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My argument against abortion has been set out in this LJ some years ago (http://fpb.livejournal.com/69029.html). As it was a response to an agnostic student of medicine, its arguments were not based on religion, although it assumes that morality as such is a common human feature. (I have also written one aimed at Catholics: http://fpb.livejournal.com/63365.html .) It is my view that the arguments for abortion are not only immoral but stupid; that they rest on bad reasoning and invalid connections, and that those who accept them inevitably end up making stupid and absurd statements. Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to go back to those essays and write a rebuttal.

I have recently got more evidence for this proposition than I already had, and at the pen, at that, of a man who is otherwise a genius: the fan writer who signs himself

inverarity. (I have, of course, argued that it is perfectly possible to be a genius and stupid - http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/6639.html and especially http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/6828.html; but this particular genius happens to be quite bright too.) And he has calmly, confidently, without even realizing that he was saying anything in any way dubious, said an enormity that cries to heaven for vengeance.

This is the enormity: It is arrogant and selfish to have a baby when you know you are not going to be alive to bring it up.

Let us, first, make sure what kind of statement this is. This is a statement of morals. In fact, it is pretty much a statement of moral law. So, anyone who does not want, for whatever reason, to discuss a moral statement in moral terms, is out of this debate. They have nothing to the point to contribute. The point is morality; good/bad; right and wrong behaviour. I say this because discussion of morality is out of fashion, and many people are so embarrassed by it that they try to bring in materialistic approaches to its discussion - in particular, the nonsense of "evolutionary psychology". Do that if you want, but don't be surprised if I attack your arguments with the purpose of showing they are ignorant nonsense. I repeat: I regard that sort of thing as question-begging, escapist nonsense, an attempt to avoid the discussion of basics of human behaviour in their own terms - which are moral. There is a reason why both Greek and Roman philosophers built the very word for morality from their words for behaviour (ethos, mores); there is no discussion of human behaviour which is not moral in content. If you say that you don't like the way someone behaved, you say that they are behaving morally badly. If you say you do, you are giving moral approval. That is the beginning of any discussion of behaviour; anything that avoids it is escapism.

Having said that, let us move back to the concrete statement itself. Its key words are "arrogant" and "selfish". The meaning of "arrogant" is 95% moral, and to that extent negative; it does describe a way to behave, but describes it with an inevitably negative connotation to do with the way in which it hits other people (and, to some extent, deforms the person who indulges in it). There is an inner as well as an outer dimension to morality; the person who indulges in immoral behaviour deforms his/her relationship to him/herself as much as his/her relation to others. An arrogant person - a person who is proud without reason and who tends to squish and ignore others - is a person, experience will show, who has a misshapen relationship with him/herself; who is shoving the reality of him/herself away from his/her own gaze at least as much as s/he is shoving that of others. "Love thy neighbour as thyself" is not even so much a moral dictate, as a statement of fact: if your relationship with others is on the proper footing, so will your relationship with yourself be. But the more of violence, mendacity, self-deception, there is in your dealings with others, the more you will be doing it to yourself. It is a peculiarity of human beings that we can and do, each of us, treat with our own self as if it were an Other, and our relationship with ourselves is therefore similar to our relationship with others. This strange fact is at the heart of morals.

That is why, moving to the second term, the word "selfish" has a wholly moral meaning. As it means the ignoring of others - their personalities, their needs, their rights - in your dealings, so it ultimately implies a complete abrogation of your own self. Selfishness is almost synonymous with wickedness. You cannot strip it of its moral connotations; there would be next to nothing left. When you qualify anyone or any action as selfish, you are making a purely moral assessment of their reasons. It is therefore not only correct but necessary to assess any statement in which this word is used in moral terms.

My thesis is that

inverarity's statement is an enormity, that it reverses moral law, and that it is the tainted result of a diseased moral culture. There are many ways in which I might approach this, but reality itself just provided me an excellent one: reductio ad absurdum, which, as I assume everyone knows, means showing what the proposition would mean if it were taken to its logical extreme. I don't have to invent anything:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/sep/07091405.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/may/08050108.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05121402.html
I know at least half a dozen other such cases. They happen regularly. And according to

inverarity, these women are showing the extreme of selfish arrogance. After all, if they knew that either their lives or their children's were lost - that is, that if they let the child live they would violate

inverarity's moral law - that it is "selfish and arrogant" to give birth to a child you know you are not going to be able to bring up. They were condemning their child to what seems to him a horrible, motherless life.

