Your insertion of religion into an argument in which I did not mention religion, and your inference of several things about my religion, in addition to your increasingly frenetic and increasingly rude response, tells me that I have struck a nerve. Nor am I particularly appreciative of the tone displayed in the comment, “ever heard of manslaughter?” I don’t know what they would call people like you in Britain (the author of the above article says “one-off”) but where I come from, we have a distinctly less pleasant term.

I do place quite a bit of weight on intent. That you do not is rather strange.

Whether a fetus is a human life is not particularly a matter of religious belief. I am not arguing from potentiality, and even if I were, you should be able to distinguish levels of potentiality. The matter stands that by any definition of a human that can purport to be general, a fetus fits, and if we can make no definition, that would still imply the illegality of abortion since it is absurd to err on the side of allowing what may potentially be a murderous activity. But this is not about abortion.

It takes a rather frantic mind to jump from my assertion that there is enough food/capacity to produce food to feed most (if not all) people on earth to pretending that I asserted resources are unlimited. I did not. But the fact of the matter is that where there is starvation, there is either a) potential for food to be grown, potential undeveloped by a disordered society whose disorder is by no means a product of the West or b) such a lack of resources in that particular area that sustaining a population there is impossible, despite modern advances (the middle of the desert, perhaps. The first is much more likely than the second. You have yet to produce concrete evidence or concrete reasoning that implies that if a farm in Iowa produces enough food for a whole village, that means a farm in Angola is incapable of performing the same feat.

Your rhetoric seems to flatten, dualize, and level several shades of nuance, and several shades of truth are lost in the process.

Yours, &c,
VMG

VGM: “an action whose intent is ending a life and an action whose intent has nothing to do with ending life.”

You put an awful lot of weight on intent. Law and ethics recognize a distinction, but still judge people guilty of causing harm without intending to. (Ever hear of “manslaughter”?) Western use of limited resources causes pain and suffering and death by starvation elsewhere on the planet. The only circumstance in which that would not be true is if resources were unlimited.

Interestingly this is a contention that you make. (You don’t make an argument, just a bald unsupported assertion. A little evidence would be nice.) “The idea that there is not enough food on the planet to feed the population is not true. In fact, almost the reverse is true.” What dream world are you living in? The Green REvolution is a bust; it did in fact increase world food production (and give us an historically unprecedented low ratio of agricultural workers to other workers) but it did not eliminate starvation, because population expanded up to and beyond the limits of the newly expanded food supply. And notice that the Green Revolution runs on oil–a resource that is limited, and that we are pumping out of the ground at very near to maximum capacity right now. EVen so, even with our wide-scale conversion of past solar income (oil) into current food, there are people starving or experiencing “food insecurity” (not sure where their next meal is coming from) today.

“the “ending a life” is highly contestable at best.” Do you have any idea what you’re saying? The starting of life is a highly contestable proposition, at best–which means that “abortion is the ending of a human life” is a highly contestable proposition at best. Why should your beliefs “win” that contest? Because you and you alone have access to the truth? Excuse me, but when someone tells me that they have a pipeline to revealed truth, I start thinking that they are way more dangerous than a government that is reined in by my possession of Constitutional rights–including the right to privacy, the right to choose when and how I become a parent. All that bravuro swagger about “gummint” is misplaced–it is people like you who threaten freedom on this planet. Why? Because if we don’t limit population and don’t limit throughput of scarce matter and energy in our economy, we are either going to have the collapse of civilization from loss of ecosystem services (like clean water, clean air, recycling of nutrients, creation of soil fertility, and a host of others), or we’ll limp along under a severe centrally planned regime that tries to preserve enough ecosystem services to support civilization. And to do that, it will be necessary to limit civil freedom.

In Colorado, it’s illegal to catch the rainfall off your roof–not because some government official thought that it would be cool to regulate people’s use of water for fun, but because that water is subject to the Colorado River Compact, and every drop–every drop!–has been promised to a use–including irrigation to grow food. If people in Colorado start impeding the flow of water to the river, they are reducing agricultural productivity downstream–and did I mention? People need that food to live? So rainbarrels in Colorado kill people–and there goes another civil liberty, sacrificed to the god of economic/agricultural production, because we simply have too many people on the planet. If you’re a fan of liberty, you’d work to keep population steady or to reduce it.

If we continue to pretend that the world is infinite, and that more human population is a good thing, we’re in for big changes: either social collapse, or a degree of social control that will make Stalinist Russia look like a paragon of Liberal democracy.

