relativepaucity
relative paucity
relativepaucity

To be fair, not all cruisers have tinted windows (almost none, where I am), and officers are often in their cruisers for many more hours than we are. Also, part of the “safety hazard” is that they can’t see into your car when approaching to see whether you’re pulling a shotgun out from between the seats; we already

That’s very strange. I wonder how well this reconciles with studies that show speed itself is rarely a factor in collisions, but rather that differences in speed are typically the problem (i.e. going 70 doesn’t kill you, going 70 on a road with someone going 60 kills you). I’m not certain both of these findings can be

And, if you’ll permit me this slight divergence: this isn’t just an abortion question, it’s a question that has many, many implications for other important legal issues. Who deserves legal protection, and why? Let’s say we decide the critical factor is self-awareness, and since a foetus isn’t self-aware, it doesn’t

Well, there’s literally no other situation in which anyone is inside of someone else’s body! So we don’t have precedent to fall back on: thus, we have to fall back on first principles: what about life deserves legal protection? And I don’t have a problem with us saying that a foetus needs to be at some particular

Sure, but that happens rather a lot, where the rights of one person have to be limited because of the rights of some other person. As a general case, that’s kind of what laws are. Almost all abortion laws respect some point at which the foetus gets rights that then conflict with the mother; unless you’re proposing

As far as that goes, I do believe that any human’s right to what goes in and out of their body is not currently legally absolute; that’s not a gender issue, it’s how our current laws work. I’m absolutely open to the idea of giving humans back complete control of what goes into and out of their bodies, I’m just not

If “undecided” means “decided” to you, there’s probably not a lot further we could go in the conversation anyway. Thank you, though!

I believe humans have the right to autonomy over their own bodies, but I also believe laws put limits on that autonomy; my purpose is to find the point at which that’s appropriate, and apply it to this situation. The things I find genuinely uncertain - what life is, when the law should protect it - remain so, and so

But I haven’t made my choice: that’s the point. No one has yet convinced me that a foetus isn’t alive, just as no one has yet convinced me that a foetus isn’t alive. No one, in all the variety of conversations I’ve had on the topic, has been able to explain to me what “life” is, and where and when and why it deserves

Another excellent example of why I usually don’t get involved in these conversations: almost no one is willing to accept the genuinely uncertain, when their own moral certainty is so strong. That’s entirely all right, and I apologize if I’ve troubled you in any way. Go well, and if at any point you might wish to

If you believe in souls, I’m not sure that justifies terminating that soul’s vehicle: otherwise, we’d just be allowing murder of anyone. And the existence of souls is most definitely a belief, and not a scientific fact. The very problem I face is that I only embrace scientific fact, and science doesn’t hand out

I can’t quite do either of those things (and that could well be a flaw of mine and not of the universe itself). I can’t accept “commonly accepted” things: I have to have the proof, or at least a very strong amount of logical support. And how would I choose amongst the various basic principles upon which I could derive

And it’s not that I don’t get your point, but I think when I’m in that situation might be the worst possible time for me to make that moral judgement. Decisions made on the basis of emotion, in my experience, aren’t always the most ethical decisions I make.

As regards the robbing issue, I mention elsewhere - you’d have no reason to have seen it - that I think IUD failure rates are low enough that it’s difficult to use that as legal “assumption of risk,” so I think we agree as far as that goes.

Personally, I think I could make a pretty compelling argument that they should have to.

Okay, I see what’s happened, and if you’d please allow me the chance to explain, I think we could clear this up. The statement you’ve quoted is a conditional statement: “if...human life begins at...conception,” is the conditional part, the part I don’t know, the part I don’t think any of us really know, because we

Well, I haven’t been pregnant yet, but I’m reasonably familiar with the biological processes involved, and none of those you’ve described do anything to clarify, for me, what a human life actually is, when it begins, when it ends, when the government has the responsibility to protect it, and so on. You see EXTREMELY

Could you do me a big favor, and point out where I said abortion was murder?

I can say that because I’m not only addressing the article - although someone could argue that IUD failure rates are such that one could reasonably be said to be assuming risk for the pregnancy, I would argue that’s probably a case where it would be reasonable to feel pretty damned safe you weren’t going to get

That’s something I think about a lot: I typically don’t think governments should legislate morality, so this bridge between ethics and laws is a difficult one for me. For example, I think government should get entirely out of the “who can get married” issue, and step back to do nothing but enforce the legal contract