I want to underline that there is no stretching or misrepresentation here. These cases fall fully within

inverarity's parameters. A woman KNOWS - knows for certain - that she is going to give birth to a child she will not be able to bring up. What is more, it is highly likely that if she aborts the child, she will be cured and perhaps be able to have, or at the least adopt, other children. But if she dies, the child will be motherless. What, in this, does not adhere to

inverarity's formula? Nothing, obviously. One of these women was a doctor herself - even better able than the rest to judge the danger or certainty of death if she did not abort her child. No decision can have been more conscious; and being particularly conscious, she must have been, in

inverarity's view, particularly guilty.

Now there is a sentence that is burned in letters of fire across the conscience of Western man, a sentence that even the most hardened priest-baiter, the most obstinate atheist, the most committed libertine, will recognize as being as close to the pinnacle of morality as language can get. And the sentence is: GREATER LOVE HAS NO MAN THAN THIS, TO GIVE HIS LIFE FOR HIS FRIENDS. Nobody could possibly deny its moral value. But if we take

inverarity's own moral dictate seriously, then we have to reply: Greater love hath no woman than this, to lay down her children for her life. At which point I would suppose that some of us at least might start to see a problem.

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Ah: but you ignore the glaring difference between the cases you cite and the argument at hand.

The women in the articles you listed were pregnant before they knew that they were dying. They each were diagnosed while pregnant; when they became pregnant, they fully expected to live long enough to raise their children.

What you initially suggested (and which I find you conveniently neglected to repeat here) was that, were you a woman and you KNEW that you would be dead by the age of twenty, you would deliberately have a child just prior to your death in order "to leave something behind." Your suggestion was to bear a child that you knew you would have to abandon, as some sort of extension of your own self-expression.

There is a massive moral difference between lying down your life in exchange for a life already begun, and deliberately beginning a life when (nay: because) you know that your own life will soon end. Your suggestion is tantamount to wilfully choosing to abandon your child, morally no different than giving birth and leaving the infant on the steps of an orphanage (or a relative now saddled with the consequences of an irresponsible choice in which they had no part).

Inverarity did not suggest abortion at any point. He suggested choosing not to get pregnant in the first place if you knew that you wouldn't be alive to raise your own progeny. You seem to eager to charge him with what amounts to the crime of thought-abortion: to call the choice of not getting pregnant in the first place, of not bearing a child that would have to be abandoned, the "abortion" of the potential-person who would have resulted from an opposite choice TO get pregnant.

Why does anyone want to have children? My answer is: look at a baby, and you will have the answer. It is a part of human life, it is something that draws a human being to it as much as love and friendship and morality and everything else that makes us. I speak from certain and unarguable experience when I tell you that a human being who has been unable to have a child is deprived of something fundamental, as much as if s/he were blinded, or made tetraplegic, or jailed. To have a child is not something that you have to argue for, any more than to live is something you have to argue for. What you have to do is argue against it. The reason must be very, very serious. When Katharine Hepburn consciously refused to marry ahd have children to fulfil her vocation as one of the greatest actresses who ever lived, that was a reason. (It would have been even if she had been a nobody, as long as she was serious about her trade and really did everything in her power to succeed.) When a man takes vows to be a priest or a monk, or a woman to be a nun, that is a reason. When a scientist or an artist or a businesswoman seriously cannot handle both things at once, that is - just about - a reason. But the fact that you may not be alive in twenty years to bring it up simply does not compute. Only the craziest of maniacs presumes to know on what will happen in twenty, ten, five years. You may make a gamble on it, but that is not the same. And to presume to deprive yourself of one of the most significant features of humanity for that reason is trash.

You do not give birth to a child in order to bring it up; you give birth to a child because the love that is fundamental to human nature is so superabundant that you have enough love to project it into the future, to love a creature not yet born, a creature you may never know. Your child may grow up to be Adolf Hitler; but that is no argument. The point is that you have gone out of yourself to the extent of wanting something born, because you loved it even before it existed.

Just to clarify: is the choice not to get pregnant the same as an actual abortion in your view?

You cannot propose that every human being is motivated to have children for the same reasons. You cannot propose that every human being is fundamentally fulfilled by having a child. You cannot speak for every human being, or attempt to propose what is or is not central to the human experience. You simply cannot.

Your "unarguable experience" is just that. YOUR experience. I may not be able to argue with your experiences, but I will certainly argue that your experiences cannot be broadly applied to the entire human species. There are people for whom the desire to procreate is simply not the central aspect of human existence that it seems to be for you. They are not deficient in some fundamental way, as you seem so eager to believe. They don't want children, and that is pefectly reasonable. Noble, even. We are six-billion strong as a species. There are droves of actual, living human children who are being neglected. How many of us do you think this planet can handle?

