Phred said:
Then don't have an abortion. Otherwise, it's not your decision. The fetus isn't a being with rights. It's not viable and as such the decision is about the woman's body, not the fetus..
I usually don't touch these arguements, but the issue of rights always interests me.
Musical rights. There are the hypothetical future generations, ie those who could possibly become a zygote and then a human. There are merely concieved, ie a zygote. And then there is us, the humans. Follow my logic here.
1] It's all about the guy and the girl, because the aborted tissue was just a fetus or fetuses, so it/they had no rights whatsoever which had to be considered in the present.
2] The fetus/fetuses were merely conceived.
3] The merely conceived have no rights whatsoever.
4] Before having no rights whatsoever, the recently merely conceived things were merely hypothetical members of some future generation, though, they became
less hypothetical and more potentially concrete by becoming merely conceived.
5] There is no member of any future generation that becomes an actual member of a present generation without passing through the state 'merely conceived, with no rights whatsoever.'
6] Hypothetical members of future generations clearly have no rights whatsoever.
Therefore, the underpinnings of most environmental arguments are totally baseless. We have no obligation to respect the rights of merely hypothetical members of future generations, because clearly, all such instances are things which must transist to the present by way of a state in which they have no rights whatsoever.
Conservation of natural resources, long term treatment of nuclear waste, etc., etc., has no basis in rights, at least, rights of entities capable of having rights.
Surely, if future generations are capable of holding rights that are our present obligation to defend, then they do not give up those(and all rights)simply by being conceived?
Or, do they?
If that is true, then future generations have no rights at all.
I mean, it's OK that we 'care' about future generations, and are concerned for them, and all of that, but when it comes to legislation and rights and judicial matters and so on, there is no basis for 'rights' that must consider future generations, because they have not been born, and thus, have no rights.
I'm going to dispose of my nuclear waste using a mechanism that will absolutely last about 200 years, and then most probably completely fall apart. It's either that, or spend ten times as much today to deal with the problem.
Likewise, I'm also going to consume natural resources at a rate that will guarantee that they are all consumed in about 200 years. It's ewither that, or spend ten times as much today to deal with the problem.
Is there any legal problem with any of that, or is there any basis for legislative action, and if so, whose rights would I be violating if I were to behave that way? On whose behalf am I incurring additional cost today if I must consider their rights in the future?
Or, is it just some general 'consideration' that I owe future generations, unlike the consideration that is not owed members of same who are merely conceived?
So, the unborn have no rights...maybe. I'd have to concede that, because it is obviously the case. But, I'd have to quote something in a different context, because it applies:
At the banquet table of Nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take. You keep what you can hold.
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph
Pure Law of the Jungle. In Nature, the strong rule with impunity. In our case, applied temporally; the current generations are sitting at the banquet table, the unborn/future generations are not.
So, the unborn have
no legal rights. They have only what we deem are fluid 'moral/ethical' obligations to consider.
That is, the fluidity is directly proportional to how sufficiently convenient it is to be magnanimous. As in, the costs are paid by some vague others for our caring about future generations. When the costs and inconveniences are immediate and personal, 'moral/ethical' issues immediately give way to the Temporal Rule of The Jungle. That couldn't be more clear, and we shouldn't dress it up as some Holy thing.
I asked my son this question last night, and posed it this way:
Suppose our nation had toxic/nuclear waste to render safe, and had two basic options. Option A would last about 200 years. Option B would last 50,000 years, but would
inconveniently cost 20 us times as much. Which option
should we choose?
He thought B. Most of us, I think, would think that B is the option that we
should choose. So, I asked him to think about the 'why' of that; where does that come from?
This is not a 'legal' question, because 'the unborn have no rights.' No, it is a 'moral/ethical' question, and that is how he identified it. I said, "But we and everyone we love will be long gone. The only folks around will be that subset of hypothetical future generations that have actually been conceived and have made it past their own personal family gauntlet to get here, to the Banquet Table. Why
should we accept the inconvenience of addition immediate burden on their behalf? What is the
source of that moral/ethical obligation to merely potential future life?
It's not a question with a firm answer, because we clearly answer it differently depending, as far as I can see, only on the selfish proximity of the inconvenience/costs involved with the moral/ethical caring.
Because...
We
want what we
want; carte blanche to treat our sexual selves as recreational beings only, as we wish and when we wish, governed only by our Holy intentions. And, uncomfortable confrontatons with the conflict between the consequences of our actions and the personal inconvenience of dealing with those consequences immediately cause us to squirm and wiggle and rationalize while it is
suddenly OK to punt on moral/ethical concern for
factual instances of those potential future generations we once cared deeply about, when the costs and inconveniences were far removed/safely over the horizon...
There is yet not even one anecdotal contradiction to the fact that
every single possible instance of members of those future generations we claim to have moral/ethical concerns for get here by way of the state of being merely conceived, and yet in that state, we have no consensus ethical/moral concern for them whatsoever.
Instead, at best. incantations about 'group rights as opposed to individual rights,' as if we were all still dressed in skins and dancing around the tribal fire at some volcano.
So, it comes down to this. If, once explicitely invited, factual instances of future generations can survive the scalpal wielding gauntlet governed only by our convenience, they are welcome to fight for a seat at Nature's Banquet table.
That is, and this is a new one, if Mom is willing to feed them in the baby chair.
We want what we want, and are willing to dance every dance imaginable until we get it; a Holy wink and nod from the rest of the tribe when we individually flush an anctual member of the potential future generations down some **** hole, in the name of our convenience.