Further to the point, @Athena, is that both materialism and idealism can account for us bouncing off of the wall in the same way.

I refer you to idealism, materialism/physicalism, and facts.

Which is not say that I am either a materialist or an idealist, but merely that there is a context for a discussion of facts that has nothing to do with a theory of atoms or other claims of the natural sciences.

If you want to argue the man in the video is wrong, first you have to pay careful attention to what he said. — Athena

We are having two different conversations - I am talking philosophy and you are talking something else. If you want to talk about philosophy, then you need to focus on the difference between the sounds/gestures/symbols we make with our bodies, what is capable of being symbolized, and things like “reality” or “what is” or the “state of affairs”. We can’t walk through walls because we can’t walk through walls. That is the “fact” that is being discussed. A person’s understanding of why they can’t walk through a wall (such as a theory of electrons, atoms, and exclusion principles) is about symbols, not about “facts.” Pointing to someone blathering on is not in the least bit responsive to why we can’t walk through a wall. Idiots and physicists alike bounce of a wall when they walk into it.

The question is, what does bouncing off of a wall have to do with “facts” as used in philosophy? The point @Banno is making is not inherently about the generalization that “we can’t walk through walls”, but that there are specific instances of us and walls and the ways in which they interact independent of how we talk about them and our talking is judged right or wrong by how well they fit the “facts.” I am not critiquing generalizations per se (which are clearly abstracted from facts and do not refer to facts themselves), but the idea that facts are assessed by the extent to which they impose themselves upon us independent of our talk.

Your understanding of science (or the video’s creator) simply does not address the conversation being had - it is an aside.

The simple case (to avoid getting wrapped up in abstractions, tenses, etc.) is Banno’s cat. When Banno says, “My cat is on the mat” he is making a factual claim that we assess as “True” or “False” based upon whether his cat is on the mat. The issue is the relationship between his cat, “facts”, and “truth.” Is there some way, independent of his cat being on the mat, that we might say “His cat is on the mat” and claim such is true besides his cat being there? And if we said it and believed it, would that mean we weren’t wrong to say it when his cat is not on the mat?

Banno’s claim is that someone can be wrong and that wrongness is assessable by something outside of language. Is he wrong?

P.S. Banno, though he can speak for himself, will be clear that he isn’t talking about our ability to assess based upon our epistemology (that is, whether our assessment of whether it is true or false meets our epistemic criteria), but rather that regardless of what we know or claim, his cat is on the mat when his cat is on the mat and is not on the mat when it isn’t. No more, no less - a “something out there” which is or isn’t, as the case may be.

Dawkins has no idea what he is talking about. Some religions that make particular incorrect factual claims are incorrect. Religion writ large doesn’t make any factual claims and so can’t be factually incorrect.

Picking on Christians makes for good sport, but bad philosophy of religion.

Sacred myths, historicity, etc. Religion is not tied to the “truth” of some fact or set of facts or some event or series of events in history. It is an imposition of critics and a reflex of the ill informed.

So some guy posts a video as to why and you suppose that is true for all eternity. Many a scientist was firmly convinced of many an error, why do you think your (or his) certainty creates facts where other people’s certainty failed to create facts before?

Or maybe somewhat differently, do you want to talk about modal logic but used non-modal references for the sake of inclusivity?

But if the counter to lies is just alternate belief, what's the point?

Isn't the point that the election was fair, vaccines do save lives, climate change is man-made?

If you start from the premise that truth doesn't matter, you've already lost. — Banno

What matters is up to us, no? Your critique smacks of aesthetics.

It would be nice if facts mattered, but they don’t. The wall pushes back until it doesn’t. Your assertion we can never walk through it is true until it isn’t. What was true is no longer true and what will be true has yet to be. Facts are not substance, but wispy things that evaporate the harder we look or the harder we try to hold them. (Go ahead, start with the block universe.)

Being wrong is like the happiness machine - a cry into the wind about how what is real should somehow carry some weight beyond what we believe or feel - that we have to get back to something that has inherent something regardless of us. A futile hand waving in the face of insurmountable intellectual absence.

Your insistence that being wrong matters does not elevate facts to things which people can be wrong about outside of belief/language, and isn’t just about idealism. We change the world (the facts) all of the time and as our knowledge expands the world stops reacting in the way that it did before. What was a “fact” before is merely the limitation of the utterer to achieve their purpose, not some feature of metaphysics. And even your use of ideas like “climate change is man-mad” are so theory laden that if you turn out to be “wrong” about the causal mechanism but right about the solution, so what? What was important was to save the world as you defined it, not that your theory is not subject to revision as different evidence becomes available.

The cat is on the mat. It has been for years just as you’ve typed about the cat being on the mat with your keyboard and I’ve read it with my eyes and we’ve performatively contradicted any assertion of skeptical doubt. None of that fixes a fact.

A fact is the sort of thing that true statements are about - what makes a truth bearer true. Why put more weight on the word than what it supports? And why insist that there is a territory for our map when all we can deal in is maps?

Validity means that the premises cannot be true and the consequent false. To test validity we assume all premises are true and see if there is a spot on the truth table where the conclusion is false.

p | q | conditional
—————————
T | T | T
T | F | F
F | T | T
F | F | T

Is the truth table for the conditional as traditionally defined. Note that the conditional can be true in three cases and false in only one.

The conditional is always true when the consequent (Q) is true, meaning that knowing that the conditional is true and Q is true tells you no information about P, i.e. p then q,q therefore (p or ~p). These are entries one and three on the table and correspond to the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

The conditional is always true when the antecedent (P) is false, meaning that knowing that conditional is true and P is false tells you no information about Q, i.e. p then q, ~p therefore (q or ~q). Conditions 3 and 4 therefore correspond to the fallacy of denying the antecedent.

The conditional can be true or false when the antecedent (P) is true. Condition one is the only case where the premise is true and the conditional is true. The only truth value for Q in this situation is T. This entry corresponds to the valid inference of Modus Ponens.

