Is this a pro life anarchist? An anarchist advocating placing restrictions on personal freedoms?????
Trying to logic into this position hurts my brain.
Like I get a theoretical argument (beyond the common pro-life positions) stating that allowing abortion is harms the future atonomy of an unborn baby, but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child, so there’s not exactly as strong of a leg to stand on.
I presume by bringing fascism into the equation they’re probably trying to point out that fascism uses abortion for eugenics, and therefore banning it would prevent fascists from doing eugenics. Well, abortion being illegal might stop eugenics via abortion, but that does nothing to stop eugenics via sterilization, and it also assumes fascists wouldn’t just perform abortions anyways.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child,
This is the crux of my own pro-choice position. It's irrelevant to me if the baby is a person or if it's just a clump of flesh because, either way, it does not have a right to use another person as an incubator. It's the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don't want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
It's the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don't want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
I'm not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities, and if you stretch definitions a bit - to everyone, because we all depend on society to survive.
Can you spell out how that would go a bit more explicitly? The violinist argument is supposed to show that nobody gets to use a particular individual as a life support system without their consent, not that we don't owe some degree of care to one another. I'm not saying there's not a way to make a (bad) analogous argument about people with disabilities, but I'm not familiar with it and can't quite see how it would go. If you've got time to spell it out, I'd appreciate it!
It certainly can't be "equally" applied! No one has to have their body mutilated and bodily autonomy violated and health harmed and life threatened and put through excruciating discomfort to support people with disabilities.
Nazis are coming with an army to kill disabled people and minorities. In order to fight the Nazis, conscription is necessary. Is it moral under this framework to conscript a white CIS man to fight to protect disabled people and minorities if the Nazis would otherwise have left that white CIS man alone?
Fighting, of course, means putting him at risk of mutilation, deprives him of his bodily autonomy, and consists of a lot of excruciating discomfort even if he isn't wounded.
Surely there must be better arguments for abortion that don't rely solely on the Western conception of individual rights as a moral and ethical basis?
"Should we build a slave army of cracker conscripts to fight the Nazis" is a fun thought experiment, but the logistics would be a nightmare! That's how you get conscripts fragging their superior officers. I suppose you could maybe keep them under control with bomb collars or something, but uh, at that point we have firmly left moralism far behind us.
Also, can you give me a justification for 100% of abortions that ignores whether the baby is a person or a clump of flesh?
If you want to bring the practicalities of a hypothetical moral scenario into this then the violinist argument, which involves stitching an unwilling person to a sick person to share a kidney, fails even harder.
My point in the abstract is this: the violinist argument is one that myopically focuses on individual rights. It proposes that an individual cannot be forced to do anything that may result in bodily harm in service of a "greater good". The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good. Mandatory service to fight Nazis is merely the clearest cut example.
I support abortion rights for many reasons. However, the violinist argument itself is incredibly flawed both logically and rhetorically and I don't think it's a helpful argument to make. It can be so easily reframed into a scenario where both sides have reasonable arguments and doesn't really prove anything. It's main crux is just the visceral reaction to the disgusting nature of the scenario.
I brought in practicalities because I didn't feel like addressing the horrific implications of your hypothetical moral scenario. But! Okay.
The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good.
Again, you have left moralism behind. Using your logic, it is sometimes moral to ban abortion: if we need to increase the population to fight off the fascists, if we need to repopulate after the antifa war, etc. In fact, using your logic, it is moral to force people to get pregnant in the first place. Without bodily autonomy as a basis for ethics, how do you avoid forced birth baby factories?
My scenario is not a hypothetical scenario. It is one that happened between 1941 and 1945. Millions of people lost their lives to defeat fascism. I consider mandatory service as imposed by the USSR to be morally defensible, even if the bodily autonomy of millions of people were violated. Do you consider that forcing Soviet citizens to take up arms was morally indefensible?
Sorry, I didn't realize you were making a historical point!
I misread it because you're ignoring the fact that Nazis do not consider Russians to be Aryan. Hitler had viewed Slavs and Serbs and Poles as primitive subhumans the same as Jews. So actually, no, the scenario you were talking about is not something that actually happened. Soviet citizens were conscripted to fight in their own interests, not just in the interests of minorities. Your example is ahistorical.
