Winning Friends and Influencing People the Richard Dawkins Way

[Martinus]

What does "immoral" mean anyway? Cause I don't know. Whether a decision is good or bad seems much more interesting.

Morality is one scale that you can use to determine if a decision is good or bad.

In fact, depending on the type of morality adopted to measure that, you can really conflate "good" with "moral". For example, according to utilitarian morality, the most useful decision would also be most moral.

[grumbler]

In fact, depending on the type of morality adopted to measure that, you can really conflate "good" with "moral". For example, according to utilitarian morality, the most useful decision would also be most moral.

I think that morality is probably the only way to measure "good" and "bad" in decision-making, given that you are thus limiting the choices to a binary outcome.  Any non-moral evaluation will result in a mixed outcome virtually every time, and to reduce that to a binary outcome requires application of subjective values; i.e. morality.

[Josquius]

What made his tweet offensive is not that he was arguing for post-natal abortions, but that he was outright stating that people who chose not to abort their down's babies are immoral. That goes waay too far.

Most of the backlash though is based around people with downs syndrome and accusations that he is saying they should have been aborted.
Its a bit of a different thing to say that a current fetus should be aborted and an actual grown up person should have been aborted.

[Jacob]

Most of the backlash though is based around people with downs syndrome and accusations that he is saying they should have been aborted.
Its a bit of a different thing to say that a current fetus should be aborted and an actual grown up person should have been aborted.

All English babies should be aborted because they're English. No offence to any Englishmen, of course.

Yah... I dunno if that flies.

[Josquius]

All English babies should be aborted because they're English. No offence to any Englishmen, of course.

Yah... I dunno if that flies.

Well that's genocide. The parents can't really try again as the baby would still be English. Well. Unless they emigrate first.
With a gravely disabled fetus however they have a pretty clear choice of "Do you want a kid that is disabled or not disabled"

[garbon]

All English babies should be aborted because they're English. No offence to any Englishmen, of course.

Yah... I dunno if that flies.

Well that's genocide. The parents can't really try again as the baby would still be English.

Nah, they can just each have babies with other people.

[grumbler]

Most of the backlash though is based around people with downs syndrome and accusations that he is saying they should have been aborted.
Its a bit of a different thing to say that a current fetus should be aborted and an actual grown up person should have been aborted.

All English babies should be aborted because they're English. No offence to any Englishmen, of course.

Yah... I dunno if that flies.

Is this really your argument?  That being English is equivalent to suffering from Downs Syndrome? 

I am taking it that you have never met a person with Downs.  It is a horrifyingly debilitating condition.  It is true that some (very small) percentage eventually lead a satisfactory life, but the vast majority seem to be either unhappy or else so crippled by the disease that they lack the capacity to be unhappy.  I have a niece with the condition, and the great fear of my brother is what will happen to her after he and his wife die, because she will never lead an even convincing semblance of a real life.  She is mentally about ten years old, at best.

[Razgovory]

So, like Tyr then?

[Jacob]

Is this really your argument?  That being English is equivalent to suffering from Downs Syndrome?

nope, that's not my argument, in spite of what we might think of Tyr sometimes.

My point was that people belonging to [category x] can reasonably take offence to statements saying that fetuses belonging to [category x] ought to be aborted, even if they themselves are not fetuses any more. And that the distinction between saying "the moral thing to do is to abort fetuses belonging to [category x]" and "those who belong to [category x] should have been aborted" is fairly minor.

I am taking it that you have never met a person with Downs.  It is a horrifyingly debilitating condition.  It is true that some (very small) percentage eventually lead a satisfactory life, but the vast majority seem to be either unhappy or else so crippled by the disease that they lack the capacity to be unhappy.  I have a niece with the condition, and the great fear of my brother is what will happen to her after he and his wife die, because she will never lead an even convincing semblance of a real life.  She is mentally about ten years old, at best.

I have met people with Down's Syndrome.

[grumbler]

My point was that people belonging to [category x] can reasonably take offence to statements saying that fetuses belonging to [category x] ought to be aborted, even if they themselves are not fetuses any more. And that the distinction between saying "the moral thing to do is to abort fetuses belonging to [category x]" and "those who belong to [category x] should have been aborted" is fairly minor.

Wow.  I can't respond to the bolded, because I can't see how that follows any logical pattern at all.  We just have to agree to not understand each other posts on this.

[Jacob]

Wow.  I can't respond to the bolded, because I can't see how that follows any logical pattern at all.  We just have to agree to not understand each other posts on this.

Have a great weekend, then

[grumbler]

Wow.  I can't respond to the bolded, because I can't see how that follows any logical pattern at all.  We just have to agree to not understand each other posts on this.

Have a great weekend, then

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to start school on the next Monday, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

[CountDeMoney]

Is this really your argument?  That being English is equivalent to suffering from Downs Syndrome?

nope, that's not my argument, in spite of what we might think of Tyr sometimes.

  When it comes to Tyr, I give the edge to Downs Syndrome.

[Ideologue]

I wonder if they could discover prenatally that the child will grow up to be gay if they should be aborted as well.  Gays have higher rates of suicide, and from that we can probably conclude higher rates of unhappiness.  So would aborting the gay child be the right thing to do if you were interested in increasing human happiness?

On some level isn't that attacking the problem from the wrong direction? After all if gays are generally more unhappy, I'd assume most of that stems from society being intolerant. I wonder if rates of unhappiness will stay the same as we become more tolerant (allowing for life goal things like marriage, children, etc.).

Because, otherwise, yeah then we're heading down a path of well perhaps we can use abortion to increase human happiness by weeding out differences. Can't be picked on for being different if we're all the same.

Yeah, because the never-ending struggle to find a place in an overcrowded world is fucking awesome, and watching someone constitutionally incapable of achieving that goal fail time and time again is awesomer still.  It's how God gets His kicks, and we can join in!

Dawkins is right.  Eliminating merely negative traits is something we don't know how to do yet, but foreclosing the near-certainty of sadness for Down's sufferers--along with a host of other serious congenital conditions--is something we do know how to do, and something we should do.

The alternative is not a humanist utopia, after all, or a world where differences are embraced, kindness is the rule, and everything works out great.  The alternative is the world we live in right now, where eugenics already exists, only privatized, with every possible excess, inefficiency, and inequity inherent to any free market system populated by actors of differing capabilities and degrees of rationality.

P.S.: if I were you, I would find Raz' gay analogy both spurious and offensive.  In fact, I find it such without even being you.

[Martinus]

Most of the backlash though is based around people with downs syndrome and accusations that he is saying they should have been aborted.
Its a bit of a different thing to say that a current fetus should be aborted and an actual grown up person should have been aborted.

All English babies should be aborted because they're English. No offence to any Englishmen, of course.

Yah... I dunno if that flies.

I'm surprised to see you, a self-described leftist, refer to fetuses as "babies".

Also, you remind me of one of those people who want their kid to be deaf because they do not view deafness as a disability. Down's Syndrom is a disability - there is no ambiguity about it whatsoever. As opposed to being English or gay.

If you think this way, you should be pro-life. If you see fetuses as babies and yet believe there should be a right to kill babies, you must be a horrible human being.