The conditional can be true or false when the predecessor (Q) is false. Condition four is the only case where the conditional is true and the antecedent false. The only truth value for P in this situation is F. This entry corresponds to the valid inference of modus tollens,

Condition 2 is the only entry where the conditional is false. In a valid argument all premises must be true, so condition 2 cannot be the premise of a valid argument, i.e. P cannot be true and Q false in an argument where P then Q is a premise (true). This means that knowing that the conditional is true, it must be the case that either P is false (since P being true can lead to a false conditional) or Q must be true (which always leads to a true conditional), i.e. ~P or Q, which corresponds to the valid inference of material implication.

Validity and the rules of inference are established definitionally. There is no “logical” relationship between the parts other than what is defined.

This lack of relationship between the individual statements, e.g. P, and their presence in a valid argument leads to odd semantic outcomes and the formal rules of logic seem to stop functioning as useful tools of thought. The conditional in particular has been criticized for leading to absurd results do to its use in statements of cause and effect and identity and people have tried to rehabilitate it with ideas such as entailment and necessity.

Introducing the concept of “could” to replace the logically defined concept of “or” in valid proofs is a semantic shift that leads to confusion rather than clarity. If this concept results in some philosophical question for you, it strikes as an invention of your word choice. Perhaps you can expand a bit on what issue with the conditional/modus ponens you are having. The formal logic does not seem problematic so far as it goes.

Both a boat and goose float, yet one is not the other. Democracy is not the only form of government that can lead to peace.


Also, I was not claiming that peace is the measure of the functioning government, but that it is an example of a measure that one can use to make a judgment. This has philosophical implications, but was made in a political context - participants in a democracy need not make everyone agree about everything unless that is one of the goals of democracy.

How can anyone today believe a god walked in a garden with a man and a woman and this is the beginning of our history? If that story is accepted as factual, isn't there a problem with our thinking? Like before scientific thinking why wouldn't everyone believe that story? There was not a method for thinking that would clarify the story as a myth, not a fact. Democracy is about reasoning and that is only possible when our minds are prepared to think independently and scientifically, right? — Athena

The sentiment is nice, but thinking along these lines is muddled. All we have is extent stuff - the eternally present now. What we have is theories about how things were and how things will be based upon what is now. Some people are OK with patterns not holding and some people insist that there are “laws” out there that make things in the past behave like things in the present or such that things in the present give an indication of what happened in the past or will in the future. Asking why/how people believe what they believe (if it is true that the world revolves around the sun, why wouldn’t everyone 10,000 years ago have believed that?) sounds a bit like a reasonable challenge to the “truth” of some claim, but people can be (and are) wrong about big and little things.

The religious folk you are likely talking about are not engaged in arguments about religious belief from extent stuff as interpreted through their paradigm, but about personal revelation that made them believe some lot of stuff is/was “true.” Different groups have some modifications to this general line of thinking, but ultimately what is grounding their paradigm is of a different sort than the stuff that grounds a good theory about the fate of the mammoth.

Descriptions of the world and how it functions (the sorts of things that presumably make up the corpus of what you call scientific thinking) do not address the existential questions that people seem to be discussing when talking about why things should be done (like living or dying). Imagination (whether based in current states of affairs or otherwise) is what permits people to envision the past and work towards the future, both of which are counterfactuals.

A functioning democracy is about functioning, not about adherence to some ideology or another. If a functioning democracy is one that allows for relatively peaceful (i.e. not subject to group violence) existence, then the measure is the extent to which it does that, not how that peace is achieved.

All I've said is what Aristotle, Hegel, and others have said about form, spirit, soul — Gregory

And some people that wrote in English called rights “nonsense on stilts.” It is great to assert preference in the form of an ethical theory, but we shouldn’t pretend that rights theory is somehow any more rational or any better at staving off the nihilists. As to spirit, it is no different - a way that you try to push off responsibility for enforcing your preferences on people by appealing to something beyond. If a soul finds it way into a freshly fertilized egg, chances are that newly ensouled cell ends up as goo on the delivery room floor rather than in the baby people are busily fawning over.

Regardless, your mystical event that converts an ovum to a rights bearer has yet to be recognized at law in the US (at the Supreme Court level) for purposes of either asserting a claim of state interest or refutation of a woman’s right to abort. The only people arguing about life beginning at conception are the people who are trying to argue for judicial fiat to become the law (however temporary) of the land and the whimsical creation and destruction of rights as the political appointees to the Court gain and lose power.

If it wasn't for the abortion issue biologists would be in agreement that human life starts at conception. — Gregory

Ideas like this are sort of curious and belies a certain level of naïveté about what classifying something does in a metaphysical way. It is as if you believe that someone’s decision about how to use a word can magically change something from X to ~X and from ~Y to Y.

Last I checked, the cell is the basic unit of life. Sexual reproduction (which is how humans reproduce) involve the contribution of certain genetic material from a male gamete to a female gamete. Virtually all of the male gamete is destroyed in the process and a relatively trivial amount of the male gamete material persists after fusion of the male and female gamete. That is to say, at fertilization, virtually the entire cell is identical to what it was before fertilization save a smidge of new genetic material. There is no “life” that begins in that moment, rather there is a cell with some unique genetic aspects that has the potential to develop into something else. This cell may not be all that different than a cell that has been infected by a virus in so far as the virus changes the genetic makeup of a cell and causes the cell to cease being the “same” as the host’s cells before the infection. You don’t typically find someone arguing that a virally infected cell is a new human merely because there is some change in genetic composition between the cell before and after the infection.

I am mindful of the fact that a fertilized egg may develop into a human and a virally infected cell just explodes, but the question is, where does the material come from for a fertilized egg to develop? So you have 1/10,000 parts contributed from a male sex cell, the remainder from the female sex cell, plus other stuff to make the one cell two (and then four and eight and so on). Where does that stuff come from? It doesn’t come from anywhere - it is simply the incorporation of other parts of the mother, thereby making the non-mother portion of the result two cells like 1/20,000. This process continues - the mother’s one cell with minor genetic variation incorporates more parts of the mother and makes increasing numbers of cells.