I will admit that the Violinist is overly individualistic, to the point that maybe I should adopt a different framework. I was just describing how I came to my pro-choice beliefs, but in hindsight that was back when I was a liberal Christian teenager trying to comprehend the issue within that specific moral framework. These days I can see the weaknesses you're talking about and, though I disagree with the example you used, I think you make a good point that I should adopt a less atomized vision of abortion.
The historical example is perfectly apt because we know from Nazi historical documentation that a certain percentage of Eastern Europeans were considered acceptable for "Germanization" after total Nazi victory. Therefore, under the moral framework of the violinist argument, it would have been unacceptable for that percentage of Soviet citizens to be conscripted into service.
This highlights the problem with the violinist argument because it is an individualist argument that then purports to expand an individual right to a systematic right. If there is even a single Soviet Citizen (for example the Volga Germans which the Nazis expressly regarded as Aryan) which would have their "bodily autonomy" violated by conscription but not by Nazi rulr then the entire moral architecture of conscription to fight Nazism would be indefensible. However, stepping back from the violinist argument I think most people and almost all leftists would agree that conscription to fight Nazis is pretty reasonable.
We know that from documentation that Soviet citizens wouldn't have access to. From their perspective, the Nazis were coming to kill them all, so the Violinist doesn't apply because no one was confirmed safe. Anyone could die, so everyone had to fight.
Whatever. Doesn't matter.
Maybe you didn't read the second half of my comment. Here it is again:
I will admit that the Violinist is overly individualistic, to the point that maybe I should adopt a different framework. I was just describing how I came to my pro-choice beliefs, but in hindsight that was back when I was a liberal Christian teenager trying to comprehend the issue within that specific moral framework. These days I can see the weaknesses you’re talking about and, though I disagree with the example you used, I think you make a good point that I should adopt a less atomized vision of abortion.
Do you have a recommendation?
Because using your framework, it seems pretty easy to justify banning abortion and force women to give birth for the greater good.
I'm not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities
You are correct. The whole issue isn't about life, but about control. It's about a whole group of people who force/coerce you into a caregiving role. The very coercion reveals their own desire to not do the work themselves. I find it especially galling that these same people will not do the same caregiving, do not offer help, and get when you object to all of this work!
You cannot coerce people into caregiving, whether babies, disabled, sick, elderly, or anybody else. It must be a choice.
There's actually only one kind of scenario where someone WOULD have that right over you. Luckily it's absurd:
If you could grab a random, fully living person off the street and jam em up in your womb, and somehow make them dependent on you to survive until you can be surgically detached, you would owe them that service 100%. And if someone else forced this on the both of you, you wouldn't owe them that. The vast majority of people would agree with this.
This is why fundamentalist Christians have to believe that God pulls down souls into fertilized zygotes. It turns conception into a form of soul-based child abduction. If you completely skip past any thought about what the fetus is, and just assume with full conviction that it's equal to a person in every important way, then you literally arrive at the most common fundie anti abortion position... Full ban unless it's the mother's "fault".
This is extremely convenient - the linchpin of their entire argument is literally magical thinking. Think of the first scenario, someone has done this to a person, they're stuck attached, and the abductor is complaining that their right to kill the abductee and go chillax are being trampled. That's what it sounds like to anti abortion religious fundies.
This is why they must be opposed with raw force. They can't be reasoned out because they didn't reason themselves in.
Christian Nationalists full-on worship an evil deity, that intentionally and knowingly sends the souls of babies to Earth to get aborted and then be sent to Hell for not accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It's not worth arguing with, y'know, evil worshiping death cultists.
I found the Violinist Argument reasonable when I was a vaguely Christian teenager figuring my own beliefs out, though.
but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
The whole argument of trying to place where "life" begins, or where the fetus becomes a "person" will always lead nowhere because there is no definitive cut off point or specific week/term where this occurs, forcing people to come up with arbitrary qualifications (such as an identifiable heartbeat). This will go on forever until people realize that as it is developing the (potential) child is always in between conceptual forms. The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
One time when I was in college pro life protestors came on campus and being the foolish bleeding heart liberal I was I went to debate one of them. I inuited this idea during the conversation and they hit me with a "well, that's invalid." No explanation, no reasoning, just refutation via nuh-uh. It was so incredibly upsetting that I just walked away. Fuck that person. I'd be pro choice with no other reason besides that conversation.
Is this a pro life anarchist? An anarchist advocating placing restrictions on personal freedoms?????
Trying to logic into this position hurts my brain.
