I think this is a worthless debate.
I've run into far too many bloggers whose content I enjoy who then feel compelled one day to write about abortion. This inevitably pisses everyone off.
The core of the abortion debate - on both sides - is squick factor, not logic. There are compelling arguments on either side, but no one ever gives the opposition any heed. It's ultimately about whether or not abortion makes you feel funny. My own stance, and the reasons I have for holding it, are not going to convince anyone for more than five minutes before they find a counter argument that supports their gut feeling.
Also, you're wrong about gun control; there is mounting evidence that banning guns results in higher crime, while legalizing them causes crime to decrease. I don't think this argument suffers the same squick factor; while many people knee-jerk to gun control because they're afraid of firearms (and because government legislation feels like 'doing something', no matter how ineffective it is), I've successfully argued many people into changing their stance by presenting evidence.
Abortion? I don't even trust my own rationality to be completely valid, despite holding a stance which goes against what I would like to believe. It's a black hole of rationality fail.
I think this is a worthless debate.
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The core of the abortion debate - on both sides - is squick factor, not logic.
Yet this is a good start, to observe that a final unmoving 'nay' emotion is the core of any morality debate. When people acknowledge that what's 'right' isn't related to a logical argument, there are two immediate consequences:
First, they realize that their morality doesn't need to be justified by logical arguments: morality is arational. This makes morality safe from logical argument. No one can convince a person that something i...
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.