your care, you've made a non-verbal contract with the baby and everyone else around you that you're responsible for it. The same goes for children in general. A cold-hearted person might be technically in their rights to end that responsibility as quickly as possible, but it's not really something you can legitimately get out of by evicting it straight into the lonely street in the dead of a cold winter night. If a person dies under your care, when they wouldn't have died if you never took them under your care, that's not exactly an "efficient breach" of contract that cleanly ends your responsibility. ;)

That said, you nevertheless make a good point about the NAP's incompleteness. A more correct complaint against the NAP's incompleteness would be that it may arguably permit "negligent homicide" in the case where two strangers have no implicit or explicit agreement with each other, and one drowns to death while the other sits on his ass and watches. (The operative question might be if being the only other person in the vicinity reasonably implies a non-verbal contract to help if needed...probably not, but it may depend on further context.) The NAP is pretty excellent at defining consistent interpersonal boundaries between strangers in a world where other moral [secular] standards fail to establish strict boundaries at all (permitting, in the end, gross abuse and arbitrary inconsistencies)...but it's not complete: It omits all guidance regarding how a person ought to act on behalf of others absent express or implied contracts, and it also omits all guidance regarding issues like verbal abuse, manipulation, etc. (although certain kinds of manipulation may be viewed as fraudulent). Unfortunately, if you try to patch these holes up by demanding positive action to the point of allowing coercion to enforce those demands, it destroys the consistency of the moral system in an effort to attain completeness (this is once again reminding me of Gödel). Practically speaking, this is another reason why I defer to the Golden Rule on issues where the NAP is silent. It's not going to keep other people from committing terrible sins of omission, but it's going to help you pick up the slack. As far as I can see, it's the best we can do without legitimizing the kind of thought that leads [consistently] to the leviathan state.

Back on topic:

I don't think there's sensible disagreement at all.

Once early in my marriage my wife was using a paper bag in the middle of the road as an analogy for something (don't recall what, it isn't important). She stated as part of her soliloquy "...because you don't just drive over a bag in the middle of the road" and I added "yeah, because there might be a baby in it".
She blinked a couple times, incredulously, and said "Well, I was going to go with a bag of nails, but, sure, there could be a baby in it."
I was recalling an actual case I heard about in New Orleans when I was a kid, wherein someone had found an abandoned baby in a paper bag.

I had assumed driving over a road obstacle would have a negative effect on someone else, and my wife assumed driving over a road obstacle would have a negative effect on her. But neither of us thought that driving over the bag would be a good idea.

Abortion proponents say exactly that. "I don't know what's in that bag, I admit freely to not knowing what's in that bag, but I'm not turning this wheel or hitting the brake - I'm driving straight the eff over it."

The ones that claim to know when life begins are even worse, because they have put the thought into it and realize that they can't drive over a bag with a baby in it, but they've come up with a cockamamie, totally subjective definition of when life begins strictly to be able to support abortion.

If one can say with a straight face that one either doesn't care when life begins or has a subjective definition for it, then that is irreconcilable with libertarian thought. And I don't see what can be sensible about it.

This is an important argument, and I actually agree with it: When you consider the stakes underlying the question of when personhood begins, the implications of "What if I'm wrong?" are so much more dire for people who lean pro-choice than people who lean pro-life that I can't personally justify not erring on the side of caution. It's a bit like a Schrödinger's Baby scenario. ;) At the same time, if someone considers the probability that personhood begins at conception to be infinitesimally low compared to it starting at e.g. brain waves, they could argue it reaches the same probability of you accidentally dropping and killing a baby every time you hold one...that is, too negligible to impact your decision-making. I don't make this argument, so I can't say where they'd be deriving probabilities from or how effective the argument would be, but that also means I don't currently have grounds to reject it either, so I have to still concede there's room for debate.


the reality for as long as we've stood on two feet is that there will be abortions, no matter how you or anyone or *everyone* feels about it.

to me it's a matter of whether or not you want to make it happen with a coat-hanger, or allow it to happen in a doctor's office.

Imagine your 15-year old sister gets knocked up, and she has decided she doesn't want to have it - for whatever reason. Maybe she doesn't even tell you or your parents about it. Coat-hanger or clinic?

You find out about it after the fact. Are you going to label her a murderer and throw her in prison?

me... I would rather it be a clinic, and leave the judgement call to God.

To me it still comes down to the all-important question, "Are you killing a person or a sack of tissue?" If you're just killing a sack of tissue, you should be able to do it as safely as possible. If you're killing another human being, it should probably come with a degree of personal risk. Still, even if you don't know for sure it's a baby, if you're really cold enough to go ahead with it with no regard for the implications of what you may be doing, then do you really deserve absolute safety yourself? I mean, when it comes down to it there's a really easy solution to avoiding death by coat hanger: Don't kill babies, who are a lot more young, vulnerable, and scared than you are. My hypothetical 15-year-old pregnant sister might be young and scared, but she's not simultaneously smart enough to think, "Get it out with a hanger" and stupid enough to think, "I have no idea what's in there, but I need to get it out." If abortion were made illegal, anyone who thinks, "I'm going to get this thing out of here with a coathanger" probably has a pretty good idea what they're trying to kill, along with an inkling about why abortion was made illegal in the first place.

The alternative today is that society's pro-choice concept of when life begins is so absurd that scared teenagers recognize it makes no sense that the baby suddenly becomes a person when the head comes out. Therefore, if abortions up until that moment are just fine, what's wrong with flushing the baby down the toilet or bashing its head in after birth? It's only a difference of a few seconds, right? The sick thing is, they're right! It really isn't any "more" wrong. They diagnose the logical inconsistency so effortlessly...but in their panic, after a lifetime of bizarre and confusing mixed cultural signals about when it's okay to kill a baby and when it's not, they "fix" the logic in the worst way possible. Kermit Gosnell didn't really see the difference either. (On the subject of calling them murderers and sending them to prison, how would you handle these particular scenarios? When does a baby finally possess individual rights worth defending? When the head comes out, just because? Only after another person feels love for it? After a baptism? When it can talk and walk and say "No" in English? When it turns 18?)