Without going through all of embryonic development, suffice it say that you get to a blastocyst which is descended from the initially fertilized cell. This blastocyst has two parts - a trophoblast and the rest. The trophoblast, which is genetically identical to the rest of the blastocyst, goes on to form parts of the placenta and other support structures for the developing embryo. You may recognize the placenta as the thing that people throw in the garbage after a baby is born. What rights does the placenta have given that it meets all of the “life” requirements you established as the basis for being a rights bearer. And if the placenta has no rights, what does it mean to say that a fertilized cell is a rights bearer?

Now let’s say that all of the biologists agree that fertilization results in a cell with a different genetic composition than the cells from which it came and define that new cell as a new organism, how does that change the conversation from a world in which the biologists say that it isn’t a new organism until later embryonic development where individualist structures have developed?

You play a losing game when rights attach to cells with unique genetic properties. That mole on your back might be a rights bearer which you cannot remove without committing murder.

I was responding to Tim. I didn’t mean to imply that you were uncritical of the SC or other precedent. Sorry.

But yes, it would be hard not to strike down this law if considered on its merits and so I can see them using procedural delays to avoid doing so (such as invoking issues of standing, ripeness, and enforceability).

And you have not noted flaws in Roe so much as you don't find it bespoke for your purposes. — tim wood

A flaw is contextual. In my context, Roe is flawed. In yours, you see it is a good decision. We can go round the bush again with you trying to get us to say the same thing, but we won’t. I pointed you to literature in law, politics, academia, etc. which also discuss Roe’s flaws, but you don’t seem very interested in anything besides repeating your view about how I or other people might see it.

I am not looking for a final resolution in Roe when I judge it on jurisprudential grounds, but well founded legal reasoning. My critique of Roe in this thread has not been a matter of what I prefer, but rather whether Roe accomplishes what it purports to do or people understand it to do.

My view on the right to reproductive choice has been stated and one would imagine that I believed it reasonable when I wrote it. In terms of Constitutinal analysis, my preference is for a right that is not consumed by the exception, which is the obvious inevitability of Roe.

The thing is if you have to go back to pre-codification of Torah times to talk about what the Jewish ethic is, you are talking a period well before the Roman invasion and the formation of Christianity (500 bce vs like 70 bce to 200 ce). It feels unfair to claim that the Jewish ethic did not include things like the death penalty, self-defense, and holy war at the time of early Christianity (or the end of late temple period). You’d have to engage in a significant amount of “no true Scotsman” and “just soism” to get there.

By the by, the Ten Commandments in Exodus are followed a few lines later by capital crimes (in case you might think that Deuteronomy was the last addition to the Torah and so is somehow a less credible of ancient Jewish/Israelite ethics).

:sad:

And the idea of private parties performing traditional acts associated with government is our new reality on every level - local, state, federal, international, regulatory, etc. We are really watching the willful undoing of our public systems of government to the benefit of entrenched powers (political and capital).

I’m not sure what you mean by “later”. Less than 50 “lines”?

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the LORD thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.
— “Deuteronomy 7:1”

Deut. 7:1

16 Thou shalt not murder.
— “Deuteronomy 5:16”

Deut. 5:16

have their origin in Jewish foundational ethics, wherein the divine command "thou shall not kill" has absolute force. — Michael Zwingli

This is simply incorrect and a bad translation in any event. There were times the Bible specifically commanded the killing of people or permitted the killing of people (war, crimes, self-defense, etc.). Bad Christian ethics do not replace what actual Jews (then and now) thought about Biblical directives.

Also, Jews say that the commandments were given so that you may live and that you should not, therefore, die by them. Here is an approachable enough article on the topic of Pikuach Nefesh - saving a life (including your own). Wiki on Pikuach Nefesh

Roe, then, doesn't satisfy you. You still have not made clear any of its supposed flaws, except perhaps although not necessarily a datedness. Your reference even noted that if technology is to be accommodated, then viability becomes a function of time, place, circumstance, and availability of technical aid. But you're clearly a generous and patient writer: what's wrong with Roe? Shouldn't take more than few sentences. — tim wood

I believe I have previously addressed this, but I will try one more time.

There is a fundamental right to reproductive choice which should, under current Constitutional analysis, require a governmental law/regulation/policy narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest in order to regulate (or place an “undue” burden on).

Roe, which serves as the first explicit recognition of such right, both affirms that and at the same time grants the government a compelling interest in regulating behavior around potential lives.

Roe provides a bright line test of “viability” as the point at which the state has its compelling interest.

“Viability” is not a jurisprudential concept, but one that is plucked from medicine around the time of Roe. Such concept is inherently tied to the ability of contemporary medicine/science to permit the development of a clump of cells into a person.

In logic, then, Roe both establishes a right and details the way in which that right can be denied in virtually all circumstances based merely upon an accident of timing of non-judicial concepts. A woman can have a right to an abortion on day 35 and get it without incident in the wilds of Jabib, but if similarly situated woman had minor changes in date of pregnancy, length of pregnancy, place of pregnancy, overall health, etc., her right to an abortion may be different based merely upon the filing of a patent, the distribution of a machine, etc. So viability is not a standard by which a woman’s right to reproductive choice is protected, but rather a standard by which the state’s ability to regulate abortion is momentarily (and contextually) delayed.

Discussion of viability is, therefore, an abrogation of the SC’s obligation to provide judicial grounding for the existence and protection of rights. If a woman has a right to reproductive choice, there should be an articulable, consistent judicial basis for such right, not a punt that splits the baby between warring camps.

If you want to discuss the other jurisprudential reasons why Roe was probably wrong, we can do that, but I am trying to focus on those issues currently relevant to the abortion case law rather than re-hashing whether the right to privacy under Griswold was a judicial invention or something properly subject to protection under the due process clause of the 14th Amendement.