If having children is something to be argued against, then, by reducto ad absurdum, you should be arguing that every person ought to begin procreating at every opportunity from the moment that they are biologically capable (that's, what, the age of nine or so?). Abstinance and safe sex, after all, contradict the human imperative to project our "fundamental...superabundant...love...into the future" (or whatever flowery nonsense that was). Even the notion of waiting until marriage results in the negation of countless potential-lives. by your arugment, we should be giving in to our procreative impulse from the moment it strikes.

The biological urge to procreate is just that. A biological urge. But we are human beings; we are capable of transcending our biological urges. We need not procreate simply because our lions or our genes insist it. We are animals, but we are tremendously intellectual animals. We are capable of collecting information and making choices based on that information.

And the idea that even a majority of children are born because anyone "[went] out of [themselves] to the extent of wanting something born, because [they] loved it even before it existed" is posivitely laughable. Just look at the statistics on unplanned, unwed, or teenage pregnancies to see that, in fact, most of those children are the results of nothing more than ill-informed people recklessly acting on their biological impulse to have sex.

What a dreary display. And what a lot of nonsense. You misapply reductio ad absurdum - since I have already stated that there are reasons why people should decide to opt out of ordinary human behaviour to that extent - and you show a positive terror of emotion. You quiver at the thought that human beings might have love in their make-up, and you are completely incapable of understanding that a teen-ager who has a baby and keeps it is not merely obeying some pathetic reductionist notion of rioting hormones. God, what a display of unhappiness, reductionism, escapism, and the lowest sort of cynicism - the kind that truly knows the price of everything (or at least of most things) and the value of nothing.

For one who touts arguments are fiercely as you, I find surprising few in your diatribes. What I find instead are opinions dressed up in flowery poetics and hyperbolic generalizations of your own experiences. I find you speaking for all of humanity based on your own thoughts, and insisting that everyone disagrees with your opinions is wrong and abnormal. I find little foundation for any of your claims beyond the vehemence with which you pontificate.

And do I really quiver at the thought that human beings are capable of loving? Odd, that. Stranger, still, that you would make such an absurd claim based on the fact that I objected to your attempts to speak for all of humanity.

Here I thought you wanted debate. Turns out you just want to bludgeon those who disagree with you with your garishly-wrought opinions. Have at it.

I do not think you have an argument. I think you have an urge to deconstruct, which is not the same thing at all. There is no positive statement about childbearing in your statement at all, except for the tautological stuff about "biological imperatives" or whatever - which does not even represent a contradiction of my own statement, but simply an attempt to drain the strength out of it by pretending that the emotion, the love, is not fundamental to it. That is not an argument; it is an abuse of language, using loaded terms to pretend that we are discussing something as emotion-free and intellect-free as the attraction of an (inanimate, soulless) piece of iron to an (inanimate, soulless) magnet. But that is a fraud, because what we are discussing is neither inanimate nor inevitable. It is living and capricious. Your pretence that it is anything else by using reductive terms is neither an argument nor an idea, and I do not have to treat it as such.

On the contrary: your attempts to dress up the biological inevitability of procreation with baroque lyricism is little more than an appeal to emotion. It is neither an argument nor an idea, and I do not have to treat it as such.

What is "love," after all? You seem to want to treat it as some preternatural force that surges into being through the conduit of some immaterial soul-portal. You imply that intelligence is little more than a function of our genes, but treat love like a mystical energy source? Love is as much a function of our biological make-up (the mind, after all, is a direct function of the brain, and emotions are a result of the mind) as an intelligence.

"What is 'love', after all?"
I could answer with Satchmo that if you gotta ask the question, you will never know the answer. But to the contrary, I think you know the answer, somewhere, as every single human being does, and that you are busy running away from it, leaving behind a trail of obfuscations, half-truths, category mistakes and red herrings. Love is a part of perception. Everything we perceive, we have an emotional reaction to; some more strong than others, some so weak as to barely measure, but all existent. The emotional pleasure in looking at a small clump of grass is hardly on the same level as giving the love of your life a poem you have written for her and watching her eyes light up (I speak as a male); but it belongs to the same category. And since an emotional reaction is a part of any kind of perception whatever, it follows that to try and achieve an unemotional perception is to mutilate the experience. Got it?

And please, try to stop your desperate attempt to speak of biology as if it were a contradiction of anything. This is just verbiage. I don't know if you are even capable of speaking except through such fourth-rate adolescent debating cliches, but they neither argue nor prove anythingl.

You are not more intelligent because you imagine that intellect separates you from emotion; you do not increase your understanding one whit by pretending that you have seen through the varieties of love - to the contrary, you prove that you never even began to think about them. The fact is that love, intellect and morality march in concert, and that the attempt to separate one from the others withers them all. What you love, you seek to understand; what you understand, you appreciate more; and understanding includes an advanced and improving notion of right and wrong. Your notion that "tremendous intellect" should separate us from "our genes" is about as un-intellectual as any superstition I have ever heard. Where do you think that intelligence comes from? And where did you get the truly superstitious notion that the spring can rise higher than its source? Silly, silly, silly.