The "prohibition doesn't work" argument doesn't apply to violent acts for two reasons: First, the factual statement that prohibition doesn't work is most true when it comes to laws that people can't personally justify by their own morality. (Would you drink alcohol under 21? Probably. Would you kill thirty people for kicks? Probably not...a "slightly" smaller number of people will do that.) The screwed up scenario above demonstrates that cultural attitudes toward abortion do in fact affect people's behavior, and fewer people are going to attempt abortion (especially late-term) if they're surrounded by a culture that reinforces the belief that they're killing a baby than if they're surrounded by a culture that reinforces the belief they're killing soulless tissue. There will always be abortions, but there have never been this MANY of them. The past century has ushered in the transition from "Every once in a while there's a back alley abortion" to, "Full-blown [dis]assembly lines operating in parallel with maximum throughput." Second and more importantly, tolerating and even protecting violent crime "just because it's going to happen anyway" leads to the wholesale abolition of justice. I mean, even if prohibition doesn't work, I don't see anyone saying that since serial killers are always going to murder, we might as well set up legal clinics for them to bring their victims to kill them in a controlled environment without risk of getting hurt. Granted, I DO dispute the argument that abortion is murder, because few who do it actually acknowledge the reality of what they're doing, and the harshness of judgment has to reflect that. I'd call it manslaughter rather than murder at least, and an appropriate sentence has to consider the perpetrator's intent, as well as considering the stage of pregnancy (I can't justify abortions, but I can't justify throwing people into prison for doing it early in the first trimester either). At the same time, if you really think someone's killing babies, making it as safe for them as possible probably shouldn't be "priority one." There are more pressing considerations in that case.

[PierzStyx]

I am confused. Are you saying you are an anarchist that thinks both doctors and women should go to government jails if they participate in abortions? Please explain.

If I shoot a baby should I be imprisoned? I think you would say yes. Well human life is human life and it should always be protected, no matter how young, innocent, or unable to defend itself, pre-natal or post natal. As for government prisons, well I think prisons should be privatized.

[Christian Liberty]

the reality for as long as we've stood on two feet is that there will be abortions, no matter how you or anyone or *everyone* feels about it.

to me it's a matter of whether or not you want to make it happen with a coat-hanger, or allow it to happen in a doctor's office.

Imagine your 15-year old sister gets knocked up, and she has decided she doesn't want to have it - for whatever reason. Maybe she doesn't even tell you or your parents about it. Coat-hanger or clinic?

You find out about it after the fact. Are you going to label her a murderer and throw her in prison?

me... I would rather it be a clinic, and leave the judgement call to God.


I don't have a sister, but regardless... yes... she'd be a murderer.



You are still my friend but I just don't think you can make abortion illegal. Too many people see it as a right. I am not saying it is right but you won't win and any movement against it will not win how ever unfortunate it is.

Because I know how hard headed and hearted people are about this wedge issue I think the more we make a big deal of it and keep it in the political arena the worse the fight will get and abortion will still go on abortion has been around probably almost since the beginning of humans it was just not something people made a political issue of or spoke much about until the last half of the past century.

I think the real issue is sexual morals and men are just as much a part of the problem as women. If you don't like abortions then take responsibility for your actions and teach your children to respect their bodies and life by your example this is how you fight and win the abortion issue. Don't just expect that they will have sex expect that they won't have sex and when they get to the age of puberty do not abandon them because they still need you in their life to guide them.
You're probably right that it will never happen. I doubt an end to taxation will ever really happen either. So what?

Off-topic, but:

Is it just me, or did FF's post #28 (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?447647-One-quot-wedge-issue-quot-I-will-not-compromise-on&p=5467102&viewfull=1#post5467102) break the browser rendering on this thread? Everything on my end got funky after that one.

EDIT: So it's not just me. Apparently, Mini-Me is getting the same thing. Weird.

Yes, it did something weird. Not sure why. If a mod could fix it tht would be great; I don't know how to.

[Occam's Banana]

Here's my 0.02 FRNs-worth on just a few of the many interesting & thought-provoking items in Mini-Me's commentary ...


There's a "first cause," an "unmoved mover" outside the system: Absurd? This is only solvable by handwaving and invoking a transcendental entity whose reason for existence is somehow itself, for reasons we cannot further explain. We can call this entity God by convention, but there's no reason it has to be the Christian God or even a sentient entity at all. It's just something that "is" for no reason, which evades further explanation by virtue of being outside our comprehension. We're talking about a hypothetical entity that by definition does not obey the laws of logic, so it's a tossup whether we call this absurd (because it doesn't obey logic) or not (because by definition it logically wouldn't). Unfortunately, even if this is the solution, we still can't be certain of its specific parameters. (For the record, I lean toward this solution.)

Another approach - one to which I very strongly incline - is simply to say that existence is a metaphysical given beyond which there is no possibility of going. "Existence exists" - and that is all there is to say about it (at the most fundamental level). There is no "why" or "how" to it. Questions like "why" and "how" require a larger context in which they are to be understood - but there is no possibility of any "larger context" when the object of our consideration is "all of existence" or "existence in and of itself." It just "is" - and that is all. (This has the virtue of avoiding both circular question-beggings and infinite regresses. It will, however, fail miserably in satisfying those who wish for some grand "explanation of it all" - but one of the more obvious and infamous features of existence is that it is in no way obliged to respect or indulge our wishes.)

The fundamental and non-explicable fact of existence is the ultimate starting point (or ending point, depending on how you look at it) for any and all "deep" inquiries and investigations into the various aspects of existence we might wish to conduct. It is the "root" context for all other contexts - it is the "Ur-context," so to speak - and it does not have (nor by its nature can it have) any larger context of its own. Thus, any attempt to "go beyond" this Ur-context (such as positing a "Creator" for it) is entirely superfluous.

