Huh? We have a system of laws, now. The penal system should do what is necessary to keep people safe by sequestering criminals and deterring crime. But supplying "justice"? By which you seem to mean punishment in excess of what is strictly necessary, just to flaunt our ability to withhold forgiveness. No, that's silly.

Nobody has or ever will know what justice even refers to. What does it mean to be a man who killed 200 innocent people 20 years ago? I don't think anyone can really answer that question.

It's not anybody's job.

"What, then, is the just punishment for our most henious crimes?"

I'm sure I don't know. But it shouldn't be the government's job to supply "justice," or to communicate which crimes we especially don't like.

The criminal justice system should supply deterrence, and it should keep the populace safe from dangerous people. Since keeping the terminally ill in prison does neither of these things, it's on us to not do it.

"What will happen if I don’t go to H&R? Would you prefer me to say “by threat of force”?"

Only you would know if that were true. What if the government didn't have guns, or jails? Instead, a button would be pushed, your name would be flagged, and it would no longer be possible for you to participate in the American economy. Would that be enough incentive to get you to pay taxes?

Not by force.

"It’s that we say “this is being taken by force” as it is taken from us. For some reason, that really seems to grate."

Because by "taken from you," you refer to the process of you driving yourself to H & R Block, reporting all exemptions, writing out a check, putting it in the mailbox, and then watching some cable.

Yeah, whatever. The point I'm trying to make is that I always thought the word "conservative" was used to describe people who preferred safe and tested approaches to government, as opposed to crazy new schemes that more purely advance an ideology.

The reason state-sponsored single-payer health care appeals to me is that versions of it seem to have had pretty decent and steady results in other countries. And it's a lot cheaper then what we have going on in America. That's about all I need to hear.

I don't particularly understand how you can have "principled objection" to a policy that basically works fine and still call yourself conservative. Aren't you just an ideologue when you cross that line?

"Again, I’ve written a number of posts that present much more conservative proposals for health care reform"

Really? The conservative approach here is a move towards some form of single-payer, which at this point is market-tested and safe. But instead you're chastising your commenters for their "lack of imagination" and pushing for crazy utopian schemes. The proposals you favor are radical, not conservative.

You might want to similarly re-examine the whole of the exchange, since the same paranoia you've just identified in yourself is equally present in all of your posts on this subject.

The market has already spoken, my son.

You guys are grasping at straws. This essay is founded on the factual claim that single-payer health care has "precious little support from the population at large". It's a claim with very little basis in reality.

BCChase:
No. This is no longer a fact that can be waved away by whining about "wording." Polls show support for single-payer even when it's referred to as "socialized medicine", and also when it's explicitly tied to major tax increases. It's what lots of people want, but it's not being delivered because of an institutional bias in the government. I think this is so obvious that it's weird to deny it, but the entire essay is founded on this denial of reality.

"Neither of those findings capture what will happen if the government passes a bill that significantly changes things – it may work, it may not. "

I'm not making any such assertions. I'm just responding to Mark Thompson's claims that public support for single-payer healthcare is lacking.

Mark Thompson:
National single-payer health care, as you concede, polls better than any other option, strongly and consistently. The end. Next to that, your seven-year old referendum on state single-payer, which ran on negligible campaign funds, yet which the insurance industry had to spend a million bucks to keep to 20%, is pretty weak tea.

It would be far more accurate to admit that single-payer has strong public support, but the game is rigged against that option.

Dan Miller:
"B) Even if it is true, mere broad public support is only one component of something being politically viable. It sucks but it’s true."

No kidding. But Mark Thompson would prefer not to make that argument. Most of the country wants something that the political system won't deliver. He's apathetic to that, because he doesn't want what most of the country wants.

Yet, despite not caring that most of the country is being denied their top choice by entrenched special interests, he is deeply, deeply dismayed that the same interest groups have denied him his own pet project, which is like the eleventy-third choice of everybody else.

"Unfortunately, I don’t see single-payer ever getting the kind of popular support necessary to get passed in the US"

What do you mean? Single payer polls better than anything else.

Tim Kowal in sum: we must live in an unpopular Nightmare World that is less efficient then what the public wants, in service to some "principle" to be named later, which we will construct while group-hallucinating some secondary, sociopathic persona.

Mark Thompson

"While you may think that creating several different rights structures depending on fetal development is unprecedented, this does not equate to making it wrong."

It doesn't make it wrong, but once you have the infinite variance of rights structures in front of you, it becomes clear that the pro-life movement's actual goals have nothing to do with "expanding personhood", but in fact just with the creation of niggling regulations and some new class of not-persons that they can use to control the behavior and life choices of other people. Of course, this desire to create legally recognized fractional people is presented in the most self-aggrandizing terms. So, getting people to admit that their desire to restrict abortion is both morally neutral and irrational is a worthwhile rhetorical goal of its own.