Like I get a theoretical argument (beyond the common pro-life positions) stating that allowing abortion is harms the future atonomy of an unborn baby, but that would only work under the misguided assumption that life begins at conception.
That position would also be coercive, restricting the autonomy of a woman on behalf of an unborn child, so there’s not exactly as strong of a leg to stand on.
I presume by bringing fascism into the equation they’re probably trying to point out that fascism uses abortion for eugenics, and therefore banning it would prevent fascists from doing eugenics. Well, abortion being illegal might stop eugenics via abortion, but that does nothing to stop eugenics via sterilization, and it also assumes fascists wouldn’t just perform abortions anyways.
This is the crux of my own pro-choice position. It's irrelevant to me if the baby is a person or if it's just a clump of flesh because, either way, it does not have a right to use another person as an incubator. It's the Violinist Argument - if you use someone else as your life support system and they decide they don't want to be an appliance anymore, they are fully justified to terminate.
I'm not fond of this argument, because it can be equally applied to people with disabilities, and if you stretch definitions a bit - to everyone, because we all depend on society to survive.
Can you spell out how that would go a bit more explicitly? The violinist argument is supposed to show that nobody gets to use a particular individual as a life support system without their consent, not that we don't owe some degree of care to one another. I'm not saying there's not a way to make a (bad) analogous argument about people with disabilities, but I'm not familiar with it and can't quite see how it would go. If you've got time to spell it out, I'd appreciate it!
It certainly can't be "equally" applied! No one has to have their body mutilated and bodily autonomy violated and health harmed and life threatened and put through excruciating discomfort to support people with disabilities.
I'd be fascinated to see it applied equally.
Nazis are coming with an army to kill disabled people and minorities. In order to fight the Nazis, conscription is necessary. Is it moral under this framework to conscript a white CIS man to fight to protect disabled people and minorities if the Nazis would otherwise have left that white CIS man alone?
Fighting, of course, means putting him at risk of mutilation, deprives him of his bodily autonomy, and consists of a lot of excruciating discomfort even if he isn't wounded.
Surely there must be better arguments for abortion that don't rely solely on the Western conception of individual rights as a moral and ethical basis?
"Should we build a slave army of cracker conscripts to fight the Nazis" is a fun thought experiment, but the logistics would be a nightmare! That's how you get conscripts fragging their superior officers. I suppose you could maybe keep them under control with bomb collars or something, but uh, at that point we have firmly left moralism far behind us.
Also, can you give me a justification for 100% of abortions that ignores whether the baby is a person or a clump of flesh?
If you want to bring the practicalities of a hypothetical moral scenario into this then the violinist argument, which involves stitching an unwilling person to a sick person to share a kidney, fails even harder.
My point in the abstract is this: the violinist argument is one that myopically focuses on individual rights. It proposes that an individual cannot be forced to do anything that may result in bodily harm in service of a "greater good". The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good. Mandatory service to fight Nazis is merely the clearest cut example.
I support abortion rights for many reasons. However, the violinist argument itself is incredibly flawed both logically and rhetorically and I don't think it's a helpful argument to make. It can be so easily reframed into a scenario where both sides have reasonable arguments and doesn't really prove anything. It's main crux is just the visceral reaction to the disgusting nature of the scenario.
I brought in practicalities because I didn't feel like addressing the horrific implications of your hypothetical moral scenario. But! Okay.
Again, you have left moralism behind. Using your logic, it is sometimes moral to ban abortion: if we need to increase the population to fight off the fascists, if we need to repopulate after the antifa war, etc. In fact, using your logic, it is moral to force people to get pregnant in the first place. Without bodily autonomy as a basis for ethics, how do you avoid forced birth baby factories?
My scenario is not a hypothetical scenario. It is one that happened between 1941 and 1945. Millions of people lost their lives to defeat fascism. I consider mandatory service as imposed by the USSR to be morally defensible, even if the bodily autonomy of millions of people were violated. Do you consider that forcing Soviet citizens to take up arms was morally indefensible?
Sorry, I didn't realize you were making a historical point!
I misread it because you're ignoring the fact that Nazis do not consider Russians to be Aryan. Hitler had viewed Slavs and Serbs and Poles as primitive subhumans the same as Jews. So actually, no, the scenario you were talking about is not something that actually happened. Soviet citizens were conscripted to fight in their own interests, not just in the interests of minorities. Your example is ahistorical.