This is why questions such as "where did the universe come from?" are really just instances of deceptively meaningless gibberish. There can be no "from" (that is, no larger context) from which the "universe" could have "come," since the "universe" (i.e., "all of existence") is itself the "set of all 'froms'," as it were. (And it is very important to note that I am here using "universe" as meaning "all of that which exists." There are various physical theories which posit that there might be other "alternate" or "parallel" universes, but those would just be parts of the "universe" I am talking about. In light of those theories, those who wish to insist upon a more strictly precise & physicalist nomenclature can replace the word "universe" in what I have said here with "multiverse" or "polyverse" or some other suitable term.) It isn't that there is some "answer" to the question and that we just can't ever really "know" what that "answer" is (or might be). It's that there is not even a real and meaningful question to begin with - just a string of words followed by a question mark. (One might as well ask: Do colorless green ideas sleep furiously?)


When it comes to certainty, there's pretty much only one thing I know for sure: "I think, therefore I exist," as René Descartes said. It's technically possible that I'm just a brain in a jar being fed external stimulus from a totally alien outside world. It's even technically possible that my mind is the only thing in all of existence, has no reason for existing beyond absurdity, and that it's dreaming everything else up and trying to make sense of something that never will...and similarly, from your perspective, the same could be true for you. These are very bizarre possibilities, and they're just two out of a potentially infinite number of realities, so I'd consider them pretty unlikely. I don't take the position of philosophical skepticism, but...I can't disprove it either.

And if any of those other possibilities turned out to be the case, it still wouldn't make any actual difference to the fundamental point. Even if you were just a "brain" in some mad scientist's vat, Descartes' cogito would still apply. You would merely possess an "incomplete" and/or not entirely "correct" view of the world and reality. But when you get right down to it, how is that really any different from NOT being a "brain in a vat" (that is, how is it really any different if it turns out that the "real" world is just as it appears to be)? This is why I don't have much patience with philosophical skepticism. It's good at concocting interestingly bizarre scenarios, but little else. At best, it serves as a "point of departure" for getting into something of actual substance. It is otherwise sterile and useless.


For all we know, there may be universal moral statements that are also true but unprovable...but if this is the case, how do we arrive at them? If we're going to arrive at unprovable truths, we have no choice but to use imperfect means to arrive at tentative conclusions, which is how I arrive at self-ownership and the NAP. It's pretty much how you arrive at Biblical belief too...just with a different balance of self-consciousness and self-certainty.

I believe (or very strongly suspect) that it is the case there are "universal" or "objective" moral standards. But for "Gödelian" reasons, I do not think that any moral system can ever be both "complete" and "consistent" - which is to say that there are moral truths that can never be proven, but that are nonetheless still true. But while we cannot "prove" them, we can at least "approach" them by "successive approximation," so speak - for example, by the application of inductive principles (such as Occam's Razor) and the like.

This indicates that there is more than one way to effectively and usefully seek or access moral truths, without having to be bound to any one person's or group's dictum of "do it this way." This is why I reject assertions to the effect that one cannot claim any basis for objective morality unless one believes in some particular god, prophet or holy book. (By the same token, I also reject "atheistic" claims that religion is somehow not valid as means of accessing or expressing moral truths.) It is also why I have never been terribly impressed with alleged "gotchas" like the so-called "is-ought gap" (which seems to be one of the favorite weapons of those stuck in an impoverished arch-deductionism which insists that a thing can be neither meaningful nor true unless it can be "proven").


The NAP is pretty excellent at defining interpersonal boundaries between strangers in a world where other moral [secular] standards fail to establish strict boundaries at all (permitting, in the end, gross abuse and arbitrary inconsistencies). It's consistent, but it's not complete: It omits all guidance regarding how a person ought to act on behalf of others, and it also omits all guidance regarding issues like verbal abuse, manipulation, etc. Unfortunately, if you try to patch these holes up by demanding positive action to the point of allowing coercion to enforce those demands, it destroys the consistency of the moral system in an effort to attain completeness (this is once again reminding me of Gödel). Practically speaking, this is another reason why I defer to the Golden Rule on issues where the NAP is silent. It's not going to keep other people from committing terrible sins of omission, but it's going to help you pick up the slack. As far as I can see, it's the best we can do without legitimizing the kind of thought that leads [consistently] to the leviathan state.

Here you have touched upon just the sort of thing I meant when I referred to "'monistic' Rothbardianism" in one of my earlier posts. There are some who seem to think that the NAP is or can be the sole source & arbiter of what people "ought" (or not) to do - and that it is to be employed primarily in a preemptive or ante hoc fashion. I believe that this is a mistake (for reasons I have elaborated upon elsewhere, so I will not go into them here). The NAP is critical and central (especially as a post hoc jurisprudential principle), but it is not all-encompassing, nor is it uniquely or solely dispositive.

[Dogsoldier]

I believe in karma to my very core. It is because of this that I can say with confidence that whether abortion is illegal or not doesn't matter. A woman who has an abortion WILL SUFFER FOR IT THE REST OF HER LIFE. We don't even need the state to punish her. She will pay for it the rest of her life anyway in ways that we could not understand.

Every action as an equal and opposite reaction.

Its not a wedge issue for me.

[Christian Liberty]

If you replace "abortion' with "infanticide" would you still hold the same viewpoint, dogsoldier?

[MRK]

Why do people keep negrepping FF? It looks like he's lost 3 bars in the last 3 days alone, as if he's getting neg-rep DDoS'd all of a sudden. I always thought neg rep was for trolls/spammers/low-quality or misleading arguments or some literal shenanigans. Why use it when you just disagree with an opinion? If I neg repped everyone on this forum who I disagreed with I wouldn't have any hours left in the day to sleep. I suppose there's different ways to use the system.

[Christian Liberty]

Why do people keep negrepping FF? It looks like he's lost 3 bars in the last 3 days alone, as if he's getting neg-rep DDoS'd all of a sudden. I always thought neg rep was for trolls/spammers/low-quality or misleading arguments or some literal shenanigans. Why use it when you just disagree with an opinion? If I neg repped everyone on this forum who I disagreed with I wouldn't have any hours left in the day to sleep. I suppose there's different ways to use the system.

