this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Public Freakout
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Presuming, for the sake of argument, that the consensus in the future comes to be that it is in fact murder, then yes - it's rightly labeled "murder" regardless of the view one might hold.
But that's beside my point.
To carry on with this particular context, what you're asserting is that those who support a right to abortion believe that murder is okay, which is very much NOT what they in fact believe. They believe that it does not qualify as "murder" at all.
So again, you're misrepresenting what they actually believe, and doing so in order to saddle them with a moral position they do not in fact hold, snd that dishonesty, in my estimation, calls into question the notion that you actually are a moral person.
Oh, and for the record, I think you're wrong anyway. I think that when all of the reactionary, emotional fervor dies down and cooler heads prevail, the beginning of human life will be defined by the exact same thing that's already the accepted marker for the end of human life - the presence or absence of measurable cortical activity.
And curiously enough, cortical activity can only be detected in fetuses well into the second trimester.
I disagree with your logic, it is a massive logical fallacy to say that becuase something isn't murder now that even if it's seen as murder in the future it wasn't murder in the past. Slavery now is still the same as slavery in the past and past atrocities do not become humane because they are viewed through the lens of time. Now legally speaking sure, if slaves are allowed then slavery is legal, but legality does not in any way dictate morality. This begs the question why do you keep insinuating that because something is legal then it is moral?
The premise of your argument is that they're going to consider it murder in the future. But what if they don't? Anyway, the logical fallacy is worrying about what future societies might think, since they're not here now.
Abortion is moral and merciful. Forcing an unwanted child into the world is cruel.
Your opinion that a fetus deserves rights is something that most of us don't respect here.
I'm not convinced that's actually true, but it's irrelevant anyway, since that's not what I said.
The other poster did not assert simply that abortion is murder, but that those who support a right to abortion explicitly advocate for murder.
The assertion was not about the morality of the act, but about the morality of the people who support the right to commit that act.
Do you grasp that distinction?
Certainly, but again, that's irrelevant, since the exact point I was making was that the other poster was rendering a moral judgment of the people - not the act.
And slavery makes a good comparison. Yes - we now view slavery to be wrong, and simply wrong - it was wrong in the past just as it would be wrong today.
But we can't legitimately condemn those in the past who held slaves in societies in which holding slaves was deen to be entirely moral, since they were doing the exact same thing that we're now doing - they were doing the best they could to lead a moral life. It's not that they were evil and we are good - it's that they were good by the standards of their time just as we are good by the standards of ours. That's the most one can generally do, so that's all anyone can ever justifiably be expected to do.
If standards change such that an act that at one time was judged to be good is later judged to be evil, then yes - it can be said that it was always evil. But those who committed the act specifically because they were taught that it was good - those who set out to be good people and acted as they did specifically because the society of which they were a part told them that [this] is what good people do - cannot legitimately be charged by later generations with advocating for evil. They advocated for good, just as we do. That they were, by our standards, wrong about what does or does not qualify as good doesn't alter that fact.
I... didn't even come vaguely close to "insinuating" that. I have absolutely no idea where or how you got such a wildly inaccurate impression.