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On top of that, as I pointed out below, I'm not even sure that 'humanity continuing to exist' is even slightly logical as a 'interest' of humanity.

I, as a living human, want humanity to continue, but an eventual lack of humanity appears to harm no one, specifically because there is in fact no one to be harmed. You end up hitting a sort of divide-by-zero error if you try to calculate the 'interests' of a bunch of people who do not exist. What does 'no one' want? Nothing.

OTOH, if you do claim they do have some interest, (and clearly their first interest is in actually existing at all), then it is, as you point out incredibly immoral to not have all the kids you can, continually, because it is vitally important that people who currently exist had parents that had children.

I'm not sure I stated those options in any sane manner, but basically, either we should consider the fate of nonexistent people as part of the 'universe of our actions', in which case it is incredibly important we help them with that (Because if no one did that, we literally won't exist at all. It's life or death.), or we _don't_ consider their fate, in which case we owe them no effort to try to make them exist whatsoever.

There's no sane middle ground there, at least not under categorical imperative. (And probably not under any moral theory, really. No theory can cope with the near infinite 'rights of people who are not real to be real'.)

However, I'm not quite sure why you dislike comparisons to the golden rule. 'Do unto others as you would wish everyone to do unto everyone' is a perfectly reasonable restatement of the _first_ formulation of the categorical imperative, and makes a fine comparison to the golden rule. (Later formulations would be something like 'Accomplish the same things that you would like everyone to accomplish', which wanders so far from the golden rule to be unrecognizable.) Do you just dislike the fact it is talking about the means, not the ends?

We've got a huge problem anyway, as this is about 'having children', not 'being gay' in the first place.

If it's unethical to be gay because you won't have children, then it's clearly unethical to be straight and not have children...in fact, it's _more_ unethical, simply because straight people can have kids much more easily than gay people, and have to actively stop themselves from doing so.

And it's hard to argue that gay _men_, or even straight men, have any responsibility here...there is _plenty_ of sperm to go around, and women could literally be churning out babies as fast as they wanted with almost no action from men. It's _women_ who are failing to reproduce, and should be blamed entirely for it. If no men reproduced, we could shudder along for another few years, if no women did, we'd be instantly in trouble. (Please note I don't actually think this, but I'm taking the argument to where it logically goes, and think the entire moral argument is stupid.)

Likewise, gay people can certainly have children, and if the entire world somehow was gay, we'd surely be smart enough to quickly set up some sort of easy-to-use society-wide system of artificial insemination and adoption.

This whole premise is stupid.

I was just pointing out it was stupid in another way. The Categorical Imperative asks how 'bad' the situation would be if everyone did what you were talking about, what would be the harm to you, and everyone else?

But if humans started reproducing, it's hard to call that 'bad', or see what the harm to me would be. Okay, humanity dies out voluntarily...so? There's an step missing where it is demonstrated 'what if no one reproduced by choice' is something we'd actually oppose.

If the human race ends because none of us are bothering to have children...well, um, yeah, that's obviously sorta what we were aiming for. It's not likely we'd actually do that, but if we does, it's hardly a question of 'morality'...it is not immoral to not exist.(1) Just sorta stupid.

1) Let's not get into suicide here, which this isn't. This is like, every year you go on vacation...until one year you stop going, and don't go again. You are not 'ending' human life, you're just failing to take action to do it again.

I'm not entirely sure why 'Humanity dying out because it doesn't reproduce' is _morally_ a bad thing in the first place. The Categorical Imperative requires is essentially a society-wide golden rule. You don't do to others what you would have them do unto you, you do unto others what you'd have everyone do to everyone.

But not having kids...who exactly is it hurting? The non-existent children? Huh? Now, as a fan of humans, I'd like humanity to continue. We've done a lot of stuff, and it'd be sad if no one knew, and I don't see any aliens out there.

So if some magical meteor coming to close to earth meant that every single human born after today was gay, (and for some reason humanity didn't decide set up a massive artificial insemination system, and totally restructure families and reproduction), and thus this generation was that last that ever lived, well, it would be sad, but it would hardly be _immoral_ on the part of those gay children to not have kids.

