To say that only humans have morality sorta begs the question of what morality is doesn't it? There are nonhuman primates with a sense of what they should and shouldn't do, for example. They don't write treatises on it, but it guides their behavior. What is that? It looks a lot like morality to me.
I just wanted to point out that there’s an abortion post above this, yet this post continues to dominate the recent comments section on the sidebar. I guess the only thing that can compete with abortion is health care reform.
I don't know that actually presenting facts is "dismissive handwaving," whereas just claiming it is so is certainly something more akin to it.
The fact is, abortion laws in the U.S. began long before Comstock, and arose largely as political, not moral issues. If you want to claim otherwise, that's fine, but at that point you're just making stuff up to fit a story.
What's more, abortion and slavery took opposite paths: slavery was legal, then illegal, whereas abortion was illegal, then legal when it became the issue it is today. There's really just no way to map the two histories that doesn't require a lot of rewriting. And that's not handwaving, that's just historical fact.
Well, no, again. Slavery was, it’s true, first a moral issue that later became a political one, though it was only after it had become a major political issue in the United States (well after, in fact) that John Brown entered the scene. It’s important to remember that John Brown (and a significant minority of the northern abolitionists in general) turned violent pretty late in the political history of abortion, and for very identifiable reasons. Brown’s violence in particular was in the service of a particular political position that was dominating the political debate over abortion at the time, namely the status of slavery in Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, and other territories. So with slavery, it went: moral issue-political issue-abolitionist violence.
Abortion may have been a moral issue since Biblical times, but in the U.S., it became a political issue before it became a moral one, because there were professional interests (of physicians in the 19th century) at stake. It became a salient moral issue later, but always remained an important political one. Then abortion was legalized, and it became even more of both. Pro-life terrorism arose for entirely different reasons than abolitionist violence, as well.
To repeat, the analogy fails at pretty much every point unless you basically make up a story about one, the other, or both.
Even this reading of the analogy requires a rather forced approach to the history of slavery and abortion. It requires a selective, if not completely ahistorical reading of both the abolitionist movement and the post-Roe v Wade political and legal and legislative history of abortion. Even the John Brown analogy makes little sense, since Brown's violence began as part of a small war, in essence, in Kansas over whether it would be a free or slave state, and culminated in an attack on the state, not private citizens. Ultimately, any reading of this analogy requires one to stretch reality well past its breaking point.
Joe, saying that he doesn’t address the similarities is not an argument, nor is it actually addressing what he said. Since he points out that there are large structural differences, he undercuts the similarities, since analogies require strong structural similarities in order to be useful. At least, they require such similarities to be useful in reasoning. I’m sure the analogy works quite well in inflaming the emotions of the choir.
Bob, I’m sure you’re well aware that most, if not all pro-choicers would consider comparing a fetus and a disabled child akin to comparing apples and lawnmowers.
Basically this is the "black people/liberals are the real racists" response. First off, it's not the "race card," it's a response to a comment that is about race, or at least an issue that is inseparable from race. "The race card" is only applicable when someone brings race into a discussion from which it had been absent; you can't bring up "slavery in America" and then accuse someone responding to you of "playing the race card."
Also, suggesting that someone was an affirmative action hire is a really disgusting way of avoiding actually addressing the arguments that person offers. That is akin to playing the race card.
When arguments defending the right of the woman to treat her property the way she wants in the face of people yelling “it’s a person” bring to mind the arguments of slave owners in the face of abolitionists, that doesn’t make abortion similar to slavery at all.
Except the property is the woman's body. I'm pretty sure telling someone what to do with their body is like slavery. In a sense, that's exactly what slavery was.
I don't mean to suggest that this is an analogy people should use, merely to point out that it works one way a bit better than the other. I suppose the echoes should give one side pause.
Bob, no need. Where you get under my skin is in your self-righteous, everyone who disagrees with me is disordered comments, not in the comments in which you shed Voegelin and show who you really are.
Bob, oh, all I’m trying to do with both of those comments is show that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about: notice how you can’t even provide examples of assertions you’ve made about things I’ve said in this thread; that’s some shit, man, that’s some shit. Second, it wasn’t a cry for help. It was to point out that I’m not exactly a preacher for the fad of the day. In fact, among such preachers I’m a bit of a pariah. But I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand the written word any more than you need to understand it to quote it out of context and without attribution.
Also, while I know Imprint Academic, or at least a couple of their journals (one of which I check with each new issue), the name Sutherland is not familiar.
One more thing, Bob. You may find this odd, perhaps surprising, but among atheists, I’m fairly tame when it comes to religion and the religious. I don’t see religion as mere fairy tale, I don’t think believers are just deluded, at least not any more than the rest of us are, and I have a genuine respect for honest belief.
