As Hard As You Want It
Secular Sanity said:
And I'm asking if a fetus is a human being, is it?
No, it is a human fetus.
Do human rights really exist or are they socially constructed?
All rights are a construct.
Should we abandon the term 'murder' and go with 'homicide'?
Is it a justifiable homicide?
It depends on how we define homicide, whether homicide is killing
something else or killing
another person.
You do realize, though, that you're presupposing your own outcome?
It's one thing to wonder if you have anything to offer other than questions, but we've seen the answer to that. You tried presenting Christian argument as compelling―excuse me, let us be precise; you called issues you perceived "tough questions"―when in fact they were calculated rhetorical sleights. And now here you are repeating the stunt insofar as you're asking questions that, in order to be answered in the context you present them,
demand irrational presupposition.
I want you to imagine you're a witness in a murder trial. And think for a moment, please, about what goes into the charge of murder. It's not an accident. It's not merely a homicide. So the defense lawyer asks, "You say you saw my client kill the deceased, but what would you do if you were being assaulted by someone trying to kill you?" And you might ask why he's asking. He petitions the bench, and the judge instructs you to answer the question. Now, maybe you're the type of person who brings your attorney with you for any such legal dealing; not everyone does. So your lawyer stands up and objects on your behalf: "Your honor, we object for relevance, since there is no evidence on the record that the defendant was under assault." The defense attorney might then repeat his request that you be compelled to answer the question, or, more likely, the judge would sustain the objection because what you would do if assaulted has nothing to do with the way in which the murder is accused of the defendant.
If you ask me how I regard a crime against a person if that person is a fetus, my answer remains the same: It's not a crime against a person because a fetus is not a person.
The problem with trying to argue by perpetually asking questions is that the method offers very little room for affirmative argument. As you present them, the questions require the presupposition of a massive ontological transformation undertaken and asserted in the twentieth century as an aesthetic appeal toward a predetermined argumentative demand. This is not a rational presuppositon.
Then again, if we look around at, say, American society, then no, by the averages you shouldn't feel badly about taking the bait. Most people do, else anti-abortion rhetoric would have required more fundamental adaptation and evolution over the decades. As we see, though, the big adaptations in the twenty-first century have been to attempt a downward redefinition of rape; distillation of "life at conception" to its intended meaning, "personhood at fertilization"; an aesthetic redefinition of medical terminology that doctors don't agree with, in order to support fertilization-assigned personhood; and an attempt to throw out the whole historical record of human philosophy and law with intent to legislate ontology.
It's kind of like the Nineteenth Amemdment. What the federal government argued successfully was that the Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to apply to women; what the federal government never had to answer was how women aren't people. If the government had been obliged to actually justify its outcome―that women do not qualify for the equal protection granted all persons under a state's jurisdiction―we would not have needed a constitutional amendment specifically granting woman suffrage. Ontology matters in law. Presuppositions matter in argument.
Go back and look at
Plessy; we need not imagine Justice Harlan had experienced some profound realization about black people, but, rather, need only assume that the one former slave owner on the court knew exactly why "separate but equal" wouldn't work. And, true, fifty-eight years is a long time in the context of a human lifetime, but in terms of history, it took
only fifty-eight years for society to demonstrate Harlan's point.
People tend to draw certain abstract lines, and a lot of it is simple ego defense.
If blacks were genuinely equal to whites,
then the seven justices in the
Plessy majority would have sided with Harlan.
If, however, black equality was a grudging concession to legalism,
then the separate but equal assertion seems a lot more logical for the sake of fulfillng one's aesthetics. History makes a lot more sense if we account for its context.
Here's a fun one: When you hear a presidential candidate―most often a Republican―speak specifically of doing something "for American citizens", pay attention to what that phrase actually means. In many cases, they're essentially pledging dereliction of duty if elected president, as neither Amendment XIV (states) nor Amendment V (federal government) limit their obligations to citizens; they apply to people under the applicable jurisdiction.
And in issues pertaining to women specifically, we often see the comparison. With men representing the baseline for human rights, what society affords women is frequently held up in comparison, and those comparisons are most often meant to describe or justify the disparity. In recent years we've had a ferocious dispute over who gets to give women permission to use oral contraception. Without this presupposed comparison the question doesn't exist. That is to say, if we start with a recognition of the full and undiluted human rights of women, the question of a woman asking permission of her husband, boyfriend, father, or employer before she is allowed to use oral contraception is insultingly farcical. The idea that men's behavior is a woman's duty―the skeletal structure of Infinite Prevention Advocacy against rape―similarly becomes insultingly farcical once we dispense with a nonsensical presupposition that her human rights must be compared to, subordinate to, and accommodating of his.
The aesthetics of anti-abortion rhetoric can be attractive, but they are, in fact, empty for the lack of actual historical roots. And rather than trying to establish the philosophical legitimacy of this assertion of "human rights" so variable as to render the phrase meaningless, the advocates have just presumed that their presuppositions will be blithely and blindly accepted. I can only urge you to not accommodate them. I can only urge you toward rational consideration. After all, the appeals to aesthetics are only hard questions if you want them to be.