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econerd4ever
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Name: Lisa
Country: United States
State: California
Metro: Los Altos
Birthday: 4/2/1988
Gender: Female
Interests:
(1) Clarinet
(2) Protecting the environment
(3) GLBT (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Trangender) Rights
(3.1415926535897932384626433832795
028841971693993751058209749445923) Math! (oh yes, math factorial)
Expertise: Clarinet? I dunno, I'm not that good at it, but better than at anything else that's considered a "good" quality. My other areas of expertise are procrastinating, confusing people, being gullible, practicing self-delusion, complaining, and saying "sorry" too much. And, I suppose, lamenting my negative qualities when I'm supposed to be focusing on something with as good connotations as "expertise."
Occupation: Student
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  econerd4ever
Member Since:
9/3/2003
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| You know you've been using LaTeX too much when you try to type a literature (as in English literature, not math literature) paper and type $ when you mean ". (or maybe it's just because I'm sleep deprived...)
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| The recent murder of Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who provided women's healthcare, including abortion, was an absolute, hypocritical tragedy. Anybody who thinks that killing abortion doctors saves fetuses should remind him/herself that women desperate enough to make the painful decision of terminating a pregnancy will probably find another doctor, and if none can be found, many will improvise, with often devastating results.
Please excuse me for using this recent event as an excuse to muse on the issue of abortion, life, and morality in general. I warn you, it's rambly. It's important for me to justify my opinions to myself, and this is my current attempt.
There are forms of life I have no problem with killing. For example, if I cut myself, I've killed some of my own cells. I don't make a habit of cutting myself, but I certainly don't have a moral problem with it. Similarly, I do not feel like a murderer each time I have my period, even though I'm losing an egg.
But right after conception, is that the difference? A single cell doesn't seem much like a person to me, nor does a clump of 16, 32, 64, etc. cells, although these are certainly alive, as was the egg before it was fertilized. Somewhere between then and birth, the clump of cells becomes a person. When is it sufficiently a person to protect it?
This train of thought leads me to question why we're so caught up with protecting human life anyway, when animals are fair game (at least as far as most people are concerned, certainly including lots prolifers). The explanation I've come to is that we're evolutionarily programmed that way. We don't kill other people because the human species does better that way. But eating other animals is our role in the food web.
This works out in comparison with most other species that are omnivores or carnivores. I doubt you'll find many vegetarians out there who hold cats to be immoral for killing mice. What's the difference? Humans are morally superior? I find that to be equally species-ist as the claim of meat-eaters that it's okay to kill animals because humans are superior for whatever other reason. I find myself concluding that the most egalitarian response is to accept our evolved role in the food web, as omnivores.
But one must also take into account current situation, and the current situation is that there are too many people to be supported sustainably. That's why I choose, when I can, to be vegan/vegetarian (I'm not currently vegetarian here in Spain, but I eat vegetables with preference over meat), since on average, it takes substantially more energy to produce the same food value in animal products than in plant products. This raises the question of why it's morally correct or necessary to aim to live sustainably, which is implicitly addressed below when I muse on my moral system in general.
But back to the question of abortion, since, not subscribing to any pre-made moral system such as a religion, I justify my morals based on what I'm evolutionarily programmed to favor, I realized that this question can't be resolved. Humans evolved before abortion was invented, so we didn't evolve an instinctive solution to the question of when a set {1 egg, 1 sperm} crosses the threshold of person-hood, and thus we didn't evolve a solution to the question of if and when it's okay to abort. Therefore, it really only makes sense to leave the question up to individual women and individual doctors.
Why do I resort to evolution to justify my morals? Because I don't want them to be arbitrary. I find myself not wanting to kill people, but having less of a problem with killing mosquitos. Some of my knee-jerk reaction morals are surely programmed by society, but where did society get them? I don't like trusting my instincts for important decisions without having a solid reason to do so. So I think about where my instincts come from, which is evolution, and I try to draw logical conclusions from what's biologically favorable.
Ultimately, then, I have chosen a basis, a system to trust, a fundamental assumption of preservation of species from which I attempt to derive all else. Because from basic, raw first principles, when I try to abstract away everything I've been programmed to believe, I can only conclude that there are no absolute morals and that there's really no purpose for morality at all. For that matter, there's no purpose for life at all; it's just a matter of probability, some really 'lucky' circumstances that happened millions of years ago. But I don't see any practical value in going about life dwelling on the idea that it has no purpose, so I decided to pick a set of axioms that conveniently, by definition, should justify what I feel instinctively is true.
This is, of course, circular in the sense that 'practical value' is a judgement based on the assumptions I've made. Fine. It's mathematically impossible to derive a conclusion with neither axioms nor premises. So I made the assumptions first. And under those assumptions, it makes sense to make them. Whatever; I had to start somewhere. But then I do have faith in something, which arguably makes no more sense than having a religion. The only difference I find is that I recognize that I've made an assumption rather than holding anything I believe to be an absolute truth.
Except, of course, that this is all assuming that logic is absolutely true. But the circularity of that line of reasoning is more than I want to try to wrap my brain around right now.
Upon proofreading, I realized one could make a human-species-preservation argument to decide the question of abortion as well. I suppose the answer would be something along the lines of avoiding abortion when the fetus is viable and when carrying out the preganancy won't compromise the health or reproductive ability of the woman, thus favoring the maximum number of healthy births. Although, also considering that abortion has only become common since overpopulation has become a problem, one could argue that aiming for a maximal number of healthy births is not what it currently favorable for our species.
As far as the law goes, it makes sense to me to leave the question up to individuals, largely because I don't trust anyone, not even myself and especially not a politician, to come up with all the necessarily exception cases to protect everyone who really 'should' have a right to an abortion.
That said, I don't know, if both the baby and the mother would come out healthy were the pregnancy carried to completion, it does seem kind of sad to me to abort. (Although, as I've already commented, I don't know when a potential-person becomes a person, and thus don't know when it becomes sad to abort.) Maybe the solution is to make it a lot easier to put a baby up for adoption. But I have no idea if that's practically possible.
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| Microfilm is cooler, but LexisNexis is SO CONVENIENT! | | |
| I need to work on seeing the big picture. Having ideas connect. Seeing everything in context.
I've been reading a journal article written in 1988. Then I noticed it was written in May, so I thought, "Cool! It's May now. So this was written exactly--um--um--[does mental calculation]--nineteen years ago."
That's when finally remembered I was born in 1988.
It's not that I didn't know when I was born. I just didn't make the connection.
It's not that this particular example is terribly important, or that my birth was relevant to this article. It just shows something scary. It shows how very little I process information and pass it through the filter of my own experience. I think I've had issues with this my whole life. It's why I'm too susceptible to written argument; I'm very bad at reading critically.
--Edit--
Speaking of journal articles, certificates are crazy, crazy things. It's amazing to have free access to stuff that normal people (read: non-college students) have to pay for and barely even realize it. My computer just takes care of it for me, and I download the article like anything else you can download for free. | | |
| It's 4:30 on Friday afternoon and the database linked off the library site is down. I'm not really sure why, but one reason is overuse.
Perhaps it's not fair to be annoyed that I'm not the only one who doesn't have a life. 
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