I have at least 10 +reps for every neg rep. I suspect I know why I lost them but I'll let Bryan clarify.

[Mini-Me]

Occam's Banana: Your argument that existence is the Ur-context beyond which all questions lose meaning is just sublime. I want to argue against it in favor of the possibility that greater cosmological questions could have meaning and [unprovable] answers, but you've persuasively demonstrated the absurdity of appealing to meaning within a "greater" context. When I ask, "Why does anything exist at all?" I want to argue that this question could have meaning transcending existence, but this would contradict the meaning of existence being the Ur-context altogether. I'd just be punting, because I'd end up asking the same question about any "outer" existence containing the inner existence it's supposed to "transcend." Like you say, the question loses all meaning. That's pretty infuriating actually...great job. :D

[Cabal]

The NAP is pretty excellent at defining interpersonal boundaries between strangers in a world where other moral [secular] standards fail to establish strict boundaries at all (permitting, in the end, gross abuse and arbitrary inconsistencies). It's consistent, but it's not complete: It omits all guidance regarding how a person ought to act on behalf of others, and it also omits all guidance regarding issues like verbal abuse, manipulation, etc. Unfortunately, if you try to patch these holes up by demanding positive action to the point of allowing coercion to enforce those demands, it destroys the consistency of the moral system in an effort to attain completeness (this is once again reminding me of Gödel). Practically speaking, this is another reason why I defer to the Golden Rule on issues where the NAP is silent. It's not going to keep other people from committing terrible sins of omission, but it's going to help you pick up the slack. As far as I can see, it's the best we can do without legitimizing the kind of thought that leads [consistently] to the leviathan state.


Here you have touched upon just the sort of thing I meant when I referred to "'monistic' Rothbardianism" in one of my earlier posts. There are some who seem to think that the NAP is or can be the sole source & arbiter of what people "ought" (or not) to do - and that it is to be employed primarily in a preemptive or ante hoc fashion. I believe that this is a mistake (for reasons I have elaborated upon elsewhere, so I will not go into them here). The NAP is critical and central (especially as a post hoc jurisprudential principle), but it is not all-encompassing, nor is it uniquely or solely dispositive.

Just to touch on this, as I think it is an important observation in any discussion on morality regarding application of NAP. As was mentioned, many seem to believe the NAP alone is adequate in determining what someone ought, or ought not to do for all situations. But I think this is a misunderstanding of sorts. I don't think the NAP is meant to be such--it is not intended to be the sole determining consideration about what a person ought to do in all situations, but specifically what they ought not to do with consideration to property rights. The NAP is solely concerned with property rights (which is something of a given seeing as how NAP extends from self-ownership), and thus it is solely concerned with prescribing how people ought to respect each other's property, and thus not initiate aggression against another's property. And while I suspect this is probably understood by the quoted posters, I wouldn't necessarily agree that this makes NAP inadequate or incomplete, FWIW--rather, NAP is just fairly specific, by design, in what it means to address and deal with.

NAP doesn't necessarily comment on a lot of things. Discrimination, for instance is entirely permissible according to NAP alone. This is not to say that discrimination is moral, or good, or right; simply that NAP does not suggest that one should or should not discriminate. So, I guess what I'm trying to illustrate here is that I'm not sure it's fair to deem NAP inadequate or incomplete as a total theory of morality because I'm not so sure it's meant to be a total theory of morality to begin with. The fact that NAP is derived from other premises (self-ownership, for instance) should be somewhat indicative of this--NAP is not a starting point, but rather a conclusion reached regarding property and property rights.

There are other factors that usually accompany NAP too--equitable defensive violence, third-party defensive violence, responsibility for the effects of actions, the role that consent plays and its independence from time, etc. These things are not specifically or explicitly understood or stated by NAP alone, but tend to be attached to it nevertheless. In any case, I suppose the point I'm attempting to make here is that I wouldn't necessarily consider the NAP's lack of commentary on a particular situation or subject that does not revolve around the issue of property rights as a shortcoming of NAP.

[Dogsoldier]

"If you replace "abortion' with "infanticide" would you still hold the same viewpoint, dogsoldier?"

Its murder plain and simple. The people that participate in it will never get away with it. They will pay for it no matter what the government does or doesn't do.

That's how karma works.

If I could stop murders from happening I would. The way I fight it is by condemning it and non participation. I don't care which way you vote your never getting rid of abortion. because at least half the country are for it. What happens if they did make it illegal? Then we gotta round up all the murderers,doctors,mothers and throw them in jail. That's an awful lot of people to round up.

[gusbaker]

I am confused. Are you saying you are an anarchist that thinks both doctors and women should go to government jails if they participate in abortions? Please explain.

I'm not an anarchist, but that sounds like a good idea to me, but like most things, cut the weed at the root, pretty sure if you started arresting doctors the issue would (mostly) go away.

[Acala]

Abortion is a problem. But it is a problem that government cannot solve.

Millions of reasonable, honest, peaceful Americans think abortion is murder.

Millions of reasonable, honest, peaceful Americans think abortion is a right.

Please tell me how government can resolve this? It cannot.

Don't bother claiming that abortion is like murder. It isn't. While it might be the same in YOUR philosophy (and maybe mine also), the fact that millions of people disagree makes it unlike murder as currently defined. Nearly everyone agrees that murder as currently defined is wrong. Even most murderers know it is wrong. Because essentially everyone agrees that murder is wrong, government can prohibit it. People don't consider murder to be wrong because government prohibits it. Government prohibits it (and can only do so) because everyone agrees it is wrong. Not true with abortion so the analogy fails.

Not only can government not solve the problem of abortion, its every attempt makes the problem worse by further polarizing the factions.

Given that abortion is a problem, given that government cannot solve the problem, and given that every attempt to use government to solve the problem only makes the problems worse, what is to be done?

