5 ms·

That is the line of reasoning that leads to banning abortions*. People have a right to alter their bodies. EDIT: and preventing young women from choosing steri

by coryrc 5y ago

That is the line of reasoning that leads to banning abortions*. People have a right to alter their bodies. EDIT: and preventing young women from choosing sterilization.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Precisely. Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of "well even though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say it's bad for you there for you cannot do it" will inevitably lead to the logic of dictating abortion rights as well. This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine. Regardless of who is more logically correct in the scenario, the current stance of American liberalism is "my body my choice" only applies in terms of abortion. Which conservatives when they get in power again, will utilize as rationale to make it illegal as many have been doing for the past decade.
- coryrc 5y ago
  I didn't say you have the right to not alter your body, the public health requirements for contagious diseases seemed reasonable until people have started lumping gun control and "possibly altering your non-existent children"... maybe I'll one day feel as you do.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    And those restrictions should only apply to people in the public; if you choose to live off the land somewhere isolated, then those requirements should not apply to you.
- didibus 5y ago
  It isn't about knowing what's best for you, but what's best for others. So where ethics come into play is when what you're seemingly doing to yourself could actually have impact on others as well. For abortion, you can claim it impacts others both ways, are you impacting a new born from having its life, or are you preventing a yet to be born child from having a troubled life, and saving family, parents and society its burden. For a vaccine, are you putting others at risk of a disease by not taking the vaccine? For bio-hacking, are you possibly creating dangerous virus or bacterias that could harm others, are you making modifications to yourself which will put a tole on the medical system if you later need assistance or special treatment if you mess up, etc. This is the same reasoning with drugs often, will your modified behavior cause harm to others if you consume them? Etc. None of this is black and white, but I think having these discussions on "what harm to others it can cause" is justified.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  "Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of "well even though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say it's bad for you there for you cannot do it" will inevitably lead to the logic of dictating abortion rights as well." The first problem is that you are claiming that the child's body is the woman's body. It isn't and you know that. You know that is it an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc, etc. In order to justify abortion, you would need to argue that murder (which is the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being) is justifiable. The logical consequences are devastating. For example, if murder of the most innocent, powerless, dependent, and vulnerable, by those with power over them no less, becomes justifable, then it becomes impossible to argue for the legitimacy any human rights whatsoever. You can't just make up moral principles out of thin air or assign arbitrary boundaries to them according to taste. The second problem is that this logic seems to put the cart before the horse. In other words, you've decided that abortion is a right axiomatically and you've decided to dismiss anything that would undermine that belief. But the moral acceptability of abortion is not axiomatic and must be judged according to prior moral principles. "This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine." See my first point above. Here conservatives are indeed speaking of just their own bodies, so this is a false equivalence.