If anything, the Categorical Imperative argues that people _shouldn't_ have kids, because if everyone had them, if every woman on the globe had a child ever year, we'd be unable to function. Whereas if no one had kids, we'd just quietly fad into non-existence, although it might be touchy there at the end with a bunch of 80 year olds and no one to care for them.

But that is the stupidly simplistic version of the Categorical Imperatives, which has never heard of 'statistics' or 'moderation'. Society would also collapse if everyone drove their car at the same time, or as the article pointed out, attempted to cure cancer at the same time, but that doesn't mean that no one should do those things.

I have no idea, all the right-wing articles that mentions the 'Obama is giving waivers to all his cronies' (Like Obama has ever even personally touched one of these waivers and the decision wasn't made six levels down from him.) story seems utterly unable to state what the waivers are for, or how long, or if they're giant 'These guys can do whatever they want forever' waivers or just '$10 too high deductible for broken bones for the next five years' waivers.

And the actual media has no picked up the 'story', probably because, as Boonton said below, this is not actually a 'story' at all.

I urge everyone to operate under the assumption all the time, or at least WRT politics, that any information that is not common knowledge, but should be known to the person writing the article, that _could_ render an entire political argument moot, but is inexplicably not included in the article making that argument, in fact _does_ render that argument moot.

I'm pretty sure you just said what I said.

It's like when you litter, you can either 'be punished with a fine for littering', or, 'you can 'incur an obligation to the state to pay for the cleanup via a fine'.

Just stating it in a different way doesn't change things.

Yes, the sole defining difference for a _political position_ is what you want the _laws_ to be. Period.

If you want to argue there's the abstract moral position that you are that deserves a name, that for some reason we need a way to refer to people who think abortion is immoral, go ahead and invent one, but 'pro-life' is already taken.

'Pro-life' is a _political_ position that wishes abortion to be illegal, so you can't call yourself that. If you want to name 'the group of people who think abortion is immoral', you go right ahead, but you can't really just barge in and take the actual name of a political position, despite not wanting the same thing.

That's absurd, confusing, and insulting, and, no, you don't get to be offended if you do so and people confuse you with the political position you've taken the name of.

Although I don't know _why_ you think such a name is required. We have no such name for people who think that adultery is or isn't immoral, or who think that wearing fancy clothing is or isn't immoral. We don't name any other group of people based on moral beliefs like that. (We have terms for entire systems of morality, or basis of morality that spawn systems, but not generally individual beliefs like that.)

That's not what waivers are for. No _person_ is getting a waiver. (If so, um, 139 waivers would be an impossibly low amount and not worth even mentioning. There are more people than that walking around who don't actually exist and are wit protection identities and CIA covers for other people, and presumably do not need two insurance plans.)

Waivers are for _plans_. Plans must meet specific standards to be counted under the law. Most companies are just going to have their plan magically change under them as insurance companies stop offering 'invalid' plans, which is why the law takes so long to come into effect.

The problem is that union-negotiated contract has a minimum exact contract it has to follow, and they probably have a deal with the insurance company that the insurance company can't change it. Because then the insurance company could change it where the stuff the company is required, by union contract, to buy, requires them to buy a very high-end plan with 99% they don't need for the 1% they do.

Sadly, this allows the employer to now hold _unions_ over a barrel if the plan is even slightly short. The insurance company can't modify it to fit under the law without permission, so if even one tiny part is out, if the plan has a $60 deductible when the law requires $50, the employer can force the union to renegotiate the contact _or_ every single union member has to pay the 'uncovered' fine like they don't have health insurance.

And while normal health insurance contracts are up each year or two, union contracts can be for a decade, so the employers can say 'Oh, but you only demanded a $60 deductible, so that's what we're providing the next 8 years. Sucks that under the law you don't have enough insurance to avoid the fine.'

So unions are getting waivers for the plans, which, as I said, is reasonable if the plans comply 95% or so.