The problem of abortion can ONLY be solved by cultural change. Cultural change comes through education and persuasion. Cultural change takes a long time and a lot of work. This is why people so often try to take the short cut of government force and inevitably fail. Government never leads cultural change, it only follows it. The problem of abortion will be solved when the culture changes and not a moment before no matter what government does.

Government cannot solve the problem of abortion BUT politicians can and do use the issue to factionalize the population and divert attention from issues government can address. Don't help them do this. Whenever someone raises the issue of abortion in a political context, explain that it is a cultural issue that government cannot solve. This does not mean that you need to condone abortion or stop speaking against it, it merely means that you recognize that there is no POLITICAL solution to the problem and pretending otherwise makes it harder to address issues for which there IS a political solution.

[pcosmar]

Period.

Ok, and I understand your opposition to Abortion.

But KNOW this
Abortion will never be made illegal again. The issue will be used to "sell" other stuff and to elect people that will screw you.

If you truly oppose it,, then attack it from another direction.
Convince young people. give them advice, give them help,, and give them other choices.

I would love to see every abortion clinic close due to lack of business.

But politics will just use it to use you.

[helmuth_hubener]

I don't think the NAP is meant to be such--it is not intended to be the sole determining consideration about what a person ought to do in all situations, but specifically what they ought not to do with consideration to property rights.
...it is solely concerned with prescribing how people ought to respect each other's property, and thus not initiate aggression against another's property.

Actually, it's not even that. The NAP just defines what actions are prosecutable. As Occam's Banana said, it is about post-, not pre-. The NAP defines: "OK, you just did this, can we respond in violence?"

The NAP is a punishment code, not a moral code. The NAP doesn't say what people ought to do. It doesn't say that people ought to respect each other's property. You may be able to come up with scenarios in which a person ought to not respect someone else's property. The NAP just says when people can be punished. The NAP says: "OK, that disrespect occurred -- forcibly stopping the suicider, or not letting go of the railing of the tenth floor balcony after the owner demanded you do so, or whatever -- and so now you are liable for what you did. You may be punished. Perhaps you did the right thing. But now you need to accept the punishment (which in both of the given examples would be minimal) should the victim be a jerk and so choose."

[helmuth_hubener]

I have very much enjoyed this thread for the brilliant essays by Mini-Me and also the insights from Occam's Banana. There's also been good thoughts by others. I just wanted to make that known. Thanks, Mini-Me!

[gusbaker]

Abortion is a problem. But it is a problem that government cannot solve.

Millions of reasonable, honest, peaceful Americans think abortion is murder.

Millions of reasonable, honest, peaceful Americans think abortion is a right.

Please tell me how government can resolve this? It cannot.

Don't bother claiming that abortion is like murder. It isn't. While it might be the same in YOUR philosophy (and maybe mine also), the fact that millions of people disagree makes it unlike murder as currently defined. Nearly everyone agrees that murder as currently defined is wrong. Even most murderers know it is wrong. Because essentially everyone agrees that murder is wrong, government can prohibit it. People don't consider murder to be wrong because government prohibits it. Government prohibits it (and can only do so) because everyone agrees it is wrong. Not true with abortion so the analogy fails.

Not only can government not solve the problem of abortion, its every attempt makes the problem worse by further polarizing the factions.

Given that abortion is a problem, given that government cannot solve the problem, and given that every attempt to use government to solve the problem only makes the problems worse, what is to be done?

The problem of abortion can ONLY be solved by cultural change. Cultural change comes through education and persuasion. Cultural change takes a long time and a lot of work. This is why people so often try to take the short cut of government force and inevitably fail. Government never leads cultural change, it only follows it. The problem of abortion will be solved when the culture changes and not a moment before no matter what government does.

Government cannot solve the problem of abortion BUT politicians can and do use the issue to factionalize the population and divert attention from issues government can address. Don't help them do this. Whenever someone raises the issue of abortion in a political context, explain that it is a cultural issue that government cannot solve. This does not mean that you need to condone abortion or stop speaking against it, it merely means that you recognize that there is no POLITICAL solution to the problem and pretending otherwise makes it harder to address issues for which there IS a political solution.

While I agree politicians just use this with no real plan or itention of acutally doing something about it I think you are wrong, considering how many murders there are in the world everyday I would say your statement that "everyone agrees" murder is wrong is simply not true. I don't think govt can fully solve rape, theft, or murder, but I also think it's dangerous to say we shouldn't legally forbid it. Yes, it will still happen, but I guarantee you it will decrease significantly. History has shown time and again you can convince people that any atrocity is OK.

I will also agree with you, we do need to change people's minds. I think motherhood insticts are one of the most powerful emotions most women have but instead of focusing on that people just kept on the with the "hellfire and brimstone" which turned people off and gave the left the narrative of the "evil, oppressive, white male Christian" against the "poor helpless woman". Most people who support abortion don't even know what it is, they are completely unaware of the physical and emotional problems women have afterward, they just have it in their head that they are "fighting for rights".

[Cabal]

Actually, it's not even that. The NAP just defines what actions are prosecutable. As Occam's Banana said, it is about post-, not pre-. The NAP defines: "OK, you just did this, can we respond in violence?"

The NAP is a punishment code, not a moral code. The NAP doesn't say what people ought to do. It doesn't say that people ought to respect each other's property. You may be able to come up with scenarios in which a person ought to not respect someone else's property. The NAP just says when people can be punished. The NAP says: "OK, that disrespect occurred -- forcibly stopping the suicider, or not letting go of the railing of the tenth floor balcony after the owner demanded you do so, or whatever -- and so now you are liable for what you did. You may be punished. Perhaps you did the right thing. But now you need to accept the punishment (which in both of the given examples would be minimal) should the victim be a jerk and so choose."

Yeah, I don't think I agree with this, and I'm not sure what makes you think this is the case.