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    "an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc" What makes us human beings is our personalities, our brains. Chop off my hand, I'm still me. Destroy my brain, I'm deceased regardless of how long you keep my other organs going. A fetus does not become human, IMO, until it can have a personality and sentience. Women have the power to create without consent of the created; the power to destroy their not-yet-human equally lacks the consent of the created. If the latter is prohibited than so should the former. From a societal view, we have enough people. Every way to support people consensually choosing to not have children should be encouraged.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "you know that is it an entirely distinct human being" You know that it isn't entirely distinct, it is inside and completely dependent upon another human. > "In order to justify abortion, you would need to argue that murder (which is the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being) is justifiable." How do you feel when a woman has a miscarriage? The child is dead, the mother's body deliberately killed it. Is she culpable? Is it different if her brain cells are involved in the rejection of the child? Isn't that you assigning arbitrary boundaries according to taste? There have to be arbitrary boundaries, the universe is a single thing, the idea of there being separate things inside it is a human convenient fiction, it's not real. The boundaries between things are fuzzy and disappear the closer you look at them. There's "just" atoms and energy, everything else is concept, if we want morals in the universe we have to make them up, and if we want them to apply to people, we have to make those up too.
bobthechef 5y ago
How do you reason that people have the (presumably absolute) right to alter than bodies however they please? How do you justify that claim? It makes very specific assumptions which are very problematic. For example, do you have the right to lobotomize a perfectly healthy brain? It is immoral? Can you say you have the right to do something immoral? How about altering your uterus during pregnancy to prevent nutrients from feeding the child? I think it's pretty obvious that right implies morally acceptability. You can't claim to have a right to something evil. (The reverse is not true. It is morally acceptable to own a Tesla, but you don't have the right to one.) Alterations can be harmful and any harm that is not a justifiable side effect is by definition immoral. That it's your body does not somehow negate the immorality of self-harm. Indeed, direct self-harm is even worse morally than harm of others because it is in direct opposition to one's own good (arguably, harm of others is also a form of self-harm, specifically harm of one's character and will and habitus, of one's intellect because of the harm of one's reasoning faculties it entails, and harm of the common good). So you cannot say you have the right to self-harm. This is just a strange consequence of the incoherent ideology of absolute autonomy. Now, if you have, say, a defect in your body that is preventing the proper functioning of your body, then we may correct this defect through intervention. This is restorative, that is, it seeks to restore the function due to the body by virtue of how it ought to function. This is the basis of medicine. Another false view that can nudge people toward the view that any modification is acceptable is metaphysical materialism, also incoherent. In that case, crude metaphors between artifacts and living things are elevated to the status of the truth and since it doesn't matter what we do to an artifact per se. We can modify a computer any way we wish because there is no fact of the matter about what a computer is or how it should be apart from human intent. It is just a collection of things arranged in a particular way incidentally that puts them in a series of incidental causal relations, but there is no inherent tendency for these things to exist in these relations and no accounting for one in terms of the others except through the lens of human intent. Living things aren't like that.
- coryrc 5y ago
  If you don't have the right to your own body, then there aren't rights. It's the axiom. I'm in favor of drug use (at least almost all), tattoos, body modifications, trying experimental medicine, everything that affects your body. I can see drawing the line at "doing this thing could become a contagion so you can only do it in BSL-4 isolation". But it's your body, your life, you want to spend it stoned or a voluntary amputee or whatever so long as don't take from me, then you should be free to do so.
refurb 5y ago
Exactly and why vaccines should never be mandatory.