The question is, is this true? Are these 'almost good enough' plans that will just be renegotiated next contract negotiation to be correct, or are unions somehow being allowed to get away with providing crappy insurance?

Well, you can tell how honest a political movement is by taking the actual stated political position it has, and seeing how many 'followers' of that movement actually agree with the stated positions.

If the followers mostly agree with it, that is a winning position, it's actually gotten people to agree with it.

If the followers act baffled or mostly disagree, or if the leaders themselves can't figure it out, and yet there are a lot of people who describe themselves as followers of that position, then the political position is probably either a) very complicated, so complicated it doesn't belong on the political map, or b) actively misleading people, probably both about the facts, and either its position or, more likely, the other side.

With abortion, it's people being mislead about the pro-choice side, and the actual facts about abortions, stuff that can be easily disproved just by glancing at wikipedia.

Likewise, the Tea Party movement is _epicly_ dishonest under this test. So they're against...taxes? Do they not know that taxes are lower than under Bush? That they are essentially the lowest they've ever been, or at least within a percentage or two?

And, just to be fair, PETA is just as dishonest.

If we had those numbers, they'd be somewhat more restrictive that our current system is _legally_, but, practically 95% of abortions would already happen before that point anyway.

However, I'd expect the average to be somewhere around 20 weeks, although 16 weeks wouldn't surprise me. But 12 weeks would, at least nationally.

While I don't have it anymore, I once had a chart that listed the 'What percentage of what states felt about abortion', and of the responses that would result in abortion being illegal, aka 'throwing doctors and/or women in jail', the most any state got was around 45%, and most states were around 30%.

No state managed to actually poll at over 50% of wishing to actually 'outlaw' abortion in the sense of, you know, actually making it _illegal_.

The vast majority of people who wanted to 'outlaw' it and were pro-life apparently thought there should be a fine, which is a) absurd for 'killing someone', and b) a rather idiotic and classist response....so only rich or middle class people can get abortions? Why, that's interestingly bigoted.

I don't think 'most pro-lifers', in the sense that most people _leading_ the movement, think that exception is a good idea.

But there's a vast majority of people out there who call themselves 'pro-life' that either:
a) Think there should simply be 'less' abortion, and have no actual knowledge about how many there are or when they happen or anything, and when you ask them if they want to outlaw abortion they say no. (Which means they are not actually pro-life at all.); or

b) Think that 'people having sex and then getting an abortion should be punished', in some sort of vague undefined way, and this is for, in their head, although they won't actually formulate it this way, 'punishment', or 'justice'. (And are horrified by the thought of rape victims being 'punished'.)

Neither of those groups, which I think actually make up the _majority_ of actual people who call themselves 'pro-life', are actually pro-life. They are either people who find abortion distasteful and have been utterly confused by the rhetoric of the pro-life side, or they are anti-women/anti-sex.

And the idea of the pro-life groups playing 'fair' is crazy, because if they played fair, they would _lose_. They have to mislead people, because something like 80% of the people out there do not think having an abortion should be punishable, or at most a small fine, when actually asked that question. And a good 50% of those non-punishment people delusionally identify as 'pro-life'.

If the pro-life and pro-choice side actually sat everyone down, and said 'Okay, we're going to vote and restrict abortion exactly how the majority of people want it.', the pro-choice people would win, because most people do not actually want legal restrictions before 12 weeks or 16 weeks or whatever. (Which is, of course, a pro-choice position.)

I'm not even sure that, if that was done per-state, that _any_ state would end up with abortion illegal. Maybe four or five states could outright ban it.

Which results in the pro-life side having to constantly mislead people about what's going on with abortion, to make the women 'evil women', or pretend that late-term abortions ever happen except for medical reasons, to use delays they _themselves_ cause as evidence of 'immorality', etc, etc.

Erm, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that rape or incest doesn't have anything to do with any of those.

Well, except 'feelings', but that's because that wrong. Women's 'feelings' aren't at issue here, the comparison is against 'a woman's right to not be forced to carry someone around inside her'.

