On May 20, 2005, at 10:20 AM, Horn, John wrote:
theBehalf Of Warren Ockrassa
To be fair, I think we should talk about the hypotheticals, evenones that seem (to some of us at least) only remotely feasible ornotparticularly relevant, because if something is reasonablypossible,eventually it'll probably happen.
Hypotheticals are OK. As a programmer myself, I am constantly trying to think about what could hypothetically happen with various program inputs, etc. But there comes a point when you have to say "this is way too unlikely to worry about".
Which is fine if we're talking about crashing an OS, but I think Dan -- and almost surely John -- are coming from the perspective that abortion can be murder, at least in some cases, which changes the valence of the discussion and almost requires hypotheticals.
The consequences of overlooking these possibilities become considerably more dire if you also believe there's a god that punishes murderers with eternal damnation, and particularly if you believe that a society complicit in abortion has blood on its collective hands.
Heck, if we worried about an unethical doctor approving a diagnosis that doesn't apply, they could just do it with a *real* DX that states the woman's life is in danger.
Yes, of course; that's a nice loophole in the legal definitions, and just another reason to *not* start splitting hairs over when or if abortion is acceptable. It makes more sense to develop a social milieu that implicitly assumes most people, most of the time, are behaving in ways that are ethically rational, a society that doesn't insist on enforcing the views of *some* people over others'.
Of course that's probably impossible, for a number of reasons, but there seems to be a trend in the US toward its opposite: Laws, laws and more laws enforcing things that most people, if they think about it for a moment, would find unnecessary.
Or should we get rid of the police and prisons because there is a non-zero chance that an unethical cop might plant evidence on an innocent person?
There's a huge difference between being falsely imprisoned and being killed.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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