SUVs Kill People. I admit, it takes an understanding of thermodynamics to get this argument. It also takes a little empathy, a little of the capacity to understand another’s cxperience (or, in Jesus’ words, the ability abide by the golden rule and treat our neighbors as we would treat ourselves) in order to see the connection I am making. My morals say that an SUV driver is more guilty of harm than a woman who makes the difficult decision to get an abortion. My little pipeline to the truth tells me that; and oh, my pipeline carries publicly ostensive knowledge that has been vetted by the egalitarian, meritocratic processes of science. Your pipeline? Faith based. Faith based systems haven’t a very good track record in supporting civil liberty, including the supposed right to grab a beer and honk around in a Hummer.

There’s nothing arbitrary or faith-based about the second law of thermodynamics and the fact that the earth is finite. The belief that human life starts at conception is an arbitraty decision that some people are trying to enforce on others. Why not go whole-hog and outlaw (as the Bible mentions) the “spilling of seed”? Semen, after all, is potential life.

But then, if masturbation were illegal, there are a lot of people who would have to go get a real political theory instead of the one they’re using.

Who’s to say whether I’m right and you’re wrong, or vice-versa? Rational argument from clear premisses and evidence is one way to do it. I’ve offered clear premisses and rational argument supported by publicly ostensive facts and definitions that have the support of the open, free-market epistemological system of science. You dismiss this in favor of–what? What have you got? Faith? So did Joe Stalin.

DW: “A Truck, driven by a tradesman going about his rounds or hauling his goods (or Budweiser empties) is not to be confused with a Hummer, driven by some soft-palmed, Chablis imbibing Baby Boomer who likes to imagine himself…or herself, as astride a grand chariot in Ben Hur, shredding the opponent with spiked alloy wheels.”
Dude, it ain’t nobody’s business what I drive, particularly the gummints’. We better stop gummint incursions into our private lives or we’re going to end up a bunch of commie-dems.

As for the argument that “SUVs let people live.” You can’t be serious. The nazi guards at Buchenwald pulled down paychecks, so their work “let them live” and support families–but that doesn’t mean that employing them that way was a morally good thing. I know, this is a “reductio ad hitlerium,” but really–if you’re going to make such thin and unsupportable arguments, you’re going to see responses like that. The fact that some people make a living by making, selling, or working on SUVs is irrelevant to the point. (I am tempted to say “duh.”)

I think qatzelok has got it right, except for: I didn’t set up a left v. right thing. There are people who drive SUVs who believe in a woman’s right to have control of her reproductive functions, and there are people who think SUVs are a horrible waste of resources who are against allowing women the right to choose when and how to become a parent. So, no, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive classes. I just wanted to point out: intrusive regulation for moral purposes is a two-edged sword, one that could be weilded by others for other moral values. I wanted anti-choice people to think: Are you ready to submit fundamental rights to legislative control under ANY possible regime, or just under the ones you agree with?

As for the contribution by Grammaticus: nice try and slicing and dicing along a distinction, but I don’t accept it. Once upon a time, when humans were few and far between, then my appropriation of resources (enough resources to, say, build and drive a Hummer) left “enough and as good for others.” But sadly, the planet is not infinite, and we’ve built out past the limits. In the world we have, my appropriation does not leave enough and as good for others. There are too many people for that. So, to use your logic against you: abortion rights, by checking population growth, actually help restore the world in which your distinction might have some force. Given that there are close to 7 billion of us on the planet, it’s a bit precious to be sentimental about the unborn when there are mature, full-bodied, but relatively disempowered “post-born” people suffering from starvation brought on by (corporate and market-driven) ecosystem degradation in various parts of the world–degradation we helped cause by being consumers. Population reduction saves resources, thus reducing the pain and suffering of humans who are already here. Or do they not “really” have rights? Are they less human than American foetusses? Really.

And before they can ever get organized, Shell or some other oil company will make sure they get “unorganized” so they can make most of the profit from their resources. The rich SUV-driving nations are also the nations that destroy developing countries so that they can’t organize themselves.

But I have to mention one fatal flaw with this blog entry: it sets up a left-vs.-right argument by suggesting that you either love SUVs or you love abortions, depending on which “side” you’re on.

Personally, I think they are both examples of horrible and anti-social human behavior. If you don’t want to have children, get sterilized or avoid penetration entirely. To “terminate” a child’s life before it can cry… is very similar to driving cars (using resources) that kill people who are too far away from you for you to see their suffering.

The poster who trivialized SUV driving as “something you drive” should remember than any atrocity can be trivialized if it is ubiquitous enough. Why do you think Israel and cigarette companies spend so much on branding?

