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This has nothing to do with not enjoying our exchanges--I enjoyed them, also. Nor does it have anything to do with enjoying debate only when people agree with me. I enjoy being disagreed with, as a matter of fact. But, like I said, if you have a point, make it. Or if you honestly think that I am being unclear or in some way disingenuous, please point out specifically when and where I did that so that I might respond specifically or, if you are correct, admit that I was wrong.

It's not that I want you to shut the fuck up, it's that, if you're going to take the time to comment, give me something I can sink my teeth into or, at the very least, give me a good logical ass-kicking. Tired comparisons to Bill Clinton hardly count as either.

Perhaps my favorite rejoinder was "shut the fuck up". The charge that I was extremely, purposefully obtuse was a close second, but I have to give you style points for your mastery of profanity. Then again, the thought of being purposefully obtuse is appealing. When you throw in "extremely", it becomes much more so. I am really torn.

Despite your apparent misgivings, I enjoyed our exchanges. I am glad to see that you appreciate open and honest debate, so long as everyone agrees with you.

Cato,
This whole thing's gone on long enough. You're not making a point or even countering anything I've said. You're just standing by your original, absurd assertion.

You disagree with my opinion, and that's fine. But don't insist that I be clear and then refuse to acknowledge when I have been. If you have something constructive to say, say it.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

Thanks for the offer of clarification. Despite your stirring defense of your own tautology, my point remains. Read your earlier posts. In your second post on the issue, you say that "my opinion is that I have no opinion". When challenged, you argue that your position on the issue is "clear" but "not concrete." You then ramble through a real stem-winder to more fully explicate your position. It's Clintonian in fluidity--"it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." You should run for office.

Seacrest out.

Cato,
The only thing that might serve to make my position unclear is the fact that you are being purposely obtuse. Extremely so, even.

Let's take a close look at the statement which you propose as being analogous to mine and which you base your conclusion that my position is both clear and potentially tautological. You say "If there are rain clouds tomorrow, it may rain, then again, it may not." You are certainly correct that such a statement does not have much meaning--it just advances the possibility that given some condition, essentially anything might happen. If we were to rewrite your statement in logical terms, we might do so as follows: X->Yv-Y. You would certainly be correct in saying that such a statement is both unclear and tautological.

My position on abortion, however, is not analogous. My position is as follows: If a fetus is a person, then abortion is morally unacceptable. But, if a fetus is not a person, then abortion is morally acceptable. Translating this statement into logical notation, we arrive at this forumlation: (P->-A)&(-P->A), where P is "fetuses are people" and A is "abortion is morally acceptable." Although it's been some time since I manipulated symbolic logic, I'm fairly certain that the statement [X->Yv-Y][(P->A)&(-P->A)] is untrue and that, therefore, the two statements are not analogous.

But one doesn't need to engage in such contrived logic puzzles in order to see that you are incorrect. You might be unsatisfied with my position on the grounds that I don't pick a side, but it is incorrect to say that it is unclear. My statement is much more analogous to the following: If Mr. Vice already watered the plants today, then I won't. But if he didn't, then I will. If you asked me whether I was going to water the plants and that was my response, it would be foolish of you to respond that my answer was unclear, even though you wouldn't be able to say with much certainty whether I'd be watering the plants. At most, you'd be able to say that my future actions depended on some condition outside of my control. But that's neither unclear nor tautological--that sort of statement has lots of meaning in every day life.

I understand the conflict you see between my avowed valuation of human life and my potential acceptance of abortion. My response is to redirect you back to my positions on the death penalty and abortion. I oppose the death penalty because of the value I see in human life and because everyone subject to the death penalty is clearly human. But I would potentially accept abortion if it were somehow determined that fetuses were not human. In a world where a prisoner is a human but a fetus is not, I can clearly be opposed to the death penalty but supportive of abortion, assuming that the thing I value most is life.

In the hypothetical you posit--where life beings at conception and we also want to preserve self-determination--my position continues to be clear. I value a woman's right to self-determination--which is to say that it's not something I discount lightly or out of hand--but I nonetheless value another person's right to life more. So, given those facts, I would oppose abortion in most circumstances.

As far as contraception, I'm sorry for being unclear in my original comment. I'll try to clear it up a little now. One of the secondary reasons that I am less vehemently pro-choice than many of my friends is that I see very few reasons why accidental pregnancies should happen outside of very rare circumstances. A woman has a right to self-determination, but that doesn't mean that she and her partner don't have an obligation to be responsible on the front end. When I've made this argument in the past, I've been informed that some women--for, as I said, various social and religious reasons--don't have access to contraception, so it would be unfair to deny them access to abortion simply because they are denied the means to be responsible on the front end. That's all I meant there.

Anything else I can clear up for you?

I think your response is pathetic. "My stance on abortion is clear, even if it's not very concrete: if a fetus is a person, I'm opposed in most circumstances. If it's not, I'm cool with it."

Explain, if you would, how that is "clear." Your position is that you have two positions, and borders on the tautological. (If there are rain clouds tomorrow, then it may rain, then again, it may not.) Most of your arguments seem to share this common trait. Despite your protestations otherwise, you are being intellectually dishonest. I submit that your opinion on the death penalty necessarily informs the other, at least as far as you have formulated your argument. And, as I stated previously, you go on and on about the value of human life in your defense of the opposition to the death penalty. How could one value human life so much so as to object to the death penalty, and, at the same time, be potentially "cool" with the idea of abortion because you aren't sure when life begins?