I used to write a blog of my own, mostly about cognitive science (my field; I suppose it’s a Gnostic distortion of classical Greek and Augustinian psychology to you), but I also delved into issues of religion and atheism now and then. This was partly because I’ve done research in the psychology of religion from a cognitive perspective, and partly because as someone who became an atheist, it’s something that has been a fairly big issue in my life (in dealing with family and friends, dating, etc.). However, as someone who came to atheism not through finally understanding the truth of evolution and general relativity, I’ve tended to be much less enamored with the “New Atheism” that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years. In fact, I find it intellectually, politically, hell even scientifically disturbing on many different levels. It’s a big friggin’ mess, to put it mildly. So from very early on, I publicly argued against their more intemperate claims about religion and the religious. As a result, I became sort of anathema on the very site (ScienceBlogs.com) that I was blogging on, I was frequently compared to a man wildly considered to have let Hitler run amok, I was insulted publicly and privately by fellow atheist bloggers, and had their sycophantic commenting hoards sicked on me on multiple occasions, often simply for saying that things were more complicated than they appeared and that respect was important. I suppose I wasn’t defending the current preachments of derailed thinkers strongly enough, eh?
Bob, I wonder if you could point to which current preachments I've defended here. I've mentioned stuff I've read and liked, none of which are particularly popular these days, at least not among the atheists I know, or even among the people in my field. Or hell, in some cases, much of anyone. Of course, I haven’t even attempted to engage in philosophy here, either, so there’s that. At most, I’ve simply pointed out that you haven’t attempt to engage in any either. You’re simply parroting ideas, without any hint that you might understand how they’re relevant today, much less any argument about why we should take anything you say seriously. You argue by mere assertion, and it’s not clear that your arguments, or assertions, are ever relevant to anything anyone says here. Case in point, what you just said about me.
I will, however, be interested in learning what you think I think about the world, given that you’re so familiar with these modern ways of thinking, and you know exactly which ones I’m defending.
I know, of course, that pointing this out and demanding actual evidence or agument won’t affect your behavior in any way. You’ll avoid explanation (as you have on this thread: see, e.g., Gnostic distortion), you’ll throw around concepts it’s not clear you understand or know how we’re supposed to understand your use of them, tell everyone how misguided they are as a result of intellectual and historical forces that only you (or Voegelin) are aware of, use insulting labels for ideas and positions with which you disagree, and pretend that, at the same time you’re posturing yourself as above all of this, you’re really just a humble guy out here trying to learn. Whatever gets you through the day, I guess.
Where Bob is mistaken is in his belief that it is only the atheists/agnostics who “assume a position of ‘contempt.’” Tom and Bob (to say nothing of Heidegger), our resident defenders of faith, have shown little more than contempt. In fact, Bob’s whole shtick is based on contempt – contempt for the President, contempt for liberals/Democrats, contempt for the secular, contempt for just about anyone who thinks differently than he. It’s not surprising that we’ve all, to some extent, “assume[d] a position of ‘contempt’” in a discussion about something that tends to be as important as religion is in people’s lives (even the lives of many atheists), but Bob is clearly blind to the fact that he is riddled with contempt, and that it oozes from virtually every word he utters on this blog.
Bob, I think modernism was/is dehumanizing as well, and was particularly so when it was at its height. That’s not an uncommon sentiment, even among atheists (like, say, the Frankfurt School… which was composed of Marxists, not communists; most were critical of communism both in practice and in theory). Which gets to my point: in order for your, and Voegelin’s (shall we say outdated, to be kind), view of secularism and atheism require that you attribute motives to secularists/atheists that they are not only unaware of, but that in some cases actually go against the motives that they are consciously aware of. And as I said, that demands some serious work with arguments and evidence that I highly suspect you want no part of. It may not be personal when you parrot it here and wherever else you vomit Voegelin, but when it’s done the way it’s done, which is to say as a bare assertion, it’s still insulting. It’s sort of like me saying that Christians believe in their particular God because they have a death obsession, both personal and sexual. It’s bullshit, but if I put a name behind it, and a few fancy words, why do I need to argue for the position? Isn’t it obvious that it’s true?
Awww... Heidi, and just the other day you were telling me that people on the right never said that if you disagreed with their position on the war you were a traitor and/or in league with the enemy.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion”
To say that only humans have morality sorta begs the question of what morality is doesn't it? There are nonhuman primates with a sense of what they should and shouldn't do, for example. They don't write treatises on it, but it guides their behavior. What is that? It looks a lot like morality to me.
"
and if we aren’t going to embrace reality what else are we going to embrace?
Jargon.
"
It appears that only Catholics do so, and even the Catholics only make this assumption for their preferred method..
This reminds me of an old Catholic joke: What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? "Mother."
