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Dr. Tiller gunned down by Christian maniac.

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TheEgoist

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The New York Time ran a good op-ed on Tiller. The op-ed also points to this site where 5 women explain why they went to Dr. Tiller. (Of course, the Christian extremists will brush off such stories as insufficient cause to have an abortion, because they think that no defect found in the fetus is reason enough.)

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My question is... Rationally, why is it immoral to wantonly kill an animal or a fetus? is it because it is irrational and without purpose?

I don't think wanting to kill an animal and an abortion are in any way similar. You can't have an abortion for the sake of abortion, it is a choice you have to make for your own sake, unless you want to have a child. There aren't unrelated fetuses out there for you to seek out and kill, even though you could just live your life separate from them.

As for the animal killing, it's unclear to me that it is immoral to want to kill an animal, just for the sake of doing it, in the context of hunting. Why would it be, hunting is a sport many people enjoy. It is true though that hurting an animal just for the sake of hurting it (as in to torture it), is an indication of a dysfunctional psychology. It is immoral to indulge that psychology rather than working to change.

Edited by Jake_Ellison
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Typically one doesn't want to "just kill" an animal for the sake of killing an animal, Jake.

There are important life-affirming skills developed (fieldcraft for a hunter, identifying targets in the terrain you hunt in, etc.,) and often the target is either delicious to eat, beautiful to behold in the form of a trophy, or a pest that is a nuisance to humans in general (and thus the task accomplishes the first reason while also helping out other humans, which, in a benevolent human, does not take priority in anything but cases of charity, but is still icing on the cake.

In addition a hunter seeks to give his prey a quick death with as little pain as his skill is able to deliver. This is not primarily out of consideration for the animal (or you wouldn't be killing it,) but again selfish reasons. Wanton suffering in animals is not a rational goal. If your goal is to kill something, you want it dead as soon as possible. And, of course, a wounded animal that goes down later loses a lot of its taste.

I distinguish hunting quite a bit from, say, capturing a squirrel and torturing it for your own amusement, eventually killing it. The former develops life-affirming skills and is a rational goal to pursue, if it interests you. I do not think there is a rational motivation for causing suffering in animals for the sake of causing the suffering; quite the contrary, I think it is a warning sign to other humans that this guy may have a screw or two loose.

The above, of course, should not be considered to include many legitimate pursuits that can and do cause pain to animals (medical testing comes to mind.) I do not consider that causing 'wanton suffering.' IE the goal is not the animal's suffering itself but some ancillary benefit that the animal must suffer to receive.

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  • 3 weeks later...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8vm38UD80Y...player_embedded

Ann Coulter is an evil...Well, I believe my message may be deleted if I truly spoke my mind here. It rhymes with tucking blunt.

Wow...she said she didn't really believe it was a murder but rather a termination in the 235th trimester! and that if you don't believe in killing abortionists then don't kill abortionists -- directly implying that if you do believe in killing abortionists, then have at it!

This is definitely one of those cases where I don't think the religious Right will be on board for individual rights. If one believes that God puts a soul into the fetus -- at conception or at the third trimester -- then logically one cannot consider murdering an abortionist to be murder. In other words, Dr. Tiller's individual rights were most definitely violated, but the religion of the Right prevents, at least some of them, from seeing it as Dr. Tiller being the individual who was murdered.

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In fairness to Ann Coulter (Can't believe I'm defending her), she was making a play on moral relativity. An argument that pro-abortionists use is "If you don't believe in abortion, then don't have an abortion."

Her statement: "If you don't believe in killing abortionists then don't kill abortionists.", was simply a play on that argument.

On a personal note, I have a really hard time drumming up any sympathy for this guy. The things he did to babies in the third trimester I wouldn't even consider doing to a cockroach.

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So you prefer for the mother to die?! Did you even read the article about the women who have late-term procedures? Did you read how he was their last and sometimes only resort?

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In fairness to Ann Coulter (Can't believe I'm defending her), she was making a play on moral relativity. An argument that pro-abortionists use is "If you don't believe in abortion, then don't have an abortion."

Her statement: "If you don't believe in killing abortionists then don't kill abortionists.", was simply a play on that argument.

On a personal note, I have a really hard time drumming up any sympathy for this guy. The things he did to babies in the third trimester I wouldn't even consider doing to a cockroach.

Are you taking into account that many of these "babies" (they are not) were either dead already or horribly deformed? Those are the two main reasons for having such a late abortion. Not only should you have sympathy for this guy, you should demand his murderer be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, like any other scumbag.

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Are you taking into account that many of these "babies" (they are not) were either dead already or horribly deformed? Those are the two main reasons for having such a late abortion. Not only should you have sympathy for this guy, you should demand his murderer be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, like any other scumbag.

Are you taking into account that many of these "babies" (they were), weren't either dead already or horribly deformed?

By the way, his murderer should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Just because I think the guy who got killed was a dirtball doesn't make his murderer any less a murderer, and doesn't mean that I believe any less in the rule of law.

Edited by NotCrazyDan
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http://www.up-video.com/watch.php?type=you...p;v=mviFMpy_sBU

Watch this. It's an interview with Dr. Paul McHugh who was contracted by the Kansas state Attorney General to determine the necessity of Dr. Tiller's activities. He conducted his investigation 3 years ago. More informative than the propaganda rag calling Tiller a hero.

