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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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It certainly can't be "equally" applied! No one has to have their body mutilated and bodily autonomy violated and health harmed and life threatened and put through excruciating discomfort to support people with disabilities.
I'd be fascinated to see it applied equally.
Nazis are coming with an army to kill disabled people and minorities. In order to fight the Nazis, conscription is necessary. Is it moral under this framework to conscript a white CIS man to fight to protect disabled people and minorities if the Nazis would otherwise have left that white CIS man alone?
Fighting, of course, means putting him at risk of mutilation, deprives him of his bodily autonomy, and consists of a lot of excruciating discomfort even if he isn't wounded.
Surely there must be better arguments for abortion that don't rely solely on the Western conception of individual rights as a moral and ethical basis?
"Should we build a slave army of cracker conscripts to fight the Nazis" is a fun thought experiment, but the logistics would be a nightmare! That's how you get conscripts fragging their superior officers. I suppose you could maybe keep them under control with bomb collars or something, but uh, at that point we have firmly left moralism far behind us.
Also, can you give me a justification for 100% of abortions that ignores whether the baby is a person or a clump of flesh?
If you want to bring the practicalities of a hypothetical moral scenario into this then the violinist argument, which involves stitching an unwilling person to a sick person to share a kidney, fails even harder.
My point in the abstract is this: the violinist argument is one that myopically focuses on individual rights. It proposes that an individual cannot be forced to do anything that may result in bodily harm in service of a "greater good". The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good. Mandatory service to fight Nazis is merely the clearest cut example.
I support abortion rights for many reasons. However, the violinist argument itself is incredibly flawed both logically and rhetorically and I don't think it's a helpful argument to make. It can be so easily reframed into a scenario where both sides have reasonable arguments and doesn't really prove anything. It's main crux is just the visceral reaction to the disgusting nature of the scenario.
I brought in practicalities because I didn't feel like addressing the horrific implications of your hypothetical moral scenario. But! Okay.
Again, you have left moralism behind. Using your logic, it is sometimes moral to ban abortion: if we need to increase the population to fight off the fascists, if we need to repopulate after the antifa war, etc. In fact, using your logic, it is moral to force people to get pregnant in the first place. Without bodily autonomy as a basis for ethics, how do you avoid forced birth baby factories?
My scenario is not a hypothetical scenario. It is one that happened between 1941 and 1945. Millions of people lost their lives to defeat fascism. I consider mandatory service as imposed by the USSR to be morally defensible, even if the bodily autonomy of millions of people were violated. Do you consider that forcing Soviet citizens to take up arms was morally indefensible?
Sorry, I didn't realize you were making a historical point!
I misread it because you're ignoring the fact that Nazis do not consider Russians to be Aryan. Hitler had viewed Slavs and Serbs and Poles as primitive subhumans the same as Jews. So actually, no, the scenario you were talking about is not something that actually happened. Soviet citizens were conscripted to fight in their own interests, not just in the interests of minorities. Your example is ahistorical.
I will admit that the Violinist is overly individualistic, to the point that maybe I should adopt a different framework. I was just describing how I came to my pro-choice beliefs, but in hindsight that was back when I was a liberal Christian teenager trying to comprehend the issue within that specific moral framework. These days I can see the weaknesses you're talking about and, though I disagree with the example you used, I think you make a good point that I should adopt a less atomized vision of abortion.
Do you have a recommendation?
The historical example is perfectly apt because we know from Nazi historical documentation that a certain percentage of Eastern Europeans were considered acceptable for "Germanization" after total Nazi victory. Therefore, under the moral framework of the violinist argument, it would have been unacceptable for that percentage of Soviet citizens to be conscripted into service.
This highlights the problem with the violinist argument because it is an individualist argument that then purports to expand an individual right to a systematic right. If there is even a single Soviet Citizen (for example the Volga Germans which the Nazis expressly regarded as Aryan) which would have their "bodily autonomy" violated by conscription but not by Nazi rulr then the entire moral architecture of conscription to fight Nazism would be indefensible. However, stepping back from the violinist argument I think most people and almost all leftists would agree that conscription to fight Nazis is pretty reasonable.
We know that from documentation that Soviet citizens wouldn't have access to. From their perspective, the Nazis were coming to kill them all, so the Violinist doesn't apply because no one was confirmed safe. Anyone could die, so everyone had to fight.
Whatever. Doesn't matter.
Maybe you didn't read the second half of my comment. Here it is again:
I will admit that the Violinist is overly individualistic, to the point that maybe I should adopt a different framework. I was just describing how I came to my pro-choice beliefs, but in hindsight that was back when I was a liberal Christian teenager trying to comprehend the issue within that specific moral framework. These days I can see the weaknesses you’re talking about and, though I disagree with the example you used, I think you make a good point that I should adopt a less atomized vision of abortion.
Do you have a recommendation?
Because using your framework, it seems pretty easy to justify banning abortion and force women to give birth for the greater good.