In Griswold, the Supreme Court found a right to privacy, derived from penumbras of other explicitly stated constitutional protections. The Court used the personal protections expressly stated in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments to find that there is an implied right to privacy in the Constitution. The Court found that when one takes the penumbras together, the Constitution creates a "zone of privacy." While the holding in Griswold found for a right to privacy, it was narrowly used to find a right to privacy for married couples, and only with regard to the right to purchase contraceptives.

Justice Harlan's Concurrence in Griswold

Also important to note is Justice Harlan's concurring opinion in Griswold, which found a right to privacy derived from the Fourteenth Amendment. In his concurrence, he relies upon the rationale in his dissenting opinion in Poe v. Ullman (1961). In that opinion, he wrote, "I consider that this Connecticut legislation, as construed to apply to these appellants, violates the Fourteenth Amendment. I believe that a statute making it a criminal offense for married couples to use contraceptives is an intolerable and unjustifiable invasion of privacy in the conduct of the most intimate concerns of an individual's personal life."

In privacy cases post-Griswold, the Supreme Court typically has chosen to rely upon Justice Harlan's concurrence rather than Justice Douglas's majority opinion. Eisenstadt v Baird (1971), Roe v. Wade (1972), and Lawrence v. Texas (2003) are three of the most prolific cases in which the Court extended the right to privacy. In each of these cases, the Court relied upon the Fourteenth Amendment, not penumbras.
— “Cornell LII on Privacy”

LII on Privacy

An afterthought, there seems to me incoherence in the following: — tim wood

2) Eh? The state's time increases as technology improves. — tim wood

Yes, I presented that incorrectly and have adjusted my post accordingly.

As for 3, that isn’t an argument, but a description of what they have done and the types of laws that have survived judicial scrutiny. 1 has failed and there has been no great movement on 2 even though the line of viability has clearly been pushed closer to conception than at the time of Roe (as acknowledge in Casey).

P.S. The three points should not be taken as an exhaustive list, by the way. For instance, there has been much ink wasted on whether there should be a different standard other than viability (such as pain, heartbeat, etc.), but arguing Roe got it wrong on viability being the standard is similar to the first point - that Roe was wrong.

And if you are interested in the state action requirement for the 14th Amendment, this is a reasonable enough article: Cornell LLI on State Action.

Beyond this are cases where a private individual discriminates, and the question is whether a state has encouraged the effort or has impermissibly aided it.1361 Of notable importance and a subject of controversy since it was decided is Shelley v. Kraemer.1362 There, property owners brought suit to enforce a racially restrictive covenant, seeking to enjoin the sale of a home by white sellers to black buyers. The covenants standing alone, Chief Justice Vinson said, violated no rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. “So long as the purposes of those agreements are effectuated by voluntary adherence to their terms, it would appear clear that there has been no action by the State and the provisions of the Amendment have not been violated.” However, this situation is to be distinguished from where “the purposes of the agreements were secured only by judicial enforcement by state courts of the restrictive terms of the agreements.”1363 Establishing that the precedents were to the effect that judicial action of state courts was state action, the Court continued to find that judicial enforcement of these covenants was forbidden. “The undisputed facts disclose that petitioners were willing purchasers of properties upon which they desire to establish homes. The owners of the properties were willing sellers; and contracts of sale were accordingly consummated. . . .”1364
— “Cornell LII on State Action”

I appreciate that you want to have the abortion debate, but that was not the point of @Ciceronianus’ post or my engaging with you regarding the shortfalls of Roe’s reasoning. If you want to read about Roe and the conceptual problems with the viability standard (later affirmed by the Casey court), you can do so. If you want to debate Roe, we can always do that in a different thread, but many articles have already done a better job than you and I will at hashing out viability (as a Constitutional, scientific, or philosophical matter).

Your initial participation in the thread regarding Roe

I invite any and all to read Roe v. Wade and to present here what they think are any failures in that law so far as reason shows - unreason disallowed. I think it's a pretty good law. And if any think they have better, let them present it, and absent which, let them be silent and comply. — tim wood

invoked my response because Roe is an unworkable standard from the perspective of anyone advocating for reproductive freedom. The Casey court acknowledge that it was a moving goal post and that as soon as viability is reached (based upon current medical technology), the state has an interest in protecting the potential person. Ciceronianus made the following comment

I think this decision is craven--it's a cowardly abdication of responsibility in these circumstances. I think it should be characterized as craven by anyone, regardless of their feelings on abortion. And, given the composition of the court, that such decisions are likely to be repeated whenever a law that is constitutionally questionable but politically or socially agreeable to the Justices is before them. — Ciceronianus

While I certainly agree with him about the realpolitik of the Texas decision, I am not so sure that Roe, Casey, and many other cases don’t follow a similar path. To simply hold up prior SC decisions as if they are some great accomplishment of human reason which engages in line drawing in some unquestionable fashion is naive at best.

Abortion has historically brought about suspect judicial behavior in service of a greater practical goal. The Texas decision is more reprehensible in-so-far as it permits the undoing of SC precedent by way of the shadow docket and the frustration of final adjudication while people are being intentionally denied their ability to exercise a constitutional right (the undue burden standard of Casey).

Whenever someone confuses the method of the SC in a brazen expansion of Constitutional rights of people with the goal of the SC, an error has been made. The viability standard, as unworkable as it is, is what the SC is stuck with if it hopes to maintain any sense of legitimacy in the public’s eye when upholding the Roe/Casey line of cases. The opponents to abortion know this and they can, therefore, fight the battle on at least three fronts with a straight face:

1) the SC was wrong in Roe regarding a fundamental right,

2) the SC’s viability standard is the most that can be supported under the Constitution and the period of time where a woman has an unfettered right to abortion is reduced each time medical technology improves while the state’s ability to regulate abortion in all instances (except for health and welfare of the mother) is increased, and

3) the regulation of medical practice or other necessary supports for obtaining an abortion (indirect obstacles/burdens) combined with directly frustrating a woman seeking an abortion by increasing the time, inconvenience, expense, etc. of getting the abortion (direct obstacles/burdens) up until the line that the SC deems such burdens “undue”.