"That effect alone could be deemed punishment enough"

Punishment? What about deterrence? Is it part of the new "right's structure" that fetuses are not entitled to deterrence?

"Perhaps we should not expect the law to make those exceptions"

Agreed.

"Is there anything inherently hypocritical about *NOT* charging her with murder for aborting her child?"

If your stated reason for wanting to restrict reproductive rights is that you want to protect the right to live of a fetus, yet you have no desire to use the full coercive power of the state to protect that right, then how are not a hypocrite?

"Otherwise you are arguing that Roe was too narrow, which is a position that virtually no one holds."

I hold that position. And I overwhelmingly agree with the substance of what you just wrote, and am glad to see someone else say it. Roe seems like a badly formed decision to me precisely because it invents that arbitrary line.

"Re: Draw a line for all time. I stand by this assertion -"

Who knows what would have happened if McCain had won the election, though? It seemed pretty dicey there to me for a few years. As for amending the Constitution, I understand that it's hard to do. It isn't impossible, if the political will is there.

"Indeed, if the Court had simply stopped at the point where it found that fetuses were not “persons” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment, and just held that there was an absolute right to an abortion up until the moment of birth, there would likewise be little problem - such a decision would have been consistent and avoided arbitrary line drawing;"

I agree. Unsurprisingly, I also believe that Roe's line of reasoning, attempting to wrangle some kind of logic behind this weird compromise, is strained and tortuous in real life. It's bad Supreme Courting, it would be bad law. But you seem to desire these sorts of compromises occur on a legislative level, as logically indefensible as they are. I don't understand that. There are two coherent arguments to make. One is that we draw the line at birth, the other is that we draw the line at conception, and just accept the strain of treating unborn human life the same as we treat each other. I think the latter would be impossible, so I accept the former. But the choice is between the two; that's just what it is.

"it also would have been so unpopular as to virtually guarantee some kind of a Constitutional compromise for an amendment such that the resulting situation would have had complete political legitimacy."

Boy, do I find that fanciful. Didn't you just argue that Constitutional Amendments are impossible to pass? I think that Blackmun was probably trying to bring his decision in line with the prejudices of the day (and today), when he wrote in that business about trimesters. However, Roe basically did end up legalizing all abortions for everybody because of the mental health exception to all late term restrictions. I mean, at least that's what Ramesh Ponnuru believes. And there's been no resultant political mobilization.

Wwhen it comes to abortion and the Constitution, we agree about a lot. However, what we seem to disagree on, which you're not addressing, is whether the Court should allow states to come up with their own mushy compromise laws that will, hypothetically, resolve the conflict, or at least make it into a nothing issue that doesn't affect elections. But I think all of those compromises are going to be inherently unconstitutional. I think these middle positions, popular as they are, aren't based on anything but primitive instinct. That's the word I'd use to describe the view that abortion should be banned unless the woman was a victim of assault: primitive.

It's not that the Supreme Court is limited to issuing decisions that set rights at conception, or that set rights at birth. It MUST force legislatures to choose between these two poles. Allowing these compromises to take place would be a dereliction.

@sidereal

Looking into it, you're probably closer to being right then I am. Both Obama and Naral support late term abortion bans, provided that there is a mental health exception for the mother. (Obama probably as a result of political pressure.) Though it gets muddy because the mental health exception can mean so many things.

Mark Thompson

"there is virtually no movement of people insisting that Roe’s protections were too narrow (which, believe it or not, would have been the more coherent position"

I don't get it. You agree that the maximalist position is more coherent then yours?

"There is an assumption in our public debate and in some of these comments that there is a “constitutional right to an abortion.” This assumption is incorrect, and is a position that the Supreme Court explicitly rejected in Casey and at least one other, earlier decision. Instead, there is a right to make reproductive decisions over one’s own body without unwarranted interference from the state. The trouble is that the SCOTUS drew a line for all time"

The Constitution doesn't explicitly guarantee a "right to an abortion".

The Constitution can be held to guarantee the right to an abortion, or to leave that matter to the states. I'm not a lawyer, but I understand that we leave those decisions to the Justices as a practical matter. Even so, their rulings are not considered "correct" or "incorrect" interpretations of what the Constitution promises. They're simply adopted into practice. No interpretation of the Constitution is "incorrect", even when the Supreme Court rules otherwise and you're just some BA.

As well, when the Court rules, it does not draw a "line for all time". That's why abortion becomes such a relevant political issue. Because there is a democratic process that both sides have access to.

Anyway, I find it difficult to argue that the Constitution guarantees unlimited abortion rights. But it also seems clear to me that the creation of a law that allows abortions to rape victims but not to women in identical physical circumstance but with a different backstory would violate the Constitution. The inevitable terminus point of such laws is the creation of "abortion tribunals" of some kind which decide which women are worthy of which surgeries. That's not America. If the Supreme Court was increased to ninety and ruled unanimously against me, it would not be enough to determine that I was "incorrect".