On “Florida Judge Voids Affordable Care Act”
I just wanted to point out that there’s an abortion post above this, yet this post continues to dominate the recent comments section on the sidebar. I guess the only thing that can compete with abortion is health care reform.
On “Abortion and Slavery again”
I don't know that actually presenting facts is "dismissive handwaving," whereas just claiming it is so is certainly something more akin to it.
The fact is, abortion laws in the U.S. began long before Comstock, and arose largely as political, not moral issues. If you want to claim otherwise, that's fine, but at that point you're just making stuff up to fit a story.
What's more, abortion and slavery took opposite paths: slavery was legal, then illegal, whereas abortion was illegal, then legal when it became the issue it is today. There's really just no way to map the two histories that doesn't require a lot of rewriting. And that's not handwaving, that's just historical fact.
"
Well, no, again. Slavery was, it’s true, first a moral issue that later became a political one, though it was only after it had become a major political issue in the United States (well after, in fact) that John Brown entered the scene. It’s important to remember that John Brown (and a significant minority of the northern abolitionists in general) turned violent pretty late in the political history of abortion, and for very identifiable reasons. Brown’s violence in particular was in the service of a particular political position that was dominating the political debate over abortion at the time, namely the status of slavery in Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, and other territories. So with slavery, it went: moral issue-political issue-abolitionist violence.
Abortion may have been a moral issue since Biblical times, but in the U.S., it became a political issue before it became a moral one, because there were professional interests (of physicians in the 19th century) at stake. It became a salient moral issue later, but always remained an important political one. Then abortion was legalized, and it became even more of both. Pro-life terrorism arose for entirely different reasons than abolitionist violence, as well.
To repeat, the analogy fails at pretty much every point unless you basically make up a story about one, the other, or both.
"
Even this reading of the analogy requires a rather forced approach to the history of slavery and abortion. It requires a selective, if not completely ahistorical reading of both the abolitionist movement and the post-Roe v Wade political and legal and legislative history of abortion. Even the John Brown analogy makes little sense, since Brown's violence began as part of a small war, in essence, in Kansas over whether it would be a free or slave state, and culminated in an attack on the state, not private citizens. Ultimately, any reading of this analogy requires one to stretch reality well past its breaking point.
"
Ah, you were just thread jacking.
"
I'd readily make it myself.
"
Joe, saying that he doesn’t address the similarities is not an argument, nor is it actually addressing what he said. Since he points out that there are large structural differences, he undercuts the similarities, since analogies require strong structural similarities in order to be useful. At least, they require such similarities to be useful in reasoning. I’m sure the analogy works quite well in inflaming the emotions of the choir.
"
Bob, I’m sure you’re well aware that most, if not all pro-choicers would consider comparing a fetus and a disabled child akin to comparing apples and lawnmowers.
"
Basically this is the "black people/liberals are the real racists" response. First off, it's not the "race card," it's a response to a comment that is about race, or at least an issue that is inseparable from race. "The race card" is only applicable when someone brings race into a discussion from which it had been absent; you can't bring up "slavery in America" and then accuse someone responding to you of "playing the race card."
Also, suggesting that someone was an affirmative action hire is a really disgusting way of avoiding actually addressing the arguments that person offers. That is akin to playing the race card.
On “Schilling on Social Security”
Yeah, follow the link.
On “Abortion and Slavery again”
When arguments defending the right of the woman to treat her property the way she wants in the face of people yelling “it’s a person” bring to mind the arguments of slave owners in the face of abolitionists, that doesn’t make abortion similar to slavery at all.
Except the property is the woman's body. I'm pretty sure telling someone what to do with their body is like slavery. In a sense, that's exactly what slavery was.
I don't mean to suggest that this is an analogy people should use, merely to point out that it works one way a bit better than the other. I suppose the echoes should give one side pause.
On “Schilling on Social Security”
The founders on health care mandates.
On “Lucretius, “Of Natural Things”- also Atoms & Atheists”
Bob, no need. Where you get under my skin is in your self-righteous, everyone who disagrees with me is disordered comments, not in the comments in which you shed Voegelin and show who you really are.
"
Bob, comparing me to Loughner? Dude, I must have really touched a nerve to make you more petty and mean-spirited than usual. I apologize for that.
"
Bob, oh, all I’m trying to do with both of those comments is show that you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about: notice how you can’t even provide examples of assertions you’ve made about things I’ve said in this thread; that’s some shit, man, that’s some shit. Second, it wasn’t a cry for help. It was to point out that I’m not exactly a preacher for the fad of the day. In fact, among such preachers I’m a bit of a pariah. But I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand the written word any more than you need to understand it to quote it out of context and without attribution.