NAP is about right and wrong within the context of applications of violence and property rights. Right: equitable defensive violence; wrong: initiation of violence or coercion (aggression). This, by definition, makes it an principle of morality concerning property rights and the just application of violence. NAP simply says: you are not justified in initiating violence or coercion; it is immoral to initiate violence or coercion. Moreover, NAP is certainly concerned with respect for property seeing as how it is a principle derived from property rights theory.

I'm not even sure that NAP necessarily comments on punishment, beyond perhaps what punishments ought not be applied, either. Defense in the moment to stop initiated violence? Sure. But punishment after the fact? I'm not so sure. NAP is used to judge the morality or immorality of applied violence against persons/property, so it can tell you who is at fault. So, I'm really not sure why you'd think it's a 'punishment code'.

[JK/SEA]

organized religions aren't doing enough to at least slow down the MIC and wars...

there, how's that for a wedge issue....

[Christian Liberty]

Actually, it's not even that. The NAP just defines what actions are prosecutable. As Occam's Banana said, it is about post-, not pre-. The NAP defines: "OK, you just did this, can we respond in violence?"

The NAP is a punishment code, not a moral code. The NAP doesn't say what people ought to do. It doesn't say that people ought to respect each other's property. You may be able to come up with scenarios in which a person ought to not respect someone else's property. The NAP just says when people can be punished. The NAP says: "OK, that disrespect occurred -- forcibly stopping the suicider, or not letting go of the railing of the tenth floor balcony after the owner demanded you do so, or whatever -- and so now you are liable for what you did. You may be punished. Perhaps you did the right thing. But now you need to accept the punishment (which in both of the given examples would be minimal) should the victim be a jerk and so choose."

OK, so does the NAP tell us that refusing to accept the punishment is immoral?

I have very much enjoyed this thread for the brilliant essays by Mini-Me and also the insights from Occam's Banana. There's also been good thoughts by others. I just wanted to make that known. Thanks, Mini-Me!

I thought his post was really good too, I am going to get to responding to it eventually since I still think he's wrong, but its going to take me a long time:)

[Christian Liberty]

organized religions aren't doing enough to at least slow down the MIC and wars...

there, how's that for a wedge issue....

I agree, most churches are pathetic, and its something that bugs the living daylights out of me. I think it bugs SF too although he hasn't given me a straight answer to all of my questions about the issue.

But, that doesn't say anything about Christianity.

[Voluntarist]

xxxxx

[Mini-Me]

I thought his post was really good too, I am going to get to responding to it eventually since I still think he's wrong, but its going to take me a long time:)

I just added more arguments actually...ugh...whenever I remember something I left out, it just nags at me forever until it's fixed.

[Cabal]

There are a number of different groupings to the abortion issue. The one I have the most difficulty with is the group that argues abortion should be illegal except in the case of rape or incest. It infers that some abortion is tolerable - so it's not a pro-life position. It doesn't establish a point of human development at which the human organism is imbued with human rights and protections. It seems, to me at least, to be most interested in the conditions under which a sexual encounter occurred - as if it's appealing to the state to enforce an unsigned social contract, "Your punishment for conceiving a child from a consensual sexual encounter is to be forced to carry the fetus to term and raise it."

And the special treatment of incest is also something I don't follow. Incest in the case of rape is at least logically consistent with the "rape exception" (that would be covered under "rape" itself)- but why should consensual incest be a special class of sex that gets a bye on the abortion issue? The rationale seems to be that it's a special class of icky, socially-unacceptable sex and the whole idea of inbreeding.

So the position seems to be that abortion should be illegal except in cases of icky, socially-unacceptable sex. It kind of makes me wonder if a case could be made for pregnancies resulting from adulterous relationships (because it seems to fall into the same class of sex).

Unfortunately, consistency is irrelevant to many, it seems.

[Deborah K]

Are you a Rothbardian monocentric natural law anarchist? As opposed to a polycentric law anarchist, that is.

http://i43.tinypic.com/mjlu1e.jpg I am confuse.

[Acala]

While I agree politicians just use this with no real plan or itention of acutally doing something about it I think you are wrong, considering how many murders there are in the world everyday I would say your statement that "everyone agrees" murder is wrong is simply not true. I don't think govt can fully solve rape, theft, or murder, but I also think it's dangerous to say we shouldn't legally forbid it. Yes, it will still happen, but I guarantee you it will decrease significantly. History has shown time and again you can convince people that any atrocity is OK.

I will also agree with you, we do need to change people's minds. I think motherhood insticts are one of the most powerful emotions most women have but instead of focusing on that people just kept on the with the "hellfire and brimstone" which turned people off and gave the left the narrative of the "evil, oppressive, white male Christian" against the "poor helpless woman". Most people who support abortion don't even know what it is, they are completely unaware of the physical and emotional problems women have afterward, they just have it in their head that they are "fighting for rights".

Let me remind you: we TRIED making abortion illegal. If that had solved the problem we WOULDN'T HAVE A PROBLEM NOW! And we tried making it a right. If that had solved the problem, we WOULDN"T HAVE A PROBLEM NOW!

Making it illegal again will simply further galvanize the opposition. If you think a law is going to solve this problem, or do anything but make it worse, you have serious illusions about the nature of government and its power.

[helmuth_hubener]

Yeah, I don't think I agree with this, and I'm not sure what makes you think this is the case.

NAP is about right and wrong within the context of applications of violence and property rights. Right: equitable defensive violence; wrong: initiation of violence or coercion (aggression). This, by definition, makes it an principle of morality concerning property rights and the just application of violence. NAP simply says: you are not justified in initiating violence or coercion; it is immoral to initiate violence or coercion. Moreover, NAP is certainly concerned with respect for property seeing as how it is a principle derived from property rights theory.