Just to confirm, since these are my major points of contention:

Do you think it is somehow noble and loving to give birth to a child in order to willfully abandon it?

Do you think that choosing not to get pregnant is the same as murdering a living fetus?

All else is extravagant distraction. That you lack the authority to speak of all of humanity has been settled, so don't expect your insistence that your opinions are universally applicable to persuade me.

1 - yes.
2 - no, but unless there is a good reason not to, it is an act of cowardice and incompetence. And you will regret it.

Your stupid rhetoric about "pretending to speak for mankind" or whatever is noted and thrown into the dustbin. If this sort of thing is not argued about from the viewpoint of human nature, it cannot be argued about at all. Even the reductionist nonsense about "teenage hormones" assumes that these things are common to teenage humans. I argue that there is such a thing as human nature, and then I argue that it involves a certain attitude to offspring. If you agree that there is such a thing as human nature, then your poorly concealed request that I should not "speak on behalf of mankind" amounts to a request that I should not express my view of human nature - that is, that I should shut up. If you do not believe it, then your best option by far is to leave this blog and take yourself somewhere where your own individual nature is better catered for. Either way, you have just made a fool of yourself.

no, but unless there is a good reason not to, it is an act of cowardice and incompetence. And you will regret it.
Taking off from our previous thread, I have to add my 2 cents worth here. Yes, I agree I am in the minority of people who are fine without having kids. But even though we're a minority, we do exist. I don't think you can make a blanket statement like "you will regret it if you don't have children." I've actually heard more women say they regret settling down and having kids, than the reverse. Whether that's a Amer. vs Brit. cultural thing, I don't know. But I don't think you can make a 100% statement either way.

I said unless you have a good reason. You are being more defensive than necessary.

Qualifier granted--the blanket statement just kind of jumped out at me. And I don't feeldefensive. ;) (Maybe it was the icon LOL)

Ask yourself why two great religions - Catholicism and Hinduism - worship God in the shape of a baby. It is intuitive and archetypical. To the majority of people, babies are the very shape of hope and life. Think of Louis Armstrong's great, grateful farewell to life:
I hear babies cry,
I watch them grow -
They'll learn much more
Than I'll ever know.
And I think to myself,
"What a wonderful world!"
Yeah, I think to myself -
"What a wonderful world!"

Well, the obvious answer that pops up is that without people having babies, the species would die out. At this point, with the world's level of population and industrialization, I don't think it's a problem if people who don't feel they would make good parents opt out of having kids. (And no, I'm not a follower of VHEMT or any of that crap. Some of my best friends are human.)

You are indulging in functionalism - next door to the evpsych nonsense that both

inverarity and I reject. Remember that there is no logical connection between a statement and a command. If you say that "unless we do x, the human race will die out," it is open to any debater to answer: "yes, and?" or "and your point is?" As CS Lewis pointed out, you cannot use "this will preserve the race" as an argument to "do this," unless you start from the moral command "the race must be preserved." So if you justify the love of babies by saying that without it the race would die out, you are not justifying it at all.

I think this is one of the things you and I will have to agree to disagree on. I'm not a follower of evopsych either--how do you determine behavior when there was no record of it in future eras? But I do think humans are 'hardwired' to some degree to take care of offspring. I'm not crazy about kids, but the thought of hurting one appalls me. I think it's one of a lot of things none of us will ever know for sure, since we can't go back and see how early humans ca.20,000 years ago or so, behaved or thought.

No, no, no, no, no. There is no need to invent an unexplained, hence mystical, "hardwiring", that keeps us from doing harm to a child like a mother cat might eat a kitten. That is not only mystical, it is actually counterproductive - since if there is an unreasoning, inborn dictate to act in a certain way, there will also be, in intelligent creatures, a tendency to revolt against it. If you postulate an unreasoning initial programming that demands that we should protect children as it demands that we should breathe (one, by the way, that is absent in most animals), you build in a nearly irresistible temptation to rebel against it merely for its own sake. And it is not necessary. It is a lot easier than that. Think of what I said: with sane human beings, morality, intellect and emotion go together. And of what I said elsewhere: an emotional reaction goes with everything we perceive, so that to postulate an unemotional perception is not to purify but to mutilate perception. (Isn't it a breathe-easier moment, a real return to sanity, when the various Vulcan characters in the Star Trek series admit to some kind of emotion?) The emotion that goes with the perception is the basis of morality. Because we are fond of beautiful thing (the sense itself of beauty is an emotion in perception), we do not want them destroyed. Because we have a particularly intense reaction to other intelligent beings - a reaction that is different not only in kind but in degree from our reaction to non-human, non-intelligent things - we experience the dictate against murder as an instinct. We have an immediate, disgusted reaction to the idea of reducing that in front of us which reacts to us, which speaks, argues, answers back, to a thing like a stone or a block - unmoving, unreacting, powerless. We experience of incongruousness, of injustice, in the presence of a corpse, because a human body is to us naturally the bearer of all those things which we recognize in ourselves and in others. The instinctive reaction we feel to man is the reaction of love, of the same kind, but of another level that we feel to a pretty tree or to a familiar landscape.