"I say then that assigning a fetus the human right to life only 'after it is born' is being arbitary, and hense, not rational.

As there is no objective measure for consciousness aside from human/non-human I say that stating any cutoff between when a fetus is endowned with the rights of a human other than conception is unreasonable."

Ok fine, not human beings, still "babies" which is what I called them. Pluck a kid out of the womb in the 3rd trimester and a 'baby' is what you have.

Edited by NotCrazyDan
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Ok fine, not human beings, still "babies" which is what I called them. Pluck a kid out of the womb in the 3rd trimester and a 'baby' is what you have.

But they aren't plucked out of the womb, which is the point -- they aren't separated from the woman, and therefore have no individual rights. The woman is the only individual involved in the decision as to whether to abort or not. So, the only necessity of an abortion to consider is the woman's right not to be burdened by a child to raise for eighteen years of her life; and no one has the authority to tell her she must do this.

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By the way, by your own reasoning, since you don't know the point at which a fetus/baby develops consciousness, and any such point that you place would be arbitrary, how can you say they don't have one? I reject that definition anyway. Calling a baby a "not human" because it's in an earlier state of development is silly. In any case, third trimester babies = definitely conscious. If you don't believe me ask a late term pregnant woman.

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Calling a baby a "not human" because it's in an earlier state of development is silly.

By that logic, it would be silly not to call a 10 year old child a senior citizen just because it's in an early stage of aging.

How does this make sense? It's not a baby when it's in the womb but it gets born 30 seconds later and boom it's a baby and suddenly has rights?

Yes. It doesn't have rights until it becomes an individual being.

This is similar as to how a sperm is not an embryo while it's traveling through the penis, but it is once it's fused with an egg. There's always a cutoff point as to when things become other things.

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It was an individual being before, it was just encased in embryonic fluid. Nothing changed about it except its location. Comparing a viable baby to a sperm is like comparing the moon to a pebble. The two terms don't equate.

Not that I'm a mod or anything, but all of this has been covered in our "official" abortion thread which I already linked.

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Are you taking into account that many of these "babies" (they were), weren't either dead already or horribly deformed?

By the way, his murderer should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Just because I think the guy who got killed was a dirtball doesn't make his murderer any less a murderer, and doesn't mean that I believe any less in the rule of law.

Yes, I am taking that into account. I do not need to evade knowledge of what kind of procedure is going on here to stand firm in my position. And they are still not babies. It is a fetus unless and until it is physically separated from its mother, no longer depending directly on her body as its sole source of survival.

I am specifically making the case that this man was not a dirtball at all but a very brave man performing a needed service, and it ultimately cost him his life. Where you mention what another doctor had to say about the "necessity" of these medical procedures that sounds like a blatant appeal to authority to me. There is no reason that the Attorney General should even be involved in "overseeing" medical procedures. That is between the doctor and patient, and possibly a third party who pays for the procedure like an insurance provider. You think it's going to be difficult to find a doctor who doesn't like abortion in Kansas for crying out loud? Lots of doctors say lots of things that are wrong. Obstetricians frequently say that episiotomy is safe and effective or that it's best for a woman to give birth laying on her back but that doesn't make either of those things true or correct. The truth is that there is absolutely no medical reason for an episiotomy and a healthy woman should give birth squatting or otherwise upright. Obstetricians hardly have the monopoly on being correct.

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You're wrong, and wrong.

Appeal to Authority:

This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.

A psychiatrist employed to determine if babies being terminated in the 3rd trimester to avoid 'A substantial and irreversible impairment" if they didn't have the abortion (Which is what Kansas state law requires. The reason they employ a psychiatrist is because for most of these cases, the claims were psychological ones (don't want to gain weight, want to go to the prom, etc. etc. So he IS an expert acting within HIS expertise, and therefore it is NOT an appeal to authority. An appeal to authority would be if I trotted out an expert on phrenology to confirm that man causes global warming.

Secondly, since Kansas state law does have standards by which someone can get a late-term abortion 'A substantial and irreversible impairment', the State Attorney General DOES have grounds for investigation.

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Secondly, since Kansas state law does have standards by which someone can get a late-term abortion 'A substantial and irreversible impairment', the State Attorney General DOES have grounds for investigation.

By man's life as the standard and the principle of individual rights, the State has no authority to intervene in this type of personal decision, since the fetus is not an individual and has no rights. The law is not the standard of morality. The law or the State may well claim to have the authority, since it has the guns to enforce its edicts, but it has no right to interfere.

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You say the word fetus because it implies that we're talking about a clump of cells. We're talking about babies in the third trimester. I can call them babies because if they were outside of the womb, you'd get a baby. The fact that they're currently inside the womb doesn't make them any less a baby. Call it what it is.

Secondly, the people of Kansas, like me, reject the prevailing rationale of this board when deciding when a human being becomes a human being. This is not something that can be settled scientifically because there's no way of knowing when consciousness or the ability to reason sets in. Therefore you seem to be starting from the conclusion "I want women to be able to have an abortion under any and all circumstances and nobody else should have a say in it" and working backwards.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Why have a baby when you don't want one? That's what I tell myself every time the abortion argument comes on. There are other reasons like, the baby could potentially kill the mom (Rhesus factor), or the baby would go be in a world of hurt before dying. The baby has no right to life yet, solely because it's still unborn, and it is still dependant on the mother; thus negating the abortionist' argument.

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