I'm not even sure that NAP necessarily comments on punishment, beyond perhaps what punishments ought not be applied, either. Defense in the moment to stop initiated violence? Sure. But punishment after the fact? I'm not so sure. NAP is used to judge the morality or immorality of applied violence against persons/property, so it can tell you who is at fault. So, I'm really not sure why you'd think it's a 'punishment code'.
Obviously morality and concepts of right and wrong play into any theory addressing what humans should and should not do. And the NAP certainly does make claims as to what humans should and should not do. Let us say, then, that it is a subset of morality, dealing with a very limited sphere (think of a Ven diagram with a little circle -- libertarianism -- inside a much bigger circle -- morality). But it is not a general moral code. It deals only with the question: when is it OK to use force and violence to punish people? Libertarianism, as Walter Block says, is fundamentally a punishment theory. Whether the action was right or wrong in light of other considerations outside the scope of libertarianism does not play into it. If it was an aggression according to the rules of libertarianism, then it is punishable. That aggression may have been "right" in the judgment of the aggressor (and perhaps in the judgment of many). But that doesn't really matter.

[gusbaker]

There are a number of different groupings to the abortion issue. The one I have the most difficulty with is the group that argues abortion should be illegal except in the case of rape or incest. It infers that some abortion is tolerable - so it's not a pro-life position. It doesn't establish a point of human development at which the human organism is imbued with human rights and protections. It seems, to me at least, to be most interested in the conditions under which a sexual encounter occurred - as if it's appealing to the state to enforce an unsigned social contract, "Your punishment for conceiving a child from a consensual sexual encounter is to be forced to carry the fetus to term and raise it."

And the special treatment of incest is also something I don't follow. Incest in the case of rape is at least logically consistent with the "rape exception" (that would be covered under "rape" itself)- but why should consensual incest be a special class of sex that gets a bye on the abortion issue? The rationale seems to be that it's a special class of icky, socially-unacceptable sex and the whole idea of inbreeding.

So the position seems to be that abortion should be illegal except in cases of icky, socially-unacceptable sex. It kind of makes me wonder if a case could be made for pregnancies resulting from adulterous relationships (because it seems to fall into the same class of sex).

That's a good point.

[Cabal]

Let us say, then, that it is a subset of morality, dealing with a very limited sphere

That's basically the point I was making in my first post, except I'd say it specifically deals with property rights, not punishment.

Block is kind of hit or miss (especially when it comes to morality, he's better at argument from effect), so he may not be the best to defer to on subjects of morality.

[Voluntarist]

xxxxx

[pcosmar]

Let me remind you: we TRIED making abortion illegal. If that had solved the problem we WOULDN'T HAVE A PROBLEM NOW! And we tried making it a right. If that had solved the problem, we WOULDN"T HAVE A PROBLEM NOW!

Making it illegal again will simply further galvanize the opposition. If you think a law is going to solve this problem, or do anything but make it worse, you have serious illusions about the nature of government and its power.

I did some research into that a while back.
It may have been "illegal" but I could not find any prosecutions for it. Only one,, where a doctor was charged,, and that for a botched surgery (malpractice).

It just was not done,, except in rare cases. It was morally repugnant,, more than it was illegal. And no respectable Doctor would consider it,, no respectable woman would ask for it.

It was relegated to witches in the swamp and butchers in back rooms,, because is was not socially acceptable.

Until it was pushed by the Eugenics movement. (the same movement that inspired Adolf Hitler)

Since it was made "legal",, it has become socially acceptable.
You are not going to reverse that with laws.

[Voluntarist]

xxxxx

[Mini-Me]

In a contractual sense, the individual the FEMALE made the compact with was not the blastocyst, the fertilized egg or even the sperm, but rather the MALE sexual partner. If both the MALE and the FEMALE had agreed that the FEMALE would become pregnant and carry the resulting unborn human organism to term, then the contractual basis of the argument could be considered to be valid. In general, that's not the case in the circumstances of most abortions. An abortion requires the consent of at least the female party that made the decision to engage in sex (and in general, both parties are in agreement).

Block's evictionism argument is at best a simplistic and emotional metaphor. It falls apart in the sense that the associate the invited MALE brought to the FEMALE's home is not simply refusing to leave the house - but has tapped into the home owner's blood supply, is extracting nutrition from her body and is dumping wastes into it. I've heard that the progressive's are working on a biological evolution that acts in a similar fashion and will allow welfare recipients to tap into the productive members of society and feed on them and dump wastes into them in the same fashion (another simplistic metaphor that really only partially applies, but conveys an emotional rather than logical message).

There can be no contract between the FEMALE and the unborn human organism within her; that organism is simply incapable of making such a contract. It wasn't invited to implant itself in the FEMALE's womb, it simply did so without consideration to consent (there was no negotiation between the Blastocyst and the FEMALE). There might be a case to be made that the FEMALE's acquiescence to the fetus being implanted in her womb for a given period of time constitutes consent to it being there - but it's the same type of logic used by squatters attempting to seize the property of someone else.

Without a consensual agreement, I fail to see where the FEMALE is under any obligation to continue feeding the unborn human organism (UHO - an acronym that saves me typing) or accepting waste products from the UHO. Given that, what method of separating the two would be acceptable? Would simply severing the umbilical cord and leaving the UHO intact be sufficient (or would that be an act of aggression - seeing how umbilical cells are of the UHO's DNA)? Could we sever the placenta at the decidual layer (where some of the cells are maternal cells and others are those of the UHO). Or do we have to resort to surgically severing cells which only belong to the FEMALE? In any event, you eventually get to some act of separation that is not an act of aggression to the UHO (but which poses greater and greater risks to the FEMALE).

I can't make a case that the FEMALE can be construed to be under any obligation to go through the birth process to expel the detached UHO (birth being a riskier endeavor for her than abortion - and her medical choices are hers to make in any event). The scenario becomes one of a UHO detached from its nutrition source but still in the womb, and dumping its wastes into that womb (and isn't that an act of aggression by the "innocent" UHO against the FEMALE). Does the FEMALE have to wait for infection and sepsis to begin before defensive action can be taken against the source of the infection?

Basically, we're not talking about an associate of an invited guest who's refusing to leave your home. It's much more complicated than that - the metaphor fails.