What is novel about the Texas case is that it was designed specifically to go outside of the traditional context of discussion by allowing a private right of action against people other than woman seeking an abortion. As intimated by the court’s discussion of who the injunction would be enforceable against in the event it was issued, the due process clause is a restriction on governmental action, not private action. Even if Roe/Casey said that the government can’t restrict women in getting an abortion (a direct burden), maybe there is enough of a hole in the due process clause that a private person (under a new grant of right) can limit third person’s from assisting a woman in getting an abortion. This move is close to terrifying in that it privatizes behavior that the government could not get away with if engaged in directly.

A few excerpts from the dissents in Texas:

. . . Texas’s law delegates to private indi- viduals the power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion during the first stage of pregnancy. But a woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion dur- ing that first stage. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 846 (1992); Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 164 (1973). And a “State cannot delegate . . . a veto power [over the right to obtain an abortion] which the state itself is absolutely and totally prohibited from exercis- ing during the first trimester of pregnancy.” Planned Parenthood of Central Mo. v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52, 69 (1976) (internal quotation marks omitted). Indeed, we have made clear that “since the State cannot regulate or pro- scribe abortion during the first stage . . . the State cannot delegate authority to any particular person . . . to prevent abortion during that same period.” Ibid. . .

. . .I recognize that Texas’s law delegates the State’s power to prevent abortions not to one person (such as a district attorney) or to a few persons (such as a group of government officials or private citizens) but to any person. But I do not see why that fact should make a critical legal difference. That delegation still threatens to invade a constitutional right, and the coming into effect of that delegation still threatens imminent harm. — “Breyer”

The Legislature fashioned this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of enforcing the law. See, e.g., Virginia Office for Protection and Advo- cacy v. Stewart, 563 U. S. 247, 254 (2011) (citing Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123 (1908)). By prohibiting state officers from enforcing the Act directly and relying instead on citi- zen bounty hunters, the Legislature sought to make it more complicated for federal courts to enjoin the Act on a statewide basis.“ — “Sotomayor”

A somewhat lengthy quote from a SC case dealing with the reach of the 14th amendment protections (prefaced by Roe’s invocation of the 14th Amendement for the right to privacy):

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
— “Roe vs Wade”

Foremost among these limitations is the time-honored principle that the Fourteenth Amendment, by its very terms, prohibits only state action. "[T]he principle has become firmly embedded in our constitutional law that the action inhibited by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment is only such action as may fairly be said to be that of the States. That Amendment erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful." Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U. S. 1, 13, and n. 12 (1948).

Shortly after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, we decided two cases interpreting the Amendment's provisions, United States v. Harris, 106 U. S. 629 (1883), and the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S. 3 (1883). In Harris, the Court considered a challenge to § 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. That section sought to punish "private persons" for "conspiring to deprive anyone of the equal protection of the laws enacted by the State." 106 U. S., at 639. We concluded that this law exceeded Congress' § 5 power because the law was "directed exclusively against the action of private persons, without reference to the laws of the State, or their administration by her officers." Id., at 640. In so doing, we reemphasized our statement from Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 318 (1880), that "'these provisions of the fourteenth amendment have reference to State action exclusively, and not to any action of private individuals.'" Harris, supra, at 639 (misquotation in Harris).

We reached a similar conclusion in the Civil Rights Cases.

In those consolidated cases, we held that the public accommodation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which applied to purely private conduct, were beyond the scope of the § 5 enforcement power. 109 U. S., at 11 ("Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the [Fourteenth] [A]mendment"). See also, e. g., Romer v.

622

Evans, 517 U. S. 620, 628 (1996) ("t was settled early that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give Congress a general power to prohibit discrimination in public accommodations"); Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co., 457 U. S. 922, 936 (1982) ("Careful adherence to the 'state action' requirement preserves an area of individual freedom by limiting the reach of federal law and federal judicial power"); Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1002 (1982); Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis, 407 U. S. 163, 172 (1972); Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co., 398 U. S. 144, 147, n. 2 (1970); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 554 (1876) ("The fourteenth amendment prohibits a state from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another. It simply furnishes an additional guaranty against any encroachment by the States upon the fundamental rights which belong to every citizen as a member of society").

The force of the doctrine of stare decisis behind these decisions stems not only from the length of time they have been on the books, but also from the insight attributable to the Members of the Court at that time. Every Member had been appointed by President Lincoln, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, or Arthur-and each of their judicial appointees obviously had intimate knowledge and familiarity with the events surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Petitioners contend that two more recent decisions have in effect overruled this longstanding limitation on Congress' § 5 authority. They rely on United States v. Guest, 383 U. S. 745 (1966), for the proposition that the rule laid down in the Civil Rights Cases is no longer good law. In Guest, the Court reversed the construction of an indictment under 18 U. S. C. § 241, saying in the course of its opinion that "we deal here with issues of statutory construction, not with issues of constitutional power." 383 U. S., at 749. Three Members of the Court, in a separate opinion by Justice Brennan, expressed the view that the Civil Rights Cases

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were wrongly decided, and that Congress could under § 5 prohibit actions by private individuals. 383 U. S., at 774 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). Three other Members of the Court, who joined the opinion of the Court, joined a separate opinion by Justice Clark which in two or three sentences stated the conclusion that Congress could "punis[h] all conspiracies-with or without state action-that interfere with Fourteenth Amendment rights." Id., at 762 (concurring opinion). Justice Harlan, in another separate opinion, commented with respect to the statement by these Justices:

"The action of three of the Justices who joined the Court's opinion in nonetheless cursorily pronouncing themselves on the far-reaching constitutional questions deliberately not reached in Part II seems to me, to say the very least, extraordinary." Id., at 762, n. 1 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part).