by coryrc 5y ago

That is the line of reasoning that leads to banning abortions*. People have a right to alter their bodies. EDIT: and preventing young women from choosing sterilization.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Precisely. Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of "well even though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say it's bad for you there for you cannot do it" will inevitably lead to the logic of dictating abortion rights as well. This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine. Regardless of who is more logically correct in the scenario, the current stance of American liberalism is "my body my choice" only applies in terms of abortion. Which conservatives when they get in power again, will utilize as rationale to make it illegal as many have been doing for the past decade.

coryrc 5y ago
I didn't say you have the right to not alter your body, the public health requirements for contagious diseases seemed reasonable until people have started lumping gun control and "possibly altering your non-existent children"... maybe I'll one day feel as you do.
- coryrc 5y ago
  And those restrictions should only apply to people in the public; if you choose to live off the land somewhere isolated, then those requirements should not apply to you.
didibus 5y ago
It isn't about knowing what's best for you, but what's best for others. So where ethics come into play is when what you're seemingly doing to yourself could actually have impact on others as well. For abortion, you can claim it impacts others both ways, are you impacting a new born from having its life, or are you preventing a yet to be born child from having a troubled life, and saving family, parents and society its burden. For a vaccine, are you putting others at risk of a disease by not taking the vaccine? For bio-hacking, are you possibly creating dangerous virus or bacterias that could harm others, are you making modifications to yourself which will put a tole on the medical system if you later need assistance or special treatment if you mess up, etc. This is the same reasoning with drugs often, will your modified behavior cause harm to others if you consume them? Etc. None of this is black and white, but I think having these discussions on "what harm to others it can cause" is justified.
bobthechef 5y ago
"Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of "well even though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say it's bad for you there for you cannot do it" will inevitably lead to the logic of dictating abortion rights as well." The first problem is that you are claiming that the child's body is the woman's body. It isn't and you know that. You know that is it an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc, etc. In order to justify abortion, you would need to argue that murder (which is the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being) is justifiable. The logical consequences are devastating. For example, if murder of the most innocent, powerless, dependent, and vulnerable, by those with power over them no less, becomes justifable, then it becomes impossible to argue for the legitimacy any human rights whatsoever. You can't just make up moral principles out of thin air or assign arbitrary boundaries to them according to taste. The second problem is that this logic seems to put the cart before the horse. In other words, you've decided that abortion is a right axiomatically and you've decided to dismiss anything that would undermine that belief. But the moral acceptability of abortion is not axiomatic and must be judged according to prior moral principles. "This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my body my choice" when it comes to a vaccine." See my first point above. Here conservatives are indeed speaking of just their own bodies, so this is a false equivalence.
- coryrc 5y ago
  "an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc" What makes us human beings is our personalities, our brains. Chop off my hand, I'm still me. Destroy my brain, I'm deceased regardless of how long you keep my other organs going. A fetus does not become human, IMO, until it can have a personality and sentience. Women have the power to create without consent of the created; the power to destroy their not-yet-human equally lacks the consent of the created. If the latter is prohibited than so should the former. From a societal view, we have enough people. Every way to support people consensually choosing to not have children should be encouraged.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > "you know that is it an entirely distinct human being" You know that it isn't entirely distinct, it is inside and completely dependent upon another human. > "In order to justify abortion, you would need to argue that murder (which is the direct, intentional killing of an innocent human being) is justifiable." How do you feel when a woman has a miscarriage? The child is dead, the mother's body deliberately killed it. Is she culpable? Is it different if her brain cells are involved in the rejection of the child? Isn't that you assigning arbitrary boundaries according to taste? There have to be arbitrary boundaries, the universe is a single thing, the idea of there being separate things inside it is a human convenient fiction, it's not real. The boundaries between things are fuzzy and disappear the closer you look at them. There's "just" atoms and energy, everything else is concept, if we want morals in the universe we have to make them up, and if we want them to apply to people, we have to make those up too.

bobthechef 5y ago

How do you reason that people have the (presumably absolute) right to alter than bodies however they please? How do you justify that claim? It makes very specific assumptions which are very problematic. For example, do you have the right to lobotomize a perfectly healthy brain? It is immoral? Can you say you have the right to do something immoral? How about altering your uterus during pregnancy to prevent nutrients from feeding the child? I think it's pretty obvious that right implies morally acceptability. You can't claim to have a right to something evil. (The reverse is not true. It is morally acceptable to own a Tesla, but you don't have the right to one.) Alterations can be harmful and any harm that is not a justifiable side effect is by definition immoral. That it's your body does not somehow negate the immorality of self-harm. Indeed, direct self-harm is even worse morally than harm of others because it is in direct opposition to one's own good (arguably, harm of others is also a form of self-harm, specifically harm of one's character and will and habitus, of one's intellect because of the harm of one's reasoning faculties it entails, and harm of the common good). So you cannot say you have the right to self-harm. This is just a strange consequence of the incoherent ideology of absolute autonomy. Now, if you have, say, a defect in your body that is preventing the proper functioning of your body, then we may correct this defect through intervention. This is restorative, that is, it seeks to restore the function due to the body by virtue of how it ought to function. This is the basis of medicine. Another false view that can nudge people toward the view that any modification is acceptable is metaphysical materialism, also incoherent. In that case, crude metaphors between artifacts and living things are elevated to the status of the truth and since it doesn't matter what we do to an artifact per se. We can modify a computer any way we wish because there is no fact of the matter about what a computer is or how it should be apart from human intent. It is just a collection of things arranged in a particular way incidentally that puts them in a series of incidental causal relations, but there is no inherent tendency for these things to exist in these relations and no accounting for one in terms of the others except through the lens of human intent. Living things aren't like that.

coryrc 5y ago
If you don't have the right to your own body, then there aren't rights. It's the axiom. I'm in favor of drug use (at least almost all), tattoos, body modifications, trying experimental medicine, everything that affects your body. I can see drawing the line at "doing this thing could become a contagion so you can only do it in BSL-4 isolation". But it's your body, your life, you want to spend it stoned or a voluntary amputee or whatever so long as don't take from me, then you should be free to do so.

refurb 5y ago

Exactly and why vaccines should never be mandatory.