Slip

LIBERAL:  “Why do you conservatives argue about ‘slippery slopes’ so much?”

CONSERVATIVE:  “Because some issues are, indeed, slippery slopes:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

If you’re starting to wonder if every American life spent saving Europe from totalitarianism was wasted, I really don’t have the energy to argue the point.

7 thoughts on “Slip

  1. I welcome this discussion. All other things equal, I also have a hard time understanding the moral or ethical distinction between killing a baby shortly before or shortly after birth.

  2. The link is bad.
    A working link is http://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/261
    The article is old: 2012.
    The use of the word “person” is interesting. Until modern times, the definition of a person was a being that had the attributes of reason, emotion, and will. This means a person is a being who can make decisions based on reason and emotion, and then choose to act upon those decisions. Note that this definition says nothing about biology. A spirit or a robot could be a person, if they had reason, emotion, and will.
    The authors do not explain what they mean by “person”, though they sometimes qualify the word as “actual person.” I am not sure what an unactual person would be. We are all unable to control our bodies and incapable of reason while we sleep.
    If you accept that “person” is defined by some political authority, you’ve opened the door to mass murder of whomever you can politically designate as a non-person. If infants are not persons, how can an invalid be a person?
    The paper doesn’t even rise to the level of B- work.
    In the old days, say, a hundred years ago, modernists wrestled with the idea that by discarding the old, transcendent, moral order, they could become monsters: statements about morals would become indistinguishable from statements about power.
    Today’s modernists don’t recognize the problem. Only history can judge, and they believe that they know the moral commands of history.

  3. There is a real-world example of the state declaring certain classes of human beings of being deserving of death. The Nazis weren’t the first.
    In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks (and they claimed to fully possess the modern spirit) became impatient with the existing legal system. They invesnted a new crime. You could be killed or sent to the gulag for being any one of many types of persons: counter-revolutionary; capitalist, revanchist, monarchist, non-Soviet. They didn’t have to prove you committed any particular crime before they put a bullet in your head, they merely had to make a judicial finding that you were a person who belonged to one of the condemned categories. Before World War Two, the Nazis condemned hundreds or thousands based on their politics or their race. Before World War Two had begun, the Soviets had killed tens of millions.

  4. One of my pet peeves is liberals bemoaning Trump’s executive actions as evidence of a slippery slope downward from Obama’s executive actions. That’s actually not the case. Obama stopped immigration, just as Trump did, but liberals didn’t complain. Obama spent money that wasn’t allocated (in Obamacare), but Trump hasn’t. Obama went to war against the media (albeit the only semi-conservative outlet, FoxNews) as did Trump (against nearly all the outlets given that they declared war on him once he became the GOP nominee).

    In fact, I’d love to hear just what Trump is doing that is so different from previous presidents as to make him an outrage. I just don’t see it. In fact, I rather like him enforcing the laws that Obama loved to ignore, and I have real hopes for the RAISE Act. If Trump gets that passed his presidency will be a success in my book.

    Now what I’d really like to see is an act that makes Congress need to vote approve ALL regulations that are issued by the bureaucracy. Congressmen like to say they don’t have the expertise to write all the regulations, but since the regulations are really what the law is, I’d like to see them stand behind what the bureaucrats are doing. Congress has passed off it’s Constitutional duty, and I believe that’s wrong.

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