The most important thing to understand is that there is no instinct that the species should be preserved. Nobody ever gave a damn about the species and nobody ever will. What we do want is to have other human beings. It is not that there should be vast numbers in a future we cannot and should not imagine, but that we should meet other individuals, today, tomorrow, and the day after. If - to name four astoundingly beautiful women - I should think of Katie Melua, Trine Michelsen, Katie Carr or Nicola Cowper, I do not think of them as specimens of something more abstract than themselves; rather, I should want to have more individuals, in the hope that some of them might turn out to be as wonderfully lovely - and with the proviso that any of them, even as foolish as some of the opponents in this debate, would be worth having for their own sake. Even if, in some cases, at a certain distance from me.

Hmmm, lots of food for thought in this discussion! I was thinking of something more...instinctive? than mystical. (And from the animal pov, there are quite a few species of animals who will protect, or at least not harm, young of their own species.)

To some degree I think we're on the same page--what you describe certainly makes sense, but I would see it as an unconscious reaction, too. I've never heard anyone say they wanted to have kids to make something beautiful! ;) We humans, do certainly relate to each other much more in the individual--I'm reminded of a study where it was found that if a person appeared to be hurt or unconscious on a city street, they were more likely to be helped if there was only one bystander--if there was a group of people, the attitude prevailed that 'someone else would help'. And the prisons are full of people who rebelled against the instinct not to murder fellow humans.
The ideal would not be to be completely lacking in emotion, like a Vulcan, but to recognize when one needs to step back and see what is emotion and what is reason, applying this to both good and bad things. Something that sounds wonderful at first feeling or whim, may not be all that great when taken to it reasonable conclusion. In the case of other people, wanting to have more individuals that you (or I) would perceive to be ideal, really needs to be balanced by the realism that no person will ever be a carbon copy of someone else. Which is where I think the emotional aspect trips some women up--they love the idea of a child, but the reality may be nothing what they expected.

I think, too, that you're much more of an idealist than me, after 25 years of working with the public I've seen just about everything I can be cynical about. It's a lot like working in law enforcement, minus the gunfire. (Well, most of the time.)

I am a historian. As a historian, I have literally read every possible evil anyone can conceive, from cannibalistic Chinese emperors to Soviet and Nazi death camps. A sober historian was the man who produced a map of Nazi and Soviet death camps and called it "The Map of Hell". (Alan Bullock, in his Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.) The only person who has heard more evil than a historian is an experienced father confessor; I assure you, cops aren't even in the same district - for one thing, they are unlikely to deal with mass murderers. So believe me, I am no starry-eyed delusional; I could tell you things that would make you vomit. But when I consider man as a whole, the wonder is not all the evil it has done, but all the evil it routinely refrains from doing.

Well, WWII history is one of the things I've studied, so I'm sure you've got me beat on the amount of material you've read, I've got books I've only read once, because reading them gave me nightmares.
I disagree with you on the police thing, though--one of my fascinations is criminology and police work, and cops see pretty gruesome things on an everyday basis. Have you ever read anything by John Douglas or Robert Ressler? Police are the first responders in the wake of the likes of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, the guy down the street who stabbed his girlfriend's daughter, the accident scene where a drunk driver hit another car head on, and the carnage is so bad they can't even tell how many people were in the car...and so on. Cops do see mass murder too, though it's not an everyday occurrence--Richard Speck, Charles Whitman, James Huberty, John List, Richard Farley--those are just the mass murderers I can come up with off the top of my head. I've never been a victim of a crime (thank God), the closest I've been to any of this stuff was seeing a gang throwdown in the wing of the mall I worked in (lots of knives), and going in and out of the mall under the eye of police snipers on the roof (there was a serial rapist haunting the parking lot one summer). I have no doubt that priests see/hear a lot of the worlds' evil, but I think the worst sociopaths don't confess until they have to, in an interrogation room surrounded by detectives and confronted with the evidence, and a lot of times not even then.

