This is an unsound argument. Vigilantes who murder for moral or emotional reasons are still murderers. Even if abortion = murder, when people commit murder they should get a trial and a sentence. So should people who murder those who they believe have done wrong. It's called the Bill of Rights.
My point had nothing to do with emotion... As for the Bill of Rights, I agree with you. However, that requires a government that does its job. If abortion were made illegal I'd be more inclined to agree with you. Right now, when abortion is legal, if an abortion doctor is openly practicing the killing of the innocents in the womb (I'm not talking about killing random people who may or may not have had abortions here) I see nothing wrong with ending their lives because they are killers. Granted, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to go to jail, and even more importantly, vigilantism is incompatible with my Christian ethics. In much the same vein, if a Nazi were torturing Jews (This is WORSE than abortion but it still does partially show why I feel the way I do) and you killed that Nazi official, even if he were not torturing people at the moment of his death, it would be justified. Why? The government isn't even trying to do its job. Killing this evil person is an act of justice. The reality is, whether proven in an official court setting or not, he's a murderer. Now, you'd better know for sure the person is a murderer before you do something like that. I'd prefer a real trial to vigilantism. But that requires government doing its job. Which it isn't.
So, my pro-abortion argument is that in the early term of pregnancy, a fetus has not developed the #1 component that gives human life its value -- sentience. One week after conception, a fertilized egg does not know it is alive, does not possess intelligence and does not possess feelings, just like the sperm and egg which were separate one week prior did not possess intelligence, sentience or feelings. To me, a baby that knows it is alive is a very different item than a lifeform that does not know it is alive. A late-trimester fetus may be sentient but we can all agree there is no *scientific* grounds to demonstrate that a week-old fertilized egg is sentient. "Conception" is the bedrock of the anti-abortion argument, "sentience" is the bedrock of my (early term) pro-abortion argument. How exactly do you think I'm just thinly disguising a pro-murder POV through my reasoning here? I'm curious.
I honestly don't know that a week old fetus is sentient. I think that its completely irrelevant. Your point about the dog does partially touch on why. But I'll get to that in a sec. As for my reason why... The reason evictionism works better than typical "Pro-choice" arguments, even if I disagree with it, is that it actually is a "Women's rights argument" rather than a right to kill, it does not allow you to kill if there is a more peaceful way to evict the fetus. Would you allow abortion if it was possible to put the fetus in an artificial womb instead? If you answer "Yes" than your argument has nothing to do with the mother's rights at all...
I don't usually talk about my views on this, but I also think the "slippery slope/infanticide" argument is pretty artificial. This is not to say that infanticide isn't cruel, merciless and stupid. I think late-term abortions are cruel and stupid. But the "would you let a crying baby die?" tack is in large part an emotional argument based on the fact that most people think babies are cute and heartwarming
And human beings with rights...
I really don't feel as much sadness over an infant dying as I feel over an intelligent and emotional being having died. The greater the sentience, the greater the capacity for suffering. If a baby is left to die its thought process is "hungry...hungry...hungry...I'm dead." It does not experience the torture and great sadness that an intelligent person would endure under the same circumstances.
So what? I don't see how taking someone's life is any better just because of how much they appreciate it. is it more wrong to kill a happy person than to kill a depressed person?
This does not mean that infanticide should be legal, or ever morally condoned. But it does mean that infanticide should be condemned for *other* reasons, like the cruelty and stupidity of it, the *potential* of the (quasi?)sentient life being destroyed, etc. It means that there are *intelligent* reasons why infanticide (and late-term abortion) is wrong, as opposed to them being automatically wrong due to the emotional & religious sentimentality toward babies.
My argument is more from the core of libertarian theory than it is explicitly religious. Libertarianism accepts that you can be forced not to use violence against other people or their property. The unborn are still people. Therefore... (Yeah.)