You also add the concept of self-determination into the mix, which further clouds your positions. Suppose that everyone agrees that life begins at conception. Suppose further that we all agree on a woman's right to self-determination. Now what? How is your position "clear" at that point?
Finally, and perhaps least importantly, what does contraception have to do with any of this? You argue moral points as to the sanctity of life and our flawed legal system, but them complain that people may be having unprotected sex? I am shocked, shocked!!

The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

Now I see the problem with my view: it depends on thinking that moral views should derive from TV shows. If I didn't think that, I don't know how else I could arrive at the ridiculous, horrible view that it is sometimes ok to kill a person who has ruined the lives of other people, and who is almost sure to ruin the lives of many more people unless I kill them.

"Regarding the flawed legal system argument, I have always wondered what percentage of the 'innocent people' who are executed deserve to die for other reasons."

The phrase "deserve to die" sticks in my mind on this one. The casual way we discuss life and death is frankly astounding to me. I find that one human being claiming the moral authority to decide that another human being deserves to die is jaw-dropping in its hubris. I fully support the idea that if someone is a confirmed murderer, rapist, or other form of predator, that we as a society have a right to remove that person from society indefinitely. I cannot, however, subscribe to the notion that any single one of us, or even the State as a whole, has a right to determine that a human being is not worthy of life.

And if you're basing your moral code on "Dexter," I hate to say it, but you're pretty fucked up. It's cool for one serial killer to kill another serial killer because the second serial killer is a "terrible person?" Um, no. Maybe it makes for good television, and that's fine. It is, after all, television. But let's be clear - in real life, there's nothing remotely acceptable about letting one killer murder another because the legal system lets them go, whether or not we know that the second killer is 100% guilty.

"Equal rights for everyone (accept bad people)" doesn't work. Someone already mentioned the possibility of government abuse. The legal system is designed to protect everyone, including those without money, power, or influence. Including those with views that are different from ours, those who don't believe what we believe, those that have different lifestyles from ours. If we decide that we have the moral authority to terminate the life of others because they are "terrible criminals," at what point do we have the right to terminate the people we don't like? We'd like to think we'll never reach that point, but honestly, it wouldn't take much. Maybe another bombing or two. The politics of pre-emption become suddenly acceptable. Even if someone hasn't killed yet, we have good intelligence that they will some day. Therefore, we have the right to kill them now to prevent that.

Feel free to call me a hippie, a hypocrite, or a straight-up hippo if you like.

Ismael, everything you say is very reasonable, clear and well-stated. However, it seems somewhat problematic to think that it is *obviously* wrong to kill a terrible brutal killer because all life is sacred, but that it is probably ok--or at least a different issue--to adopt a military strategy in a just war that one knows will result in some innocent people being killed. I don't understand why you don't see a tension there.

Although I think your view on capital punishment is reasonable, I don't think that the arguments you provide are decisive. It was no part of the alternative view I was giving that legal practice should derive from a naive estimate of the consequences rather than procedural justice--it was no part of the alternative view that we should be willing to give up on the idea that the evidence must indicate beyond a reasonable doubt that a person is guilty in order to find them guilty, or that we should give up on any other legal norms. Rather, I was pointing out that when you have a fallible 'reasonable doubt' standard--which you have to have in order to convict anyone, since there is always *some* remote possibility that they are innocent, consistent with the evidence--it is an obvious consequence that some innocent people will be convicted. So, it is an obvious consequence of your view and the alternative view that innocent people will be convicted. What I was suggesting is that in determining whether a punishment is ok, given our knowledge that some innocent people will undoubtedly be convicted, we should look at what the consequences and overall justice of having that punishment would be. And I don't think it is clear what to think about the death penalty from that (reasonable) point of view.

You say: "But shouldn't our goal be to reduce the imperfections in our system--and therefore reduce the number of innocent people that die--to the greatest extent possible?" It seems like that would have to be our *only* goal in order for your conclusion to follow. But although that should certainly be *a* goal, it shouldn't be our *only* goal. For example, if that was our only goal, we should adopt the infallible standard 'convict only if there is no logical possibility that the person is innocent, given the evidence', because only then could we ensure that no innocent people were convicted. But if we adopted that standard, we would never convict anyone, and so criminals would never be put away. So that shouldn't be our only goal. Another one of our goals is and should be to protect people from dangerous criminals.

I was also suggesting that, regardless of whether it is ok for the govt to execute people, it would be morally permissible for a suitably informed person to kill a terrible brutal murderer. (Think about the show Dexter--that's what I have in mind.) This independent point probably served to confuse the other issue. Sorry. I don't expect anyone to agree with this, but it seems obviously right to me--it seems obviously morally ok for me to kill some terrible criminal if I know for sure that they are guilty and, say, the state of new york has foolishly decided to free them.

Suppose you are faced with a choice: you have to either allow 2 very early embryos to be killed, or to allow 1 normal adult person to be killed. If you think the right choice would be to allow the 2 embryos to be killed, then it seems like you are committed to thinking that they have less moral status than a normal adult person. It seems like you can get a good estimate of how much moral status you really think the embryos have by thinking about how large the number of embryos would have to be to make you choose the embryos over the person.

Well reasoned and well done, Ismael! I admire your ability to talk about one subject without leaping unfounded into another debate to support or refute an idea. Also, way to avoid being too cynical.

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