I will admit that the Violinist is overly individualistic, to the point that maybe I should adopt a different framework. I was just describing how I came to my pro-choice beliefs, but in hindsight that was back when I was a liberal Christian teenager trying to comprehend the issue within that specific moral framework. These days I can see the weaknesses you're talking about and, though I disagree with the example you used, I think you make a good point that I should adopt a less atomized vision of abortion.
Do you have a recommendation?
The historical example is perfectly apt because we know from Nazi historical documentation that a certain percentage of Eastern Europeans were considered acceptable for "Germanization" after total Nazi victory. Therefore, under the moral framework of the violinist argument, it would have been unacceptable for that percentage of Soviet citizens to be conscripted into service.
This highlights the problem with the violinist argument because it is an individualist argument that then purports to expand an individual right to a systematic right. If there is even a single Soviet Citizen (for example the Volga Germans which the Nazis expressly regarded as Aryan) which would have their "bodily autonomy" violated by conscription but not by Nazi rulr then the entire moral architecture of conscription to fight Nazism would be indefensible. However, stepping back from the violinist argument I think most people and almost all leftists would agree that conscription to fight Nazis is pretty reasonable.
We know that from documentation that Soviet citizens wouldn't have access to. From their perspective, the Nazis were coming to kill them all, so the Violinist doesn't apply because no one was confirmed safe. Anyone could die, so everyone had to fight.
Whatever. Doesn't matter.
Maybe you didn't read the second half of my comment. Here it is again:
I will admit that the Violinist is overly individualistic, to the point that maybe I should adopt a different framework. I was just describing how I came to my pro-choice beliefs, but in hindsight that was back when I was a liberal Christian teenager trying to comprehend the issue within that specific moral framework. These days I can see the weaknesses you’re talking about and, though I disagree with the example you used, I think you make a good point that I should adopt a less atomized vision of abortion.
Do you have a recommendation?
Because using your framework, it seems pretty easy to justify banning abortion and force women to give birth for the greater good.
You are correct. The whole issue isn't about life, but about control. It's about a whole group of people who force/coerce you into a caregiving role. The very coercion reveals their own desire to not do the work themselves. I find it especially galling that these same people will not do the same caregiving, do not offer help, and get
when you object to all of this work!
You cannot coerce people into caregiving, whether babies, disabled, sick, elderly, or anybody else. It must be a choice.
Wow, I've never seen this argument expressed in such concise and clear way!
There's actually only one kind of scenario where someone WOULD have that right over you. Luckily it's absurd:
If you could grab a random, fully living person off the street and jam em up in your womb, and somehow make them dependent on you to survive until you can be surgically detached, you would owe them that service 100%. And if someone else forced this on the both of you, you wouldn't owe them that. The vast majority of people would agree with this.
This is why fundamentalist Christians have to believe that God pulls down souls into fertilized zygotes. It turns conception into a form of soul-based child abduction. If you completely skip past any thought about what the fetus is, and just assume with full conviction that it's equal to a person in every important way, then you literally arrive at the most common fundie anti abortion position... Full ban unless it's the mother's "fault".
This is extremely convenient - the linchpin of their entire argument is literally magical thinking. Think of the first scenario, someone has done this to a person, they're stuck attached, and the abductor is complaining that their right to kill the abductee and go chillax are being trampled. That's what it sounds like to anti abortion religious fundies.
This is why they must be opposed with raw force. They can't be reasoned out because they didn't reason themselves in.
Christian Nationalists full-on worship an evil deity, that intentionally and knowingly sends the souls of babies to Earth to get aborted and then be sent to Hell for not accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It's not worth arguing with, y'know, evil worshiping death cultists.
I found the Violinist Argument reasonable when I was a vaguely Christian teenager figuring my own beliefs out, though.
The whole argument of trying to place where "life" begins, or where the fetus becomes a "person" will always lead nowhere because there is no definitive cut off point or specific week/term where this occurs, forcing people to come up with arbitrary qualifications (such as an identifiable heartbeat). This will go on forever until people realize that as it is developing the (potential) child is always in between conceptual forms. The only thing that matters is capacity to survive outside of the womb, since this differentiates the outcome of the choice.
One time when I was in college pro life protestors came on campus and being the foolish bleeding heart liberal I was I went to debate one of them. I inuited this idea during the conversation and they hit me with a "well, that's invalid." No explanation, no reasoning, just refutation via nuh-uh. It was so incredibly upsetting that I just walked away. Fuck that person. I'd be pro choice with no other reason besides that conversation.