But when I consider man as a whole, the wonder is not all the evil it has done, but all the evil it routinely refrains from doing. I agree with you 100% on this one! I think where everyday people really fall short is in the little hurts and cruelties they inflict on people around them. How hard is it to start out by being nice instead of mean? Don't be rude to the waitress or sales person. Hold the door for the old lady or the mom with her kids behind you. Give the homeless guy out in the cold a coffee and a bagel. These little things make more of a difference than a lot of people think they do.

Edited 2010-06-24 15:10 (UTC)

I apologize to cops.

The cops I've met would appreciate that. ;) The good ones take the motto, "To protect and to serve," very seriously.

Just to clarify, since these are my major points of contention:

Is it noble and loving to bear a child in order to willfully abandon it?

Is choosing not to get pregnant the same as murdering an unborn fetus?

All else is extravagant distraction. The fact that you lack the authority to speak for all of humanity has been settled, so don't expect your insistence that your opinions based on your experiences are universally applicable to persuade me.

I already answered.

You did. My apologies for the double-post. Feel free to delete the anonymous duplicate.

We will not see eye to eye on this issue. There is absolutely nothing noble or loving in the willful abandonment of a child. On the contrary: it is quite the cowardly, incompetent act.

My question regarding the nature of love was rhetorical. I understand love as well as some, and better than most. I contend that you, however, entertain some massively fantastic delusions about it. For instance: you seem to think that love is some kind of supernatural radiation that can be projected. It is not, and cannot. Love is an emotion, which springs from the human mind, which springs from the human brain. The love that you may experience cannot be projected onto anyone else, or into any other time. No one else can experience the love (or anger, or jealousy, or sorrow) that you experience, because your emotions are a function of your mind. You can ACT on your emotions, and others can experience your actions, and through them deduce that you are experiencing love (or anger, or jealousy, or sorrow), but your love cannot be projected.

Surely you understand that there is a substantial difference between "human hormones" and "human nature." You cannot be so thick as to conflate the two. While all humans may have the same particular hormones, not all humans behave in the same way. Two people with the exact same hormonal condition can behave in two completely different ways; one teenage girl, experiencing strong sexual urges because of her hormones, may choose to abstain (committing thought-abortion in the process, of course), while another teenage girl, experience strong sexual urges because of the same hormes, may choose to have sex. That you could possibly construe a statement about hormones as being the same as a statement about behaviors tells me that you know even less about "human nature" than I might have imagined. And it means that you have just made a fool of yourself.

Telling you that you cannot (not "should not") speak on behalf of humanity is not the same as telling you to shut up. Not unless you're entertaining a fairly potent persecution complex. It simply means that, instead of presuming to speak some universe truth about "human nature" (which you can't even differentiate from "human hormones"), you should stick to offering your opinions for what they are: YOUR opinions, based on YOUR experiences.

As to this: "[I]f this sort of thing is not argued about from the viewpoint of human nature, it cannot be argued about at all." This sort of thing cannot be argued from the viewpoint of human nature. Therefore, I guess I must agree that it cannot be argued at all. Or, perhaps, you could accept that, while there is next-to-nothing constant about "human nature" in general, certain issues still CAN be discussed.

You have absolutely no notion of what is contradictory and what is not. In fact, your reasoning is so bad that I strongly feel it is part of a defence mechanism. To talk as though human hormones were in any way contradictory to human nature is like arguing that the existence of feet proves that the human body as a whole does not exist. Feet are a part of the human body, and to speak of them implies the existence of the body of which they are a part. Hormones are a part - a minor part - of human nature, and to speak of them as "human", meaning common to all human beings, is to assume, not to deny, the existence of a much greater thing called human nature, of which hormones are a part. That is what is wrong with your way of talking: that you talk as though you had argued against the existence of an overarching human nature, just by trying to force our attention to a mere part of it. You haven't argued; you have performed a trick. Reductionism is an intellectual crime because it is intended to use a part not to imply but to hide away the whole; it implies intellectual mendacity, conscious or unconscious.

You are also incapable, or rather unwilling, to understand the simplest concepts. There is nothing supernatural about projecting love into the future, loving what has not yet been born or made; any more than there is anything supernatural about projecting your understanding of a horse into the future to put money on your certainty that it will achieve a result. Both things are gambles, but neither thing has anything supernatural. The love for a yet unborn child is the reason why the child is conceived, just as the love for a yet unwritten masterpiece is the reason why an artist starts work on it. When Mozart set out on his three last symphonies (which seem to have been composed without a customer in mind), he was not very likely to be already clear on the stunning tour-de-force he would perform in the forty-first, especially in the last movement; but he was enthusiastic about the idea of composing some new symphonies - so enthusiastic that he wrote three in six weeks. His love of his trade moved ahead of his intellect, and his intellect followed behind; and it is symptomatic that the fourth movement of the Jupiter Symphony, literally the most complex piece of music ever composed, is also one of the simplest to experience - pure, undiluted enthusiasm, from a man who was performing the impossible and making it look easy, and knew it. It is because it is a triumphant and literally incomparable work of the intellect, that the musician can be felt almost literally capering and leaping with joy. That is all the evidence one needs, unless one has some desperate psychic reason to run away from emotion, to understand that emotion and reason, intellect and love, work together and feed off each other.