The fact of the matter is that if you spend much time occupying your community from the outside of a windshield, you soon realize that the behaviors of MOST motorists seem threatening, intentional or not. One second of negligence or beligerence and the guy without the automotive exoskeleton is toast. Beneath it all are pervasive, often unspoken assumptions about motorists’ rights to pre-empt the built environment

In most of suburban and rural America, motorists so dominate public thoroughfares – and driving is such a deeply entrenched norm – that very few people are willing to walk or bike. Yes, convincing people to cease driving around in three-ton Tonka-Toys to prove their manhood would be an improvement, but that in itsef would not help us overcome our unsustainable addiction to Happy Motoring. The only thing that will help in that respect is for us to occupy our communities much more often as pedestrians and bicyclists, and far less often as motorists.

Habitat follows behavior, after all…

I presume this to be a joke?

-Junker

On the other hand, what generally goes unacknowledged in the US is that the people with unordered societies quite often have their land used to produce export crops sold to ordered societies like the US and EU. It is the “beauty” of neo-liberal free trade, and tacking the adjective “free” on the front makes it seem like nobody’s fault.

One might also ask that if we should assign such value to human life that abortion should be illegal, should we not assign enough value to human life that people already alive should not starve?

At the very least shouldn’t the Africans whose land is used to orchard nuts and coffee get the value adding of processing those raw materials into goods that we can eat and drink while driving our SUV’s? As it stands, they mostly do not so that our ordered society corporations can see ever greater quarterly profits and pay salaries that can afford SUV’s and enough food to fatten ourselves.

I would also note that one act is systemic and social (buying an SUV) and is only really a problem when repeated over and over again by millions upon millions and even then is not evil in intent but only evil in indirect consequence, whereas the other is intrinsically and intensely evil in each individual case, all other considerations aside.

Uniting these two disparate issues in one mosh of dyspepsia may seem a little counter-intuitive but so be it. The life of the lapsed republic is a tad counter-intuitive all around so I can only say how anxious I am for some enterprising oaf to start a Mobile Abortion Clinic with his Humvee pulling an Airstream Trailer emblazoned with an American Flag and a Feminist Manifesto so then we could really have a fine roaring fire of stomping approbation all around.

Though from an anthropological standpoint, we should start filling out forms for every purchase so that the folks of the future can have a good laugh about how damned dumb we really are.

Surely, you must be able to see the difference between doing something mediately and doing something immediately, between intent and potential collateral -surely, you cannot really be limiting the scope and richness of human action to a mere table of results, which you are tabulating in utilitarian fashion and declaring roughly equal. This is the same sort of logic that goes, “Drunk driving/smoking/eating fried chicken kills more people than war, drunk driving is worse than war, ban automobiles and alcohol and tobacco and fried chicken…”

In the first place, there is no good reason to accept the (sempiternal socialist) notion that one man’s wealth is always another man’s poverty. Perhaps it may be so, but very often it is not. Simply because I can gorge myself on food does not mean a child in Africa is therefore unable to gorge himself on food -the inability of the child has very little to do with my ability. We are not living in mercantilist times, when the amount of capital is fixed, and one man’s gain is another’s loss; there is ample food to feed both me and the child in Africa. The problem is not that I am taking the African child’s food, but that the African child is living in a disordered society that suffers from social breakdown and cannot begin to perform the basic economic tasks. So yes, the resources of the Earth are limited, but no they are not so limited that the purchase of commodities in America necessitates the death of children in the Congo; at the very least, that is not the main factor in the death of those children.

But even granting that “SUVs kill people,” which is at best a wildly exaggerated piece of rhetoric and at worse deliberately false, let us look at the issue philosophically. The purchase of an SUV is made with the intent of purchasing a vehicle to drive, very often one that is friendlier for a larger family, very often one that is stronger and safer than most vehicles on the road. The purchase of a vehicle is a necessity for participation in society nowadays, for better or worse. The purchaser is not thinking about calculations of “entropy” (and if he did think about them, he would find them rightly unconvincing). Let us compare that with the “purchase” of an abortion. The “purchase” of an abortion is made with the intent of directly killing an unborn child whose future you have unique power over, until birth. It is made in the full light of other options, very often with the rather selfish calculus, best expressed by our President, that, the purchaser does not want, “to be punished with a baby.”

On the one hand, we have a direct and willful act, the sole purpose of which is to kill an unborn child. On the other hand, we have an act the purpose of which is to buy a commodity necessary for participation in society and that is usually a great convenience for the family. Even if that purchase indirectly “kills people,” which you have not done a good job showing, the difference in both intent and means distinguishes these two acts.

But the logic that SUVs lead to starvation in Africa is so construed that a more appropriate logic would be that SUVs lead to car accidents and deaths in America, which is manifestly true, and they should therefore have this questionnaire on that basis. But note that even that potential result (death) does not put into the same category as every other act involving the same potential result (and especially not in every act producing the same desired result).

This is a feat of logical leveling unseen.

An SUV is just a machine you drive: yeah, and an abortion is just an operation that some people have.