Remarkl
2 min readDec 18, 2021

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all human life deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.

Your position depends on this claim, but you offer no defense of it. Rather, you simply state it as a default position. But as a default position, it is subject to rebuttal. The only "rebuttal" you consider is the one about men controlling women. I don't think it's a particularly strong argument, but you don't even address it. Instead of denying the charge or its implications, you wander off into why society is to blame for women wanting abortion. But that's an argument FOR abortion while society is as it is. When you change the facts of society, we can revisit the morality of a particular response to the current state of play.

It's one thing to say that abortion is moral for now, but it would be nice if we lived in a world where it wasn't, although that claim would also require a defense that you don't seem willing to give. Without that defense, your argument is circular: abortion is immoral because we should live in a world where abortion is immoral.

The best rebuttal I can offer is that human life "deserves" nothing intrinsically. Rather, we confer impose duties on ourselves - e.g., to respect human life - so that we won't harm EACH OTHER. The question then is whether abortion is a first step down a slippery slope to Hobbes's war of all against all. A majority of people believe that it is not, that a line drawn at viability is foothold enough to rebut that argument. Thus, abortion poses no threat to "the peace" in the way that the murder of later-stage humans does, and so abortion should be both legal and, insofar as morality, especially for an atheist, is about the quality of life, moral, too.

BTW, your view on policing is bonkers. In many places, if you murder your neighbor, his kin will kill the first Black man they see. Most crimes are committed in stealth. How does the victim find the doer without a crime lab? YOU might feel guilt if you committed a crime. So what? State-sanctioned punishment does not alleviate guilt. Policing does not free anyone who is deterred by guilt to act without inhibition.

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Remarkl
Remarkl

Written by Remarkl

Self-description is not privileged.

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