I tend to agree with Wendy McElroy's reasoning on abortion (here (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/abort.htm)and here (http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/07/30/abortion-rights-are-logically-required-by-libertarianism/)). It's emotionally troubling, particularly in the case of later term abortions; but appeals to emotion should not over-shadow self proprietorship. Ultimately what a typical pregnancy is about is an autonomous individual continuously consenting to host a non-autonomous individual until it becomes autonomous - no contract involved. Once autonomy of the UHO is achieved, responsibility for the now-born (but still dependent) human organism can be transferred to others if need be. But until that point, biological reality leaves the FEMALE host as the only option - and its the choice of that FEMALE Host as to whether she wants to consent to the next microsecond of hosting the non-autonomous UHO.

Thought experiment:
A home invader breaks into your home in the middle of the night and drops an enormous oversized baby into your living room without your consent, then leaves. Do you:
a.) remove the baby from your home as gently as possible, inflicting a minimum of harm? Note this very large baby is much wider than the doorway to your home, so it may cause some damage. (If the baby's inability/refusal to move itself becomes an issue, try replacing "baby" with "fat old man who had his limbs chopped off by the home invader who dropped him off." He's helpless, you can't lift him, and he can't fit through your doorway. Getting rid of him intact is going to be a real pain in the ass, but he's still alive, and it wasn't his choice to break into your home; the actual home invader just left him there. Are you justified in killing him and cutting him into pieces to get rid of him? Why or why not?)
b.) kill the baby first, cut it into pieces, throw the pieces into a blender, and dump the contents into the window air conditioning unit to spray out of your house in the form of red mist? This ensures no damage to you or your home.
In other words, the problems of rape and lack of contractual obligation to the unborn baby are both red herrings with respect to abortion. They're irrelevant. If we get to the point where we agree it's a baby (a person with rights), it still has a right to life (right not to be killed, i.e. self-ownership) even if it doesn't have a right to be where it is right now. As a result, abortion simply becomes unconscionable at that point, at least aside from the scenario of the mother's life being in danger (medical triage scenario).

[Voluntarist]

xxxxx

[Voluntarist]

xxxxx

[Mini-Me]

BTW: You do recognize the quoted passage above as a false dilemma fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma), correct?

You're misunderstanding the point of the analogy here when you view it in any context other than the arena of rights. Whether my particular scenario is a false dilemma or not is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that - if you concede for the sake of argument that an unborn baby is a living person - we can disentangle the situation from the "but it's just a fetus argument" by comparing it to some other hypothetical scenario (no matter how unrealistic) in which your options are presumed to be limited to the following:
Suffer the temporary inconvenience of an innocent person who is accidentally encroaching upon your body and property in a way they cannot control and which requires no active participation from you.*
Get them out of your house/body/whatever and stop the encroachment in the way that does the least bodily violence to them
Take the easy way out and violently murder them outright by chopping them into pieces, burning them to death, jamming scissors into the back of their head, etc. (i.e. actual abortion methods)
The particulars of the analogy fail to actually limit your options accordingly, but you're supposed to pretend as though they do for the sake of examining the moral dilemma of abortion in a context with less baggage. Otherwise we'd be sitting here all day trying to come up with a more "water-tight" analogy which turns out to be no more useful for examining the core issue.

Obviously the circumstances of my scenario are contrived and unrealistic as well. For instance, "How could he have gotten there if it's so hard to get him out?" Maybe he grew bloated and swollen from being beaten to a pulp in your living room, and the swelling isn't going to go down by itself, and there's a magical force field that keeps doctors out. Also, his very presence within the house creates another magical force field that drains 50% of your energy, whether you're inside the house or not. You feel drained, sluggish, and heavy with the old man in your living room, because...magic. Does it really matter?

*Key point: You seem to be under the impression that carrying an unwanted baby means the baby is somehow forcing you to actively provide an ongoing service, but that's a mischaracterization. This is an important moral distinction preserved by the analogy: The baby and/or old man do not demand active participation on your part, and they do not demand you perform any action. Their encroachment (when unwanted) constitutes a violation of your rights of course, but your suffering is purely passive and occurs by default in the absence of any further action on your part. Even if your bodily subsystems are performing an involuntary service, it doesn't count as demanding active participation, because your bodily subsystems are not dependent upon human action/choice. (If they were, you could simply direct them to stop participating at any time.) For that reason, speaking in terms of "obligations" is confusing moral concepts. From a libertarian standpoint, your only obligation is the same as always in any scenario: Do not initiate aggression, and do not commit disproportionate aggression in the process of defending against someone else's aggression. Outside those prohibitions, no one else has the right to stop you from acting in your best interests...as always.

The purpose of the analogy above is solely to consider another scenario that shares these characteristics with someone carrying an unwanted child:
The passive encroachment on your rights may be physically draining or damaging, but it's temporary and non-life-threatening. (I concede that in the life-threatening scenario, abortion becomes a matter of medical triage. Further elaboration: The accidental aggressor's degree of encroachment is relevant to the kind of defensive actions you can take, but it's not relevant to the question of "Am I within my rights to violently kill them?" unless their encroachment is permanently debilitating or imminently life-threatening. Within the context of that question, it doesn't matter whether someone is just temporarily chained down to your living room floor, or if a baby is temporarily stuck inside you and taking nutrients from an umbilical cord: Either way, violently killing the source of your discomfort is disproportionate aggression, i.e. not self-defense.)
All of your options suck, so there's no "painless" way of ending your discomfort short of murder...
...but there technically IS another option, if you just can't bear to suffer the passive encroachment: Evict the source of your discomfort without causing unnecessary bodily harm.

[helmuth_hubener]

That's basically the point I was making in my first post, except I'd say it specifically deals with property rights, not punishment.

It does deal specifically with property rights, however I narrow its scope even further. It deals with punishment in regards to property rights. It doesn't need to take a position on whether a given violation of property rights is "right" or "wrong". It simply says that it's "punishable."

Here is a simple explanation, from Block since I mentioned him. 24:12 - 28:30:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgCmoVbdYtE