Ayn Rand
god bless her editor needing heart, managed to turn objectivism into a caricature of itself, to the detriment of all, but her heart was almost in the right place. She does a pretty good job of defining the individual right, and I do wonder what brought her to her conclusions. I would like to follow her path, if only to understand how she arrived at these conclusions.
She states- quite correctly- that the right to life is the source of all rights, and that is at the core of the human condition. Ownership of and responsibility for yourself is central; and I am amazed at the people who espouse this position, and yet consider abortion to be acceptable. Does the fetus have no right to life? Why not? Is it because it’s small? Does that mean we can murder midgets with impunity? Is it because it’s helpless? We can murder anyone who can’t defend themselves?
This is the worst kind of doublethink. I refuse to accept the sanity of anyone who can hold those contradictory positions.
As my grandfather aged, he started to feel remorse about the kind of bastard he’d been and started watching TV preachers and sending them money. “Smelling hot dirt” my grandmother called it. I suppose maybe I’m going through sort of the same thing; I look at the opportunities I have had to change things and have done nothing. Well, maybe there are things that can be done.
15 comments Og | Uncategorized
Wait just a minute. In Ayn Rand’s day, abortion-on-demand was not available here, or many other places save maybe the USSR. Stats were NOT publicly available on abortion, either, and only wild guesses were available on “back-alley” abortion, which WAS illegal AND prosecuted. If Ayn Rand WAS pro-life, and that didn’t jump off her pages at me, she would not likely have been anti-abortion, since the whole world was at that time anyway, and Rand didn’t prefer to go along with the crowd.
I’m sure she probably was not. Hence my comment about doublethink.
She was explicitly pro-choice on two grounds: A fetus (or embryo) is only an incomplete, i.e. potential, human and thus has no rights, and no one has the right to live at the unwilling expense of another. On the other hand, she considered “partial-birth abortion” (or whatever she called it) to be a monstrous practice. I assume that she meant that, at that point, the fetus is viable and thus the procedure is needless to vindicate the mother’s rights. Adoption, e.g., will do.
There’s and interesting Documentary available on Netflix about Ayn Rand that could answer a lot of your questions. Check it out.
Not being any flavor of Rand-ian I’ll leave to others to explain what she believed and how she got there. As a more general rule though, the notion of rights requires the individual ability to declare one’s claim to said right. Anything else is some species of gift or obligation granted by or imposed upon some other.
Abortion is a violation of responsibility towards the potential person developing and has been declared morally verboten behavior, but no one who has rights are having them violated by this particular medical proceedure being performed.
Legal =/= moral necessarily, outside of a theocracy (and not reliably so even then). In a Constitutional Rebublic that explicitly forbids a state religion, the justification for a given behavior cannot be explicitly derived from religious authority (however “good” or “moral” that edict might be considered to be).
Rights are not morals, no matter how correct moral behavior might be in practice. I think conflating the two doesn’t improve an argument against any particular immoral behavior.
So if the fetus can say “Don’t hurt me” leave off, otherwise vacuum away!!
Sorry. That’s just a way around the fact that it is the murder of an innocent. A chicken will never develop into a being that can declare it’s rights, but a human will. To say that the humans rights don’t exist because he can’t ask for them yet is the height of ignorance. If you have laryngitis, can I murder you?
I don’t want to get into a context mangleing contest here (that said, what part of your omlette is a chicken shitting on your plate? :)), I do think it more than a little disingenuous to mis-state my position as “human rights don’t exist”. The rights conceptually exist whether or not there is anyone present to claim them at any given moment.
A human comes into existence as a result of the act of live birth (or some medical intervention to achieve that result). It is entirely logical to declare as a matter of law that there can be no individual present to lay claim to his/her rights prior to the live birth event occuring, however morally reprehensable the cause for a failure of live birth to occur might prove to be.
By all means do argue and otherwise work to promote alternative behavior to abortion, but until that human does “develop into a being that can declare it’s rights”, it is simply not there to do so as a matter of law whatever potential to do so at some point might be argued. In which case, abortion isn’t “murder”, it’s just killing, an action I’m certain you have contemplated as thoroughly as any gun owner in the world (and probably in far greater detail than the vast majority of gun owners ever bother to).
Not being born yet isn’t any form of sickness and I wish you would stop rhetorically equating it to such. That said, sometimes not being born yet is a matter of really unfortunate timing. We agree that alternative options to abortion ought to be made at least as readily available as abortion; I’m confident we also agree there is an established mechanism for changing the law enforceing such matters.
Sorry,. Wrong. A human comes into existence at the moment of fertilization. QED.
Abortion was one of the things Rand got explicitly, magnificently wrong. Use of force within a human society was another, though she was closer there. Before the Randroids say word one on the latter (Og and I are in agreement on the former, no need to reiterate his arguments), I’d like to hear their justification of the American Revolution and how that squares with Rand’s view on government monopoly on use of force.
In other words, I’d like to hear if a bunch of Randroids could have carried out the American Revolution without tying themselves into a philosophical knot, and if so, how.
Having read literally everything Rand ever intended for publication and a fair chunk she didn’t, I haven’t been able to square that one.
Yeah, that doublethink is kinda hard to reconcile with reality.
Well, there went some time I will never get back. Will Brown sounds a little off his rocker.
I have to back Og on this one. At the moment the fertilized egg starts to split that begins a process that will be a thinking person in about 18 years. To have the unbelievable gall to say that anytime before that point the person can be killed with impunity is criminal.
I won’t get into a woman’s “right to choose” to have the kid: I have my opinion of that, & won’t burden anyone else with it.
I will point out what I believe to be a legal (and perhaps a logical) contradiction. If a drunk driver or other miscreant causes the termination of a pregnancy by his actions, he can be charged with & convicted of murder. If a woman terminates her pregnancy, she cannot, thanks to the “emanations from the penumbra,”, etc. Is this nullified if said driver hits the woman while she’s en route to an abortion clinic? Either way, it seems inconsistent to me.
It’s either one or the other.
Tennessee, you lay out exactly one of the many ways the law is an ass on this subject.
Quite aside from law, one is tempted to ask what, exactly, the mothers expected the aborted children to become that was not human? Penguins? Lawyers? Democrats?
Al Gore could not be reached for comment.
She said that government has the monopoly on retaliatory force. Self-defense and revolution (i.e., to throw off one govt. in favor of another) are beside that point.
Re: “Becoming” human, That is the key word, vice “is”.
Because it has been decided that until it actually leaves the woman’s body it’s not a living being worthy of consideration: it’s a ‘mass of cells’ and/or a ‘parasite in her body’.
Much more convenient that way when you want to flush it.
Had a bit of a go-round with someone on the subject; the usual arguments, except when I ended with “The way abortion is thought of by so many as just another method of birth control makes my skin crawl.”
He really didn’t want to argue with that for some reason.