Though these three Justices saw fit to opine on matters not before the Court in Guest, the Court had no occasion to revisit the Civil Rights Cases and Harris, having determined "the indictment [charging private individuals with conspiring to deprive blacks of equal access to state facilities] in fact contain[ed] an express allegation of state involvement." 383 U. S., at 756. The Court concluded that the implicit allegation of "active connivance by agents of the State" eliminated any need to decide "the threshold level that state action must attain in order to create rights under the Equal Protection Clause." Ibid. All of this Justice Clark explicitly acknowledged. See id., at 762 (concurring opinion) ("The Court's interpretation of the indictment clearly avoids the question whether Congress, by appropriate legislation, has the power to punish private conspiracies that interfere with Fourteenth Amendment rights, such as the right to utilize public facilities").

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To accept petitioners' argument, moreover, one must add to the three Justices joining Justice Brennan's reasoned explanation for his belief that the Civil Rights Cases were wrongly decided, the three Justices joining Justice Clark's opinion who gave no explanation whatever for their similar view. This is simply not the way that reasoned constitutional adjudication proceeds. We accordingly have no hesitation in saying that it would take more than the naked dicta contained in Justice Clark's opinion, when added to Justice Brennan's opinion, to cast any doubt upon the enduring vitality of the Civil Rights Cases and Harris.
— “US vs. Morrison”

US vs. Morrison

As to some limit, real viability seems pretty good. — tim wood

I am not anti-science or “pro-natural.” Any level of medical technology available that can make a fetus viable is reasonable because for the most part, those technologies exist to SAVE THE PREGNANCIES OF WOMAN WHO WANT THEM. So I will not quibble that some post conception thing is or is not viable because it couldn’t breath/nurse/etc. without medical intervention. And once it is separated from its mother, I will not argue that the mother can simply withhold medical care by fiat because the thing is “not viable” without the gestational analogs made available to it.

I will not, therefore, engage in the mental game of whether the decision is about “all or none” where a magic moment in time is the arbiter between murder and meaningless abortion. Clearly different people have different relationships to a potential life and how to regard it. What I will say is that REPRODUCTIVE CHOICE is the point of abortion advocacy and the reason why it is essential that a right to reproductive choice be read into the Constitution with no allotment for governmental interests. What makes my line in the sand simple is that it comports with general notions of identity - something inside of you which springs from your own cells is you. Something detached from you is something else, even if it can be reintegrated (consider an amputated hand that is reattached).

The moral confusion here is precisely about notions of ensoulment - that somehow magic happens when a sperm unites with an ovum and a new genetic mix is formed. I do not agree and find the idea to be intellectually indefensible. There is no moment in time during gestation that changes the relationship of the mass of growing cells in the uterus to the mother - it is her and she has absolute say over what happens to her body.

If your issue is simply that being inside the uterus and being three inches to the right outside of the uterus shouldn’t be the difference between permitted feticide and criminal murder, I would have you think long and hard about whether your queasiness about that situation should override someone’s choice to reproduce or otherwise do what they will with their own bodily integrity. Put differently, once the state has an interest in being in someone’s womb to override their reproductive choice because of your unease about murder/feticide, when does it stop being murder? And if it isn’t viability (which I imagine it isn’t), why pretend like it is?

Why don't you propose a good rule and never mind the rest. I will too, it happens to be Roe. I do not suppose that I can improve on that. What do you got? — tim wood

Here is my equally as quippy a rule: a woman has a right to abortion on demand at any point until the fetus has been detached from her body. Viability is of no moment and the state never has a compelling interest in coercing someone to reproduce.

Did you see I quoted the actual case at you multiple times, Tim? Are you really going to play that dense? And are you further aware that the Case case that I quoted to you actually changed the trimester analysis seemingly laid out in Roe? So like the actual law in the US regarding abortion is not based on Roe but on the viability and undue burden standard?

Even in Casey the Supremes would disagree with your 26 weeks. The case is now thirty years old.

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We have seen how time has overtaken some of Roe's factual assumptions: advances in maternal health care allow for abortions safe to the mother later in pregnancy than was true in 1973, see Akron I, supra, 462 U.S., at 429, n. 11, 103 S.Ct., at 2492, n. 11, and advances in neonatal care have advanced viability to a point somewhat earlier. Compare Roe, 410 U.S., at 160, 93 S.Ct., at 730, with Webster, supra, 492 U.S., at 515-516, 109 S.Ct., at 3055 (opinion of REHNQUIST, C.J.); see Akron I, supra, 462 U.S., at 457, and n. 5, 103 S.Ct., at 2489, and n. 5 (O'CONNOR, J., dissenting). But these facts go only to the scheme of time limits on the realization of competing interests, and the divergences from the factual premises of 1973 have no bearing on the validity of Roe's central holding, that viability marks the earliest point at which the State's interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions. The soundness or unsoundness of that constitutional judgment in no sense turns on whether viability occurs at approximately 28 weeks, as was usual at the time of Roe, at 23 to 24 weeks, as it sometimes does today, or at some moment even slightly earlier in pregnancy, as it may if fetal respiratory capacity can somehow be enhanced in the future. Whenever it may occur, the attainment of viability may continue to serve as the critical fact, just as it has done since Roe was decided; which is to say that no change in Roe's factual underpinning has left its central holding obsolete, and none supports an argument for overruling it. — “Casey”

You are asking me to account for the non-sense that was the Casey reasoning? Go ask O’Conner.

But read her sentence before the one you quoted: The viability line also has, as a practical matter, an element of fairness.

She is trying to defend the viability rule using specious logic - logic that you easily rebut yourself when saying that actual knowledge is required for any claim to consent.

The court claiming that Roe was well considered is like you claiming that you understood the decision - self-serving and meaningless for purposes of analysis.

Only if she knows she is pregnant. — tim wood

That isn’t what Casey said, that isn’t the framework, and it is generally bollox. The actual case law in the US is that VIABILITY is the deciding moment when the state has a compelling interest in protecting the interest’s of a potential life against the mother absent a threat to her life or health. Not the mother’s knowledge or anything else. The right to abortion generally (as performed by doctors) hinges on birth having a worse medical outcome than abortion at the time performed.

If the point of Roe was to enshrine the right to reproductive choice, Roe failed.

You should really quit while you are ahead, Tim. Go read the dissent to Casey and the ink spilled on the judicial fiat of the majority in Roe. If you have any hope of understanding why Roe is in such peril, you really need to have a handle on what was actually done and whether the Robert’s court can walk Roe back without undoing the concept of precedent.

I am tempted to start pointing you in the direction of literature on the issue of viability and how bad it was, but here is an amusing quote:

“ The change in viability statistics over time highlights one of the unfor- tunate consequences of using viability, a concept developed for medical purposes, as the basis for determining an individual's legal status under the Constitution. Compare a healthy 26-week-old fetus in utero in 1973 with an identical fetus similarly situated in 2009. Under the viability rule, a state likely could not adopt abortion regulations protecting the life of such a fetus at the time of Roe but could protect an identical fetus today.5 3 "According to the logic of Roe v. Wade, then, a whole class of unborn human beings would now merit legal protection but would not have merited it then."54
This difference in legal status between the 1973 fetus and the 2009 fe- tus seems impossible to explain in a principled fashion. No distinction be- tween the two fetuses justifies the disparate treatment.5 Nor is there any difference in the burden the two fetuses place on their respective mothers. 6 . . .

. . .changes in
a woman's location during pregnancy could cause a fetus to move in and out of viability. He illustrates the point with an example:
A woman is 25 weeks pregnant, and is visiting a doctor at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne. Since the Monash Medical Centre has one of the most advanced Neonatal Intensive Care Units in the world, the developing human inside her would be considered viable. Now suppose that the woman leaves Melbourne, and flies to Papua New Guinea. Once she arrives in Papua New Guinea, she walks up into the highlands, where she remains until the birth. Since sophisticated medical assistance is not available in the Papua New Guinea highlands, when she arrives in the highlands her developing human would not be considered viable, and in fact would not be considered viable for almost three months. In fact, if this woman was to continue to travel regularly between Papua New Guinea and a major centre in Australia, then her unborn developing human could reach the 'point' of viability several times, becoming viable whenever she was near sophisticated medical facilities, and not viable whenever she returned to the remote Papua New Guinea highlands.58” — “Easily Found Random Article on the Problem with Viability if You Cared to Look”

Random Article

And here is the Supreme Court discussing the Roe viability standard in Casey…

That brings us, of course, to the point where much criticism has been directed at Roe, a criticism that always inheres when the Court draws a specific rule from what in the Constitution is but a general standard. We conclude, however, that the urgent claims of the woman to retain the ultimate control over her destiny and her body, claims implicit in the meaning of liberty, require us to perform that function. Liberty must not be extinguished for want of a line that is clear. And it falls to us to give some real substance to the woman's liberty to determine whether to carry her pregnancy to full term.

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We conclude the line should be drawn at viability, so that before that time the woman has a right to choose to terminate her pregnancy. We adhere to this principle for two reasons. First, as we have said, is the doctrine of stare decisis. Any judicial act of line-drawing may seem somewhat arbitrary, but Roe was a reasoned statement, elaborated with great care. We have twice reaffirmed it in the face of great opposition. See Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 476 U.S., at 759, 106 S.Ct., at 2178; Akron I, 462 U.S., at 419-420, 103 S.Ct., at 2487-2488. Although we must overrule those parts of Thornburgh and Akron I which, in our view, are inconsistent with Roe's statement that the State has a legitimate interest in promoting the life or potential life of the unborn, see infra, at ----, the central premise of those cases represents an unbroken commitment by this Court to the essential holding of Roe. It is that premise which we reaffirm today.

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The second reason is that the concept of viability, as we noted in Roe, is the time at which there is a realistic possibility of maintaining and nourishing a life outside the womb, so that the independent existence of the second life can in reason and all fairness be the object of state protection that now overrides the rights of the woman. See Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S., at 163, 93 S.Ct., at 731. Consistent with other constitutional norms, legislatures may draw lines which appear arbitrary without the necessity of offering a justification. But courts may not. We must justify the lines we draw. And there is no line other than viability which is more workable. To be sure, as we have said, there may be some medical developments that affect the precise point of viability, see supra, at ----, but this is an imprecision within tolerable limits given that the medical community and all those who must apply its discoveries will continue to explore the matter. The viability line also has, as a practical matter, an element of fairness. In some broad sense it might be said that a woman who fails to act before viability has consented to the State's intervention on behalf of the developing child.

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The woman's right to terminate her pregnancy before viability is the most central principle of Roe v. Wade. It is a rule of law and a component of liberty we cannot renounce.
— “Supreme’s Plurality in Casey”

PP vs. Casey

I look forward to your lesson on how I am “stupid or worse” and your demonstration of how I “don’t know what I am talking about.”

Perhaps you missed where I responded to your earlier post and actually quoted Roe for you. If you like, go read it and let me know if your opinion still holds. Even if you don’t want to, the question is rather straight forward - Roe was based on medical technology in 1973 where viability was approximately six months after conception. If viability is pushed back earlier in time (five months, four months, three months, 9 weeks, 6 weeks, etc.), on your view, should that impact a woman’s right to reproductive choice? According to Roe’s reasoning, the state has an interest in protecting potential life which is sufficient to limit a woman’s right to reproductive choice.

Again, here is Roe for you “ With respect to the State's important and legitimate interest in potential life, the 'compelling' point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.”

As for your speculation, I am admitted to the bar in two states, so I am pretty confident that I know how to read a case for myself. You might want to spare me your summary of how you think law in the US works and actually get to the analysis of the language in the case that you are claiming is reasonable.

There is so much of this that is good and I don’t want to paraphrase a paraphrase. I simply want to draw attention to a very earnest examination of the question.

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” (MS, 3). One might object that suicide is neither a “problem” nor a “question,” but an act. A proper, philosophical question might rather be: “Under what conditions is suicide warranted?” And a philosophical answer might explore the question, “What does it mean to ask whether life is worth living?” as William James did in The Will to Believe. For the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus, however, “Should I kill myself?” is the essential philosophical question. For him, it seems clear that the primary result of philosophy is action, not comprehension. His concern about “the most urgent of questions” is less a theoretical one than it is the life-and-death problem of whether and how to live.

Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to an underlying premise, namely that life is absurd in a variety of ways. As we have seen, both the presence and absence of life (i.e., death) give rise to the condition: it is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none, and it is absurd to hope for some form of continued existence after death given that the latter results in our extinction. But Camus also thinks it absurd to try to know, understand, or explain the world, for he sees the attempt to gain rational knowledge as futile. Here Camus pits himself against science and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rational analysis: “That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh” (MS, 21).

These kinds of absurdity are driving Camus’s question about suicide, but his way of proceeding evokes another kind of absurdity, one less well-defined, namely, the “absurd sensibility” (MS, 2, tr. changed). This sensibility, vaguely described, seems to be “an intellectual malady” (MS, 2) rather than a philosophy. He regards thinking about it as “provisional” and insists that the mood of absurdity, so “widespread in our age” does not arise from, but lies prior to, philosophy. Camus’s diagnosis of the essential human problem rests on a series of “truisms” (MS, 18) and “obvious themes” (MS, 16). But he doesn’t argue for life’s absurdity or attempt to explain it—he is not interested in either project, nor would such projects engage his strength as a thinker. “I am interested … not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences” (MS, 16). Accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, he asks above all whether and how to live in the face of it. “Does the absurd dictate death” (MS, 9)? But he does not argue this question either, and rather chooses to demonstrate the attitude towards life that would deter suicide. In other words, the main concern of the book is to sketch ways of living our lives so as to make them worth living despite their being meaningless. — “SEP on Camus”

Camus on Suicide

Using slightly different language (with influence from the East), the root of suffering is desire and to be born is to desire. Cf four noble truths Life is suffering and, in a more existential sort of way, the sickness onto death. One possible answer is self-abnegation - the cessation of desire through the elimination of the self (the end of consciousness). If death is not the way out, then you must find the other door. If death is the way out, then death is the most expedient end. But even if this is so, Camus’ question remains: can we justify the continued suffering.

In a world of radical freedom, where the extent of our moral regard is merely the self, suicide is simply one choice of many. In a world where we are responsible for others, suicide takes a different role. Even if the hypothetical is to choose to have never been, if the consequence is on others and our morality extends to others, the answer is not so straight forward. Must we be to satisfy the needs of others? Can the demands of others extend so far as to compel our very existence? We certainly know that their choices can bring us into this world, but are we obligated to abide (and indeed affirm) those choices?

I would also point to this article on intergenerational justice as a sort of placeholder for the idea of obligations between existent beings and non-existent beings. That is, currently alive people to already dead people and people yet to be born, but in this case, might also be extended to people yet to be given the choice about whether to come into existence.

Central questions of intergenerational justice are: first, whether present generations can be duty-bound because of considerations of justice to past and future people; second, whether other moral considerations should guide those currently alive in relating to both past and future people; and third, how to interpret the significance of past injustices in terms of what is owed to the descendants of the direct victims of the injustices. — “SEP on Intergenerational Justice”

Intergenerational Justice

A law on the federal (or state) level cannot change a “precedent” in-so-far as the precedent is about prohibiting the limitation of a constitutional right absent the Supreme’s agreeing that it is narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest (or whatever other language the Supremes choose to invoke in the moment). The US is not like other countries where the ultimate tribunal’s decisions stand until the legislature (or other governing body) acts to the contrary.

Yes, the legislature can change the analysis until the Supremes have a chance for judicial review, but the American system (under the claim of checks and balances) has placed the power to decide whether laws are Constitutional outside of the scope of legislative fiat.

My own view on abortion is that is a terminally grey area and unresolvable - which is one reason I like Roe v Wade: it seems to equitably and reasonably split the difference. — tim wood

There is nothing reasonable about it and it is clearly inequitable. The state can regulate the practice of medicine however it wants (so long as it can fabricate some claim about “health of the woman”) and the women has no right to choose after “viability”. You invited conversation about why the case does a bad job at preserving reproductive choice, declined to discuss it, and then keep asserting that the case is some sort of great solution.

So, God wasn't what you wanted to discuss. What you really wanted was an opinion on human failings, incompetence, and how it would be better if we cut each other some slack to avoid unnecessary headaches. We did discuss that too, although only superficially — TheMadFool

What I really wanted to do was share a bit of humor in religious philosophy. What makes it funny is how it hints at something more profound and gives momentary context for the vicissitudes of life. Just imagine that the reason for life being the way it is is due to some dawdling good natured putz who knows everything, but just can’t seem to get out of his own way. It would be such a nice explanation, even if it isn’t.

Everyone’s, Hanover.

Who promoted God to beyond His competence? — unenlightened

People. God might have been good at somethings once upon a time, but as widely conceived these days? A bit like using a screw driver to try turning the main shaft of an aircraft carrier.

I appreciate your seeming sincerity, but one can be a flirt only so long. This post is largely an example of Poe’s Law.

That said, there are some things to be gleaned from an absurd analysis of the Omni-god, but as this is a philosophy forum (which is concerned primarily with method), I will not elaborate in a way that would strike of being religious.

I will, however, tell you that this story is an absurd expansion of an actual sermon which is timely for Jews thinking about the themes of some upcoming holidays. Charity and humility (the acceptance that others will suck at their jobs while we suck at our own) are virtues that go a long way towards maintaining relationships and allowing ourselves and others to seek and give forgiveness for our failings. The Peter Principle (empirical as it is) is a relatively contemporary tool for framing the abundant incompetence we see and highlighting the systems and systemic forces that foster it.

Woe. Shall we lament the end of the culture of the conquerors, murderers, slavers, and rapists too soon eradicated by the followers of Paul? Perhaps a touch of stoicism is in order. But yes, I can see how the depravity of man is a feature of religion and not something else.

And an ethical dimension that is ignored as religions mythologise themselves. — Banno

After which ethics class did the sculptor make a statue of the goddess Aphrodite? Perhaps you can sing a nice hymn exalting act utilitarianism?