OTOH, a universe where the _feelings_ of women make it okay for those women to _kill_ _people_ is as equally bizarre as what I said, so really doesn't help the 'rape or incest' exception's sanity.

There's really no sane moral argument to justify that exemption. The only possible grounds are...women should be punished for sex with being forced to have a baby. So we won't punish the women who didn't choose to have sex, that would be immoral and unfair.

That's pretty much the only way that exemption logically works.

And the fact that the vast majority of 'pro-life' thinks it's a reasonable exemption...well....that really says a lot about them.

Yeah, whenever I hear about rape or incest in relation to abortion, it is usually along the lines of “so-and-so politician is against abortion even in cases of rape or incest!” as sort of a vehicle to make that politician into a monster for not caring about rape victims. Of course, I think this is fundamentally dishonest.

Well, as I pointed out in some thread above, with my comments about 'This is not a sane way to behave if you think it's murder' comment, I think the pro-life side is rather fundamentally dishonest in their arguments, and a lot of what they claim their objection is isn't really their objection.

When you take an actual real moral stance that 'a fetus's life is valuable' (Whether you think it has a fixed value or grows.), it renders the whole incest or rape thing utterly nonsensical. Which rather implies the vast majority of 'pro-life' people, who recoil from not having the exception, are looking at it from some _other_ viewpoint, if you see what I mean.

So using 'even in cases of rape' is, strangely, using the fundamentally dishonesty of most 'normal' pro-life people (Who do not believe it is murder, but instead, I believe, consider it 'justice' for those women having sex.), against the people who actually have consistent stands, and possibly actually do think it's murder.

As for me, I'm pro-choice, but I find inserting my own personal option into the debate ends up having people argue against that position instead of the abstract. And I'll note that while your eight weeks and ten weeks seems reasonable to me, the reason it's longer is that the pro-life movement does _everything it possibly can_ to make abortion hard to get and delay it.

If women could literally walk down the street and get an abortion in two hours like any other outpatient procedure, that is a fine time frame. It's not when they have to fly halfway across the state because protesters shut down the nearby clinics and then they have to have mandatory 'consoling' and then have to wait another few days and have to 'notify' parents or fathers or whatever and etc etc.

And I think that society should financially support _all_ pregnant women who choose to carry a baby to term, however they got that way and whether or not they give it up for adoption. Because, you see, I don't actually like abortion, and would rather we have as little of it as possible...and something like 75% of them are for financial reasons. we could trivially reduce abortions by half tomorrow if we made pregnancy less of a burden, paid the medical costs, thanked them at the end, and put the kid up for adoption. And, on top of that, children who have medical care during pregnancy turn out to have much less problems in life.

But, as I said, a very very large segment of the pro-life side is fundamentally dishonest and doesn't care about the children at all. They care that the dirty women (Although I suggest they'd use another word that starts the same and rhythm with 'doors'.) who have sex have to 'live with their decision'. Which is why such a thing will never happen, no matter how obvious it would reduce abortions.

The question is how big the waivers are.

The acceptable plans have pretty tight requirements, and it's entirely possible that one or two of the rules aren't a good idea and basically everyone needs a wavier for that rule. Or all unions do, because all union plans do that in some other way. Or all HMOs, or all whatevers. (Or, better, that rule needs changing...but good luck getting that past this Congress.)

That's not really a problem. Often small portions of the law are found to be unworkable. I would really rather the rulemaking was in an executive department instead of Congress, but whatever.

Now, if there are waivers being granted to plans that fall far, or even moderately, short of the requirements, it might be time to start rethinking things. Either those requirements are required, or they aren't. If those plans are good enough, they should be available to all companies to offer. If they aren't, they shouldn't be available at all. (Or, rather, shouldn't count as a plan under the law. Nothing stops people from buying plans that aren't acceptable, as long as they're willing to pay the tax penalty.)

The article has no facts about which kind the waivers are, how the existing plans fell short, which forces me to assume the facts are the least convenient to their argument, and that the waivers were for trivial things. Does anyone have more info? Aren't union health care plans supposed to be pretty good? Why do they not fit the requirements?

