Sunday, November 09, 2008

The King of Comedy: And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

Zach Moore indicated in his last post that he wanted to tell jokes and be a pedant rather than engage in serious rejoinders and substantive arguments. Although I've already responded to that post more specifically, I'd rather keep piling more arguments on top of him than play Last Comic Standing.

Anyway, below are some self-evident immoral consequences of Moore's peculiar brand of pro-choice apologetics. He argues that all humans have a kind of sovereignty that entails that they have the right to do anything to their body that they want to. They decide what goes in it and what goes out from it. Period. He said this argument works even if the unborn baby is “fully human.” We see the absurdity of this line of libertarian, Randian thinking exposed for the sophomoric, sloppy argument that it is.

This self-proclaimed king of comedy not only deserves to have tomatoes thrown at him, but he just keeps digging his grave deeper and deeper.

1. The Kanga Kid Argument:



Consider what if I were to knocked Moore out, and then sew a three-year old into his back covering it up with skin graphs from other areas of Moore's body, then I included some breathing and feeding apparatuses for the toddler to survive a bit, upon awakening, could Moore now kill that toddler? That seems odd. If not, then he's giving up his 'sovereignty' to do with inside his body whatever he wants.

2. The Alien Super Scientist Argument:




Consider an alien super scientist that implants a bomb into a human, Jones, so powerful that it would destroy half the universe if detonated. Now, assume that this bomb is about the size of a flea. Suppose it is harmless to Jones and all so long as it stays in the body it was implanted in. Assume that the bomb has a device built in to it so that the death of Jones diffuses the bomb. So, so long as Jones doesn't take the bomb out before he dies, nothing will happen. Does Moore's view allow Jones to kill every man, woman, child, and wookie this side of the universe! It would have to. Notice his conditional IF/THEN premise. If the antecedent could be true while the consequent false, then we'd have to assign a false truth value to the premise. Hence Moore's argument would be unsound. Therefore, for Moore to maintain the soundness of his argument, his must admit that his position allows someone to take the life of every single person and thing this side of the universe! To claim that Jones could not because sovereignty doesn't entail that we can do something which would kill billions of innocent people is about as clear as one can get to seeing one's argument crumble right in front of him.

3. The Conjoined Twins Argument:




Consider conjoined twins of the highly symmetric dicephalic parapagus type. Suppose one twin decided to cut her own wrist (the arm on her side of the body). Moore's view of sovereignty allows her to do so. But this would result in the death of the other twin.

4. The Torture Argument:




Consider the immoral act of torturing a human being for the mere fun of it. Moore's thesis allows a woman, if she were so inclined, to pay a doctor to enter her womb with instruments and pull off a leg of her third-trimester baby, or perhaps subject the unborn baby to chemical burns in just the right places so it wouldn't kill the baby.

5. The Crack Baby Argument:




Consider crack babies. Moore's view allows a mother to use crack while pregnant while intending to keep the child so as to get more welfare money to buy crack. This baby will go through terrible withdrawals and possibly suffer mental and physical effects of crack use at that developmental stage. No action whatsoever should be taken against the women for her actions while "sovereign" over her body.

10 comments:

  1. The Crack Baby Argument = Massive Pwnage.

    Seriously, that is one of the best summarized analogies ever. I'm going to steal it for some of my own arguments.

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  2. Paul Manata: ...and then sow a three-year old into his back...

    Vytautas: Did you mean "sew" or do you have some powerful seed?

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  3. That looks like Christofer Hitchens being tortured. If so, it destroys the entire argument, since you need to propose a situation there that everybody thinks is bad.

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  4. Gordon,

    Huh?

    The argument is the words.

    I just used the picture cause Hitchens looks like a dork.

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  5. Paul, I think Gordon was joking.

    If he was, I get it, and I'm laughing very hard.

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  6. I stumbled across this, from a link from another blog. Some nice fanciful argument. And the crack baby pwns no-one. It actually reinforces the sovereignty issue. It's wrong what she does, wronger to restrain her. Yah, some interventions are not violative... but are they effective?

    Anyhow, Exodus 21 says loss of a fetus is compensated as property, not as life lost. I think Christian's should care about fetuses known to them, not about those which are strangers. What a Christian does with his/her body matters. What a Christian demands another do with his/her body is a form of violence.... Not as violent as ripping a baby from a womb, but still an inexcusable act of violence.

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  7. BobCMU76 said:

    "Anyhow, Exodus 21 says loss of a fetus is compensated as property, not as life lost. I think Christian's should care about fetuses known to them, not about those which are strangers. What a Christian does with his/her body matters. What a Christian demands another do with his/her body is a form of violence.... Not as violent as ripping a baby from a womb, but still an inexcusable act of violence."

    Paul Manata has addressed Exodus 21 elsewhere, in the previous response to Zach Moore that he linked above. Your claim that we should care about "fetuses known to us" is an unsupported assertion, it's probably worded incorrectly (I suspect you meant to refer to fetuses of people we know rather than fetuses known to us), and your concern for the abortion beliefs of people who are strangers to you (at least some of the people who read this blog) doesn't seem consistent with your professed belief in limiting our concerns to those we know. And since you think it's improper "violence" to make "demands" of what others do with their bodies, why are you in this forum making demands of what we type with our bodies? Do you oppose all laws involving the human body? Are you an anarchist?

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  8. Bob,

    I too confess my confusion along with Jason. Not sure what you're tying to say.

    You seem to be misisng the point, so image this up in neon lights out in the middle of the desert:

    I AM NOT PROTESTING WHAT A WOMAN DOES TO HER BODY PER SE, I AM PROTESTING WHAT SHE DOES TO **ANOTHER'S BODY**.

    You must have failed to read all my other posts.

    Your sovereignty arguments are horrible since you always wind up admitting we don't have sovereignty over OTHER people's body.

    The pro-abortoion apologist has told us that his sovereignty argument goes through EVEN IF the fetus is fully human.

    So, your sovereignty argument requires you to presuppose the falsity of your soveriegnty argument.

    Why can't we get a substantive rejoinder from these people who have drank the Objectivist kool-aid? However, I must admit that your incoherent response was better than what Moore has been offering.

    Btw, I notice you didn't bother to interact with all my above arguments. I'm interested to hear your responses.

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  9. Matthew, that may be. My senso-o-humor meter has been on the fritz lately.

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  10. Not really trying to get into the sovereignty argument, but I’m a scientist and wanted to correct the crack baby analogy. It's a bit ridiculous to say that people addicted to cocaine take drugs purposely to harm their children in order to get more money from the government. 1) Women in poverty use drugs at the same rate as middle-class women during pregnancy. There is scientific evidence showing this (reference below). 2) Using cocaine during pregnancy isn't that terrible for the fetus. Studies have shown that illicit drugs harm the fetus MUCH LESS than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco (reference below). Basically, the myth of the crack baby was media hype that has been debunked by scientific evidence.

    These are just a few papers. Read up:

    Hans SL. Demographic and psychosocial characteristics of substance-abusing pregnant women. Clin Perinatol. 1999 Mar;26(1):55-74.

    Chasnoff IJ, Landress HJ, Barrett ME. The prevalence of illicit-drug or alcohol use during pregnancy and discrepancies in mandatory reporting in Pinellas County, Florida. New England Journal of Medicine 1990 Apr 26;322(17):1202-6

    Frank DA, Augustyn M, Knight WG, Pell T, Zuckerman B. Growth, development, and behavior in early childhood following prenatal cocaine exposure: a systematic review. Journal of the American Medical Association. 2001 Mar 28;285(12):1613-25.

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