I recently watched a horror film, "Seed." Honestly, it was a crappy and poorly-produced movie, but there were thought-provoking issues in some of the scenes and the audience reaction to them. In "Seed," an evil guy kidnaps a dog, a baby, a teenager, and a woman and leaves them in a room to starve and die by themselves on camera. The dog and baby feel physical pain & hunger and bark/cry until they are dead. I won't go into the disturbing details of the other two scenes, but you can imagine.
I found those scenes pretty horrifying and sad, and I read about 100 critic & fan reviews of it to get perspective on how other people viewed them. I was shocked. All 100 reviews mentioned the dog and/or baby and how horrible the guy was for starving them to death. Lots of idle death threats against the director (Uwe Boll) for filming such cruel scenes that killed a fictional dog and baby. But zero...ZERO!...reviews even mentioned the teenager. One or two of them mentioned the woman while listing the scenes, but elucidated no such strong emotions on her character's death.
Yeah, I don't put the dog and the baby in the same category here. Animals don't really have rights. I do think that society should enforce some bare privleges for them, and that we should punish those who torture animals or such. However, they don't really have absolutely inalienable rights. And humans should ALWAYS come first. If torturing an animal would save a human life, I'd be for it. I would not say the same about torturing a human to save a human life. Why? We don't torture animals because there is no benefit to humans in most cases, and its wrong to unnecessarily create suffering. However, the animal still doesn't have rights. Thee human does. I don't think you think killing an eating a newborn should be legal, yet it should obviously be legal to do so to a cow, and I think it should be legal to do so to a dog. Maybe that's "Speciesism" or something, but I don't really care. Libertarianism is only directly concerned with human rights, and so it should be.
While starving a dog to death is wrong and should be punishable, I don't think it should be punishable by death. Its cruel, and its inhumane, but a dog =/= a human. I haven't really considered what the exact punishment should be for this cruelty, but it doesn't matter. I'll just say, I definitely think the dog is the least important here.
Some may value the teenager's intelligence more, while others may value the babies "Fragileness" or something, more. But the reality is that both are a human life. Killing either one is deeply immoral, and does warrant (Again with my "Given enough evidence" disclaimer) death. It doesn't matter which one dies. They're both innocent and so both do not deserve death (Well, unless the teenager is a murderer, but I assume he isn't.)
To me, these reactions are more disturbing than the scenes themselves. It makes me think of what Ayn Rand wrote about the hatred for intelligence and the worship of non-intelligence. The two intelligent, emotional characters suffered much, much worse than the dog or the baby (we can even say that the dog suffered more emotionally than the baby, since the dog had more developed emotions & relationships as a grown dog) because they KNEW what was happening to them. The greater the sentience, the greater the capacity for suffering, yet audiences seemed to care more about the suffering of the two unintelligent beings.
As stated, my reaction to the dog dying is "Animal cruelty" while my reaction to any of the other three is "Murder." It doesn't matter how intelligent. Is Albert Einstein more valuable than the rest of us? Well, to science, sure, to "Society" maybe, but to kill me would be just as much murder as killing Einstein.
It made me think that if we put our "gaa gaa goo goo" sentimentality toward infants aside, Americans have some serious issues when it comes to feeling intelligent sympathy and making rational judgements about violence and harm. We seem to be trapped in aesthetics & superstition to the point where rational love & empathy take a back seat. And I think your pro-fertilized-egg-killer-revenge-vigilante opinions fall into this deluded category.
I won't deny possibly feeling more emotion for the child (I don't really know if I would or not) but from a purely rationalistic point of view, killing a fertilized egg, killing an infant, and killing a grown man are all murder of an innocent human life and are all equally wrong. Perhaps you could argue, I might not even disagree, that the suffering caused by that murder should be an ADDITIONAL CHARGE in and of itself, but it doesn't matter because murder by itself warrants death anyway. So what would be the point?
I guess at the end of the day I just disagree with your values. I believe in human exceptionalism. That isn't to say that animals have no value whatsoever, but they simply aren't human and simply do not matter beyond pure convenience, and their suffering only matters to the extent that it is unnecessary. I'm honestly surprised you don't support banning of meat eating with that system of ethics, since the animal has to suffer, or something.