Also, while I know Imprint Academic, or at least a couple of their journals (one of which I check with each new issue), the name Sutherland is not familiar.
"
Er... Eva
"
Evan Braun?
"
One more thing, Bob. You may find this odd, perhaps surprising, but among atheists, I’m fairly tame when it comes to religion and the religious. I don’t see religion as mere fairy tale, I don’t think believers are just deluded, at least not any more than the rest of us are, and I have a genuine respect for honest belief.
I used to write a blog of my own, mostly about cognitive science (my field; I suppose it’s a Gnostic distortion of classical Greek and Augustinian psychology to you), but I also delved into issues of religion and atheism now and then. This was partly because I’ve done research in the psychology of religion from a cognitive perspective, and partly because as someone who became an atheist, it’s something that has been a fairly big issue in my life (in dealing with family and friends, dating, etc.). However, as someone who came to atheism not through finally understanding the truth of evolution and general relativity, I’ve tended to be much less enamored with the “New Atheism” that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years. In fact, I find it intellectually, politically, hell even scientifically disturbing on many different levels. It’s a big friggin’ mess, to put it mildly. So from very early on, I publicly argued against their more intemperate claims about religion and the religious. As a result, I became sort of anathema on the very site (ScienceBlogs.com) that I was blogging on, I was frequently compared to a man wildly considered to have let Hitler run amok, I was insulted publicly and privately by fellow atheist bloggers, and had their sycophantic commenting hoards sicked on me on multiple occasions, often simply for saying that things were more complicated than they appeared and that respect was important. I suppose I wasn’t defending the current preachments of derailed thinkers strongly enough, eh?
"
Bob, I wonder if you could point to which current preachments I've defended here. I've mentioned stuff I've read and liked, none of which are particularly popular these days, at least not among the atheists I know, or even among the people in my field. Or hell, in some cases, much of anyone. Of course, I haven’t even attempted to engage in philosophy here, either, so there’s that. At most, I’ve simply pointed out that you haven’t attempt to engage in any either. You’re simply parroting ideas, without any hint that you might understand how they’re relevant today, much less any argument about why we should take anything you say seriously. You argue by mere assertion, and it’s not clear that your arguments, or assertions, are ever relevant to anything anyone says here. Case in point, what you just said about me.
I will, however, be interested in learning what you think I think about the world, given that you’re so familiar with these modern ways of thinking, and you know exactly which ones I’m defending.
I know, of course, that pointing this out and demanding actual evidence or agument won’t affect your behavior in any way. You’ll avoid explanation (as you have on this thread: see, e.g., Gnostic distortion), you’ll throw around concepts it’s not clear you understand or know how we’re supposed to understand your use of them, tell everyone how misguided they are as a result of intellectual and historical forces that only you (or Voegelin) are aware of, use insulting labels for ideas and positions with which you disagree, and pretend that, at the same time you’re posturing yourself as above all of this, you’re really just a humble guy out here trying to learn. Whatever gets you through the day, I guess.
"
Where Bob is mistaken is in his belief that it is only the atheists/agnostics who “assume a position of ‘contempt.’” Tom and Bob (to say nothing of Heidegger), our resident defenders of faith, have shown little more than contempt. In fact, Bob’s whole shtick is based on contempt – contempt for the President, contempt for liberals/Democrats, contempt for the secular, contempt for just about anyone who thinks differently than he. It’s not surprising that we’ve all, to some extent, “assume[d] a position of ‘contempt’” in a discussion about something that tends to be as important as religion is in people’s lives (even the lives of many atheists), but Bob is clearly blind to the fact that he is riddled with contempt, and that it oozes from virtually every word he utters on this blog.
"
Bob, I think modernism was/is dehumanizing as well, and was particularly so when it was at its height. That’s not an uncommon sentiment, even among atheists (like, say, the Frankfurt School… which was composed of Marxists, not communists; most were critical of communism both in practice and in theory). Which gets to my point: in order for your, and Voegelin’s (shall we say outdated, to be kind), view of secularism and atheism require that you attribute motives to secularists/atheists that they are not only unaware of, but that in some cases actually go against the motives that they are consciously aware of. And as I said, that demands some serious work with arguments and evidence that I highly suspect you want no part of. It may not be personal when you parrot it here and wherever else you vomit Voegelin, but when it’s done the way it’s done, which is to say as a bare assertion, it’s still insulting. It’s sort of like me saying that Christians believe in their particular God because they have a death obsession, both personal and sexual. It’s bullshit, but if I put a name behind it, and a few fancy words, why do I need to argue for the position? Isn’t it obvious that it’s true?
On “Tunisia and Iraq”
Awww... Heidi, and just the other day you were telling me that people on the right never said that if you disagreed with their position on the war you were a traitor and/or in league with the enemy.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.