As for the rest - I will speak about human nature as and when I want, being a human being. If you insist on demanding I should not, kindly leave this blog and don't come back.

Oh for the love.

I have not "demanded" that you should not talk about human nature. I have pointed out that you cannot do so, in that you lack the authority to do so. That you cannot do so does not mean that you cannot try to do so, and you will undoubtedly continue to try to do so anyway. And you will make a fool of yourself further in the process.

That is your prerogative, as this is your blog.

I am frankly flabbergasted at how abysmally you have misinterpreted my points about hormones v. nature. Where do you find the absurd idea that I said hormones "contradict" nature? I never implied that human hormones were in any way contradictory to human nature, and I'd advise you not to put those words in my mouth if you are so fundamentally offended by others putting words in yours.

You contended, rather ridiculously, that because all human beings have hormones in common, you can claim that all human beings have their natures in common. That is, your position necessitates that all humans have the same emotional resposnes to the same stimuli. That all humans, in essense, have the same personalities. I objected to that unfounded claim. I offered simple examples of people with the same hormones making different choices, demonstrating that having the same hormones is not the same as having the same nature. You responded with Bob Thiele lyrics and appeals to theological artwork.

Of course, you also contend that it is loving and noble to willfully abandon a child. It is a wonder that you expect your opinions to be taken seriously.

Listen, mate, you would have done yourself a great favour if you had admitted that you had never listened to Mozart's 39th, 40th and 41st symphonies and that you had never given any thought to their meaning and content, rather than make yourself ridiculous before all educated people by calling them "theological artwork". Your resolution not to understand, not to even try to hear what is being said to you, not to even accept any challenge to your reductionist obstinacy, joins here with prejudice and ignorance to produce something beyond satire. Just forget it. I am sick and tired of beating myself against a brick wall. I feel sorry for the world you have constructed for yourself out of negation and fear, but I really don't have the time to waste on it. Now please avoid wasting my time with further posts, or I shall close this post.

(deleted comment)

You are banned from further commenting. Take your New Jerk Times lies home and masturbate to them. I want nothing more to do with you. Period.

Yeah, not going to get into the abortion debate with you. I will note, however, that you completely stripped away the context of my statement. In the conversation on my LJ that started this, we were specifically talking about the idea of a girl deliberately getting herself pregnant with foreknowledge that she was going to die.

Also, don't try to pin evpsych thinking on me. I disdain evolutionary psychology as much as you do, though probably for different reasons.

I did nothing of the kind. I invited any third person who wanted to take part in the debate to consider that I rejected their premises and that if they did, their premises would be under attack.

Your whole argument is based on the notion that children are only to be conceived if you are certain that you have twenty years to give them; which is dependent on the notion of a "planned" pregnancy; which is the ideological underpinning of abortion. Indeed, there is a clear parallel between, one:
A child should not be conceived or allowed to be born unless we are certain that it is wished-for and loved;
and, two:
Nobody should conceive a child they know they will be unable to bring up.
It is all too evident that the one is the obverse of the other, as much dependent on the other as a footprint on the foot that made it. So if you refuse to argue abortion, you refuse to argue the underpinning and the intellectual matrix of your argument. Incidentally, what kind of maniac assumes in advance that they will have twenty untroubled years to dedicate to their progeny? Apart that I know of cases where women got pregnant AFTER they had heard the death sentence (the three cases I published were picked at random; as I said, I know of several more), anyone who is not living in the clouds knows that anything from divorce to mental illness to death can separate mother and children at any time. To make a moral demand, as you do, that a woman should know that she will be around to bring the child up, means to brand most women with immorality and selfishness.

Nobody can rely on certainty. That's a foolish straw man you're trying to hang on me.

Let me restate my position as clearly as possible:

I think it is selfish to make the choice to conceive a child unless you have a reasonable expectation that you will be able to care for it.

(And no, I'm not going to debate every possible surrogacy case or other exceptional circumstance you can think of. Just assume that yes, I can conceive of exceptions. But "I'm going to die in seven years, so I'll get pregnant to have a child to leave behind"? There's no way that I don't see that as selfish.)

