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RowanE comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a "you must be this rational to ride" line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.
(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide - really pro it, not just the "lol yeah delicious babies" kind we sometimes see on LW. And there's a coherent position of "the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I'm contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem". But I don't think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )
Is "birth is the schelling point" really that rare a position? In LW circles it's in every discussion. Although the more common argument in wider circles is "one person's right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life of anyone whose life depends on impinging on the first person's bodily autonomy", cf "famous violinist".
Although I see both of the above as independently being enough to make it a slam-dunk for pro-choice, I'm pro-infanticide so don't have to actually worry about it.
People actually find the famous violinist metaphor convincing, would permit the "host" person to kill them? I'd be interested to see it happen in real life. To my mind society has always reserved the right to curtail your freedom where it would threaten others; compare e.g. the detention of Typhoid Mary.
Probably what would happen in real life would be that rights get ignored, people just take sides based on popularity, and being famous, the violinist wins. Or, people recognize it as the thought experiment from abortion debates, and the masses take sides based on previous pro-choice or pro-life opinions and nobody changes their minds and we don't learn anything.
I think there's a difference there between negative freedom and positive freedom - the freedom to go around spreading typhus everywhere, vs the freedom to not have things stuck in your body and the freedom to not be forced to dedicate resources to constantly keeping someone else alive.