Doh, replied to the top level instead of here. See below.

Oh, I agree that rape and incest should be removed as exceptions. There is absolutely no logical reason to treat them different.

I was just pointing out that society tended to think otherwise, and is horrified and outraged when we don't let 'innocent women' get abortions, which raises some rather interesting question about what, exactly, society thinks is going on.

'discounting some value from the right to choose since women who had sex voluntary should know that the consequences of sex are sometimes unwanted pregnancy.'

...so their ability to harm other people is lessened? Huh?

Robbing people is illegal. Should be legal if the robber is attempting to collect the same amount of money that was stolen from him by a third party? Should it be legal if he took precautions against getting the original thing stolen, and illegal if he didn't?

Does that _really_ make sense to you? Of course not. Why the heck would it make sense to society, as it apparently does?

It 'make sense' because society is misogynistic and at least some of the basis for banning abortion is nothing to do with the children and everything to do with 'those women having sex get what they deserve'. This hits a brick wall when it runs into 'rape' (Which is a fairly recent development historically, but 'blame the victim' doesn't play at all anymore, even in otherwise misogynistic environments) and they quickly attempt to exclude the victims, which rather reveals why they _actually_ want those women to carry the baby to term. Aka, punishment.

As for the man who is raped question, no, but that's because society can step in and cover those payments with absolutely no harm to the child. I.e, it's a another situation where the rights are not in conflict. (Incidentally, I think it's absurd that the government doesn't make the child support payments itself, and just require the supporting parent to pay the government.)

Yeah, G and H are only goofy in a world where abortion is predicated on the concept 'Women should not be forced to care for other people', which is what the 'right to choose' generally is.

And that generally is what it's considered here. So the second that a women can keep from having to care for the child without having to kill it, there's no way that their rights are in conflict, and her solution can be mandated to be 'give the child up for adoption' instead, which is exactly the same outcome for her.

So, in the world we live in, the world of the matrix above, G and H and everything listed after birth is goofy. It's not in, for example, ancient Rome. Where if I recall correctly, parents _always_ owned their male children, even as adults. (Female ownership, of course, was transferred to their spouse.)

As for rape and incest, adding value to the right to choose if they have 'no choice, no complicity at all in becoming pregnant.' is, um, a rather surreal result. We've giving victims of a crime more right to infringe on _other people's_ rights? Really? When did we start doing that? If someone steals my car, can punch some random person in the face?

Or, alternately, more realistically, we can look at it the other way, because it's exactly the same thing as saying 'we should diminish the rights of women who chose to have sex'. Which is rather blatantly a misogynistic way of punishing 'soiled women' by reducing their rights.

So, pick one there. Either we're giving a really weird consolation prize of allowing rape victims to kill other people to 'make up' for being raped, or we're attempting to punish women who have sex. Those are the two options, and the second seems a _lot_ more likely.

The rape or incest exemption makes no sense at all, and yet society seems to be demanding it, which a) is most probably sexist, and b) implies they think in second or third column terms. (As that's the only place the exemption makes sense.)

I'm unclear as to why such a tax _would_ be unconstitutional. You didn't address that point at all.

I'm also unclear as to why such a thing is more morally reprehensible than the dozens of other ways the US government has to transfer our money to large corporations.

Also, unrelated, and I say this on every discussion about health insurance: I wish everyone would get off the 'Everyone needs insurance' idea. No, everyone needs health care. And easiest, and this case most constitutional system, would be simply to pay health care providers for the services they render to Americans, out of taxes, period, the end. Forget 'insurance'. Go to a doctor, the doctor turns in a bill to the government that says 'I did procedure X on a citizen', and the government sends him $Y.

There is no way you could do that in real life.

But, yes, if you happened to be standing on the street in Afghanistan, with an drone-shooting RPG at hand, and saw a drone attack at house, and said 'Hey, that drone's going to murder people', and you _didn't_ shoot it down...I think I could safely conclude you didn't think it was actually murder. (Or, alternately, you didn't think murder was big deal.)