Ah, but your statement demands it. And since you refused to see anything weird about your statement, I am going to nail you to it. That is what you said; if you now tell me that it is not what you meant, you should not have treated me as if I had fallen off a tree in the first place. Not that I have to. You gain nothing by modifying your claim to reasonable expectation; it still excludes all my cases. Every one of these women had a reasonable expectation that she would be dead before her child's first year. So you threw your original claim out, and still did not answer mine. You will have to do better.

As for the "selfishness" of giving birth to a child you will not see grow, see my answer to

anthonyjfuchs.

Does the word conceive have a different meaning for you?

It means: the beginning of life - in this case, human life.

(deleted comment)

Well, it's a hypothetical proposed by

fpb based on a situation in my fan fiction novel. The conversation (which led to the blow-up which led to this post) starts here (http://inverarity.livejournal.com/45753.html?thread=213945#t213945).

(Note that it's also a spoiler, in case you're inclined to read my story. :) )

Note also that I have described

inverarity"s novels as works of genius and the next big thing and invited everyone to read them.

(deleted comment)

Deleted and banned. If you imagine that I was going to put with personal insults in my own LJ, you got the wrong guy. Goodbye, you won't be missed.

Hmm, I may have to edit this if I don't make myself clear enough. There are points I agree with in

inverarity's statement, but IMO it's much too broad. The one type of case I do feel is selfish is when women insist on having children in their late 50's or 60's. Granted, that's pretty rare, but why not mentor a child or get into a big sister program? I've known since I was 15 that I did not want to have children. When I was in my 20's people insisted on saying I would change my mind, well, I'm now 50 and haven't changed my mind. The honest truth is: I don't like babies or small children. I like kids when they get to be about 6 or 7, they can carry on a conversation and have a longer attention span. I felt everyone is better served, in my case, by helping children who are already here--I've worked with reading programs, taught riding lessons, and spent a year working with at-risk teenagers in a horse management program. The world already has 6 billion people, my DNA is not gonna make one bit of difference one way or the other.
I also find it interesting that folks with lots of kids want to call the childfree people selfish, yet if you were to ask them why they had children, you get answers like,
"I wanted someone to have my family name."
"I wanted someone to look like me."
"I wanted someone to take care of me when I'm older."
To me, all of those speak to making the parents happy, nothing to do with the child. (And yes, I've heard all those several times over.) And I have, over the years, had more than one woman say to me, "I wish I'd lived my life like you and not had children.", which is pretty sad when you think about it. Everyone is trapped in that situation.

I suggest to you that if you asked anyone "why do you respect the laws", you would get a similar selection of shallow or stupid responses. Very few people would even try to seriously analyze their relationship to the community they live in, to its rules, and to the fundamental notions of right and wrong. That is, incidentally, the biggest problem with the notion that life is about self-actualization and self-development; most people don't really consciously examine their own relationship to their selves and the world around them, and if asked to answer to fundamental questions, they tend to come up with inadequate or cliched responses. It would be more to the point to ask people who never had the opportunity (such as uh, y'know, me) how they fell about it. And incidentally, why women in their sixties and seventies do such an obviously stupid thing. (I would not, because I am all too conscious that even at my age I don't have the energy to deal with a toddler any more.)

That is not to say that I have anything to say against your experience. If that is the way you are, that is your and God's business, not mine. But I think it is a peculiar attitude and not one that is common to most humans. The question is rather why you are as you are, than why the rest of us is not.

Sometimes I think I'm too obsessed with knowing everything--if I'm fascinated by something I have to study it constantly and get as knowledgeable as I can about it. The flip side of that, though, is that I get bored really easily. In college, when girls had their whole lives ahead of them with the husband and the white picket fence, etc, that whole scenario made me feel trapped, like if I followed that route someone might as well just bury me, as I'd be the equivalent of dead already. (It took me 50 years to meet a guy who understands that and doesn't think I'm strange for having so many interests/hobbies[well, 30 years, if you figure I started 'dating' at around 20]). I don't know if any of this makes sense--I guess what I'm saying is I know I'm different--but I also know I'm not the only person like me out there. ;) (According to my friends who are into astrology, I'm a classic Sagittarius. Don't know how accurate astrology is, but hey.)

Edited for spelling fail

Edited 2010-06-22 17:49 (UTC)

As long as you don't feel offended by the idea that you are unusual or different... (You know, about ten seconds after I posted that response, I got the cold sweats and a feeling that, OMG, there goes another friend.)

Aw hell naw! ;D When I sort of fell into fandom, it was like, "A whole lot of people just like me! And the mundanes think we're all weird too!! LOL

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