"The number of people who truly hold the maximal pro-choice view — that a mother should have the right to abort a fetus a day before due date on a whim — is vanishingly small, despite the heated rhetoric of many conservatives."

No it isn't. This is the position of all mainstream abortion-rights advocacy groups. I believe it's the policy position of our president, as well. It's also what I believe: unborn human life can be given no legal rights.

This maximalist position has the advantages of being logically consistent, unlike whatever central location on your graph you reside in. I don't find polling numbers to be a very compelling reason to hold the morally and logically compromised middle view superior.

"Still, that’s why Roe continues to engender such passion, and sadly indefensible violence as well - it removed a decision historically and properly the role of the legislature and/or localities, and turned it into a settled question of constitutional law despite acknowledging that the Constitution provides little guidance as to how to define a “person,”

It's disingenuous to claim that abortion restrictions have anything to do with redefining the idea of what it means to be a person. Nobody wants to expand the definition of personhood to include all human life. That would be impossible to live up to, anyway. Abortion restrictions are actually about creating a NEW category of human life, one that has rights which are more important than the rights of people who engage in certain types of disfavored behavior, but less than other people who are totally cool. It's ludicrous for McArdle to claim that we ever granted personhood to fetuses in the same way that we granted personhood to African-Americans.

Another way of saying this is that it is obviously unconstitutional to have abortion bans that make exceptions for rape victims, and if the bans make these kinds of exceptions, then "personhood" is obviously not what's at stake.

"ask whether it’s possible to alleviate the causes of that legitimate grievance by giving them an avenue to pursue that grievance legitimately."

Pro-lifers have that avenue. What you're suggesting is putting a thumb on their side of the scales, so that pro-life majorities should be able to get their way even when they want to enact laws that violate the Constitution.

I don't mind that pro-lifers consider themselves to be beautiful nebulae beyond the restrictions of law and logic. I just wish you'd stop inventing language designed to obscure this fact.

Kyle, it's not that your examples are silly, and I don't see how either of them are rare. It's that they aren't what you claim them to be: test cases that expose how difficult it would really be to live in a world where humans only attained the protection of the law at birth. Your examples just don't make anything seem less clear-cut. In fact, even after reading your second explanation, I don't see what you're trying to illuminate.

I'm sorry to push back so hard, because your posts don't bother me, and there's nothing wrong with throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what happens. What bothers me is that Chris Dierkes uncritically quotes you as if you've been successful in your rhetorical goals. You haven't, and he should know better.

Chris Dierkes
"Unless you’re thinking of cows/horses, most humans are born with the head out first."

I think I misunderstood your intent. Yes, babies are born head first, but partial-birth abortions are performed on babies whose heads haven't breached. This is for reasons that have to do with physics more than morality.

I guess that's what it boils down to. The reason I don't consider it a moral quandary that a toe-in baby has attained legal rights, while a head-in baby has not, is that the entire argument is predicated on two colliding facts. One is that birthing the skull is mutilating, and the other is that no one really believes that unborn human life really has equal human rights. Nobody on the planet, nobody in human history. (OK, that's a possible overstatement. Perhaps there have been a handful who sincerely would run into a burning building to save an embryo.) My stance generates from that collision.

But most of us do think that unborn life has moral value, and we think of ourselves as people who value things that have moral value, and fret that we aren't valuing it as much as our descendants who will have even more leisure time. So, Freddie shares his "quiet moments" and is applauded for his honesty.

Well, not by me. I think Freddie, was being, though honest, also wishy-washy, self-indulgent, and unhelpful. He ought not to have published anything he had to qualify so many times as late-night, unaccountable whatever.

What's most irritating is the way his post has become a celebration of moral muddle, so long as it is felt by one side of the argument.

Well, look, my stance is that it is clear-cut. I'm not buying any of this. Legal rights can be granted at birth. Or, we can completely reorganize society, rethink everything, and grant them at conception. No form of compromise between these two positions will cohere.

"I am not interested in who is scientifically human; I’m interested in who has gained human rights."

Oh, excuse me. Perhaps you might clarify who the people are that you describe as "horrific". You believe that fetuses are not "persons". You define "persons", correct me, as people who have human rights. So then, the horrific view is that fetuses have the same human rights as people, but that we should take them away anyway?

Who, precisely, is expressing this view?

Let me put the question another way. When Kyle asks "What happens when a doctor, for medical reasons relating to the mother, induces early labor? Does he violate her right to abort the fetus up until the day of natural birth?"... uh, what, exactly, is he talking about? What is going on in his anecdote? Is the doctor inducing labor in a woman who requested an abortion, against her own will? Or what? How is this "plot-hole" in ANY WAY puncturing the argument that unborn humans can't adequately be protected by the law?

"If the fetus/child (depending on your pov) is halfway out of the mother’s womb–say the head and not the bottom half of the torso"

You mean, the reverse of what happens in real life?