Same with abortion. The left isn't asserting that everyone should go and buy guns and get sniper training and travel to DC and shoot whoever...they just pointing out it's an entirely reasonable response, and should be happening a hell of a lot more often, if people _actually_ believed that abortion was murder. (And no one should be startled when it does happen, just like no one should be startled when someone decides to shoot Nazis operating death camps.)

As I said, a lot of people are standing there, with signs, at abortion clinics, asserting that abortion is murder. None of them have to fly around the world and get a hold of weaponry not for sale to the public and hope to, impossibly, locate the drone attack and stop it.

Do none of them own guns? Could none of them plan to take out the police guarding the doctors? Could they not zerg-rush the clinic and dismantle it? Do they not have trucks they could crash into the clinic at night, and save a few people the next day as it's closed?

'Abortion is murder' people are the possibly most cowardly people in existence, 99.9999% of them just willing to wave signs at mass murderers ten feet in front of them, mass murderers who they know are going to kill people _that very day_, and do absolutely nothing about it...

...or they don't actually think those people are committing murder. Pick one. Because their response is to mass murder not sane at all.

A couple of points:

Firstly, G and H are bit goofy. The 'right to choose' is usually about what a woman can do with her body. Once the baby is no longer in her body, she really doesn't have sayso over it's existence at all.

If 'the right to choose' is based on the premise she doesn't have to care for it before it's born, then she presumably also has a right to choose not to care for her baby after it's born...but that doesn't mean it needs to die. Even if it has less value than her, it still has some value, and the government could require it be turned over to them instead of being killed.

As long as the entity under discussion has some value, even .0001 value, and it can exist without infringing on someone's right, there is no moral arithmetic at all, so there's no actual G and H at all, and anything at or after 'Newborn infant' is pointless to list. You only have to weigh competing value when they're actually in conflict.

And secondly, this provides an interesting framework to think about the rape and incest exception. Clearly, under the law, that should be an additional row. There should be a row of 'normal pregnancies right to choose' and then a 'rape or incest pregnancies right to choose' row.

But that's a very strange result. Why, exactly, do women who have had that happen to them have more of a right to choose? Why are they worth 1.5 , or whatever?

No, that's not what the left is pointing out. There are plenty of things that are people consider immoral but would not reasonably kill others for. Littering, for example.

However, according to various people's on the right's rhetoric, abortion is murder. In fact, it's mass, systemic, murder. It is not someone littering or even driving drunk. It's actually _worse_ than the Holocaust, not in any metaphorical way, but in actual literal truth.

And if pro-life _actually_ believe that, then they _really should_ be putting bullets in the head of people who allow it to happen as public policy in this country. (And they certainly don't get to be surprised when people do just that after listening to them, like when George Tiller was murdered.)

You, OTOH, might think abortion's immoral, but you don't think it's murder. Or, rather, you don't _claim_ to think it's murder, as it's rather clear 99.99% of the people who claim that are lying. Probably even lying to themselves. Which this poll is pointing out in another direction.

I think a better poll question might be: If the Supreme court decided that, on their 10th birthday, that 5% of the population would be randomly summarily shot, what would you do?

If the 'abortion is murder' people's response to that question is 'Attempt to elect Republicans so that law can eventually be overturned in the courts.', they are consistent, if utterly insane. If it's something like 'overthrow the government' , or 'shoot the supreme court', which is a much more reasonable response, well, why isn't that their response to abortion law?

It's the same thing with the 'death panels' nonsense recently. If you people actually thought that the government was going to kill old people, the _correct_ response would be mass assassination of Democrats.

The right can't continually assert things are mass, government-sponsored murder and then just sit there on their butt. If that is true, it's utterly absurd behavior, and they _themselves_ are evil for standing by to allow evil to triumph. If the government is murdering people, they have a _moral obligation_ to attempt to stop it by any means neccessary.

Of course, they _don't_ believe that, they don't actually believe it's murder, it's just political rhetoric. And recently the left's started pointing out how insane their behavior would be if they actually believed what they said they believed. You do not stand behind police lines waving signs while people operate murder houses.