No it doesn’t.

Irrelevant to my case. — AJJ

You are claiming that a stage of existence necessary to be human entails being human.

Therefore any stage of causality required for creating humans is necessary to being human.

I don't understand the question you are asking. Are you claiming an assessment is purely subjective? I don't accept that premise. An assessment involves a belief that can have truth or falsity. An emotion simply happens and cannot have truth or falsity..

I said that presumably you wouldn't say that it's a belief about how someone feels or what their assessment of their life is, otherwise it wouldn't be any different than what they feel/what their assessment is. — Terrapin Station

An assessment of one's life is not purely subjective.

If someone cures cancer and saves millions of lives then there life had an immense impact on other peoples well being whatever they think.

Any belief can be false and Assessment is a belief. Like I said is if someone is happy because they think (or assess) that poverty has ended then that is an assessment based on a false belief and an emotion derived from a false belief.

I think what you are doing is giving a disproportionate importance to someones most trivial feelings.

I’m saying a human being’s life starts at its conception — AJJ

A human beings life starts at the big bang by your reasoning.

Conception is necessary for human life but that does not make it sufficient.

The claim that people have a bad quality of life is not a moral claim. I think a moral claim is subjective. but the reality of other peoples suffering is not.

I had a severe toothache once but during that time I did not have the belief that I had a poor quality of life. The judgement I have a poor quality is an overall assessment and substantial elements of this are based on objective fact.

I don't know how you are using the term subjective here but I do not think that everything subjective is only subjective. Some things might be entirely subjective but others things are both subjective and objective.
For example me imagining a magic green octopus is all subjective and in the imagination. Me believing I live in poverty is not.

Some things like pain require subjectivity even though there is no doubt the pain is real unlike the magic green octopus. Therefore the belief that people in severe pain have a poor quality of life is not an entirely subjective judgement. Just because pain is private does not mean it is not a fact.

If we’re going to value the lives of our fellow human beings at all, then we must do so from the beginning. Otherwise people, when it suits them, will come up with arbitrary reasons we’re allowed to end life, as they do. — AJJ

It is quite possible to have an abortion and value human life and not harm anyone else other than the fetus. Life is a lot more nuanced than you seem to think.

Most people are contradictory when it comes to the valuing human life and what this means and having arbitrary concepts and actions. There is profound inequality across society because people do not value all humans equally. This situation was even worse (see slavery and racism and sexism) before abortion became widespread.

There is nothing arbitrary when someone gives a specific reason for having an abortion. And there is nothing arbitrary about labeling the ,multitude of stages in human development differently.

If you worked in a hospital you would not get away with answering every question with "it is a child". to technical question about what entity is being examined or treated.

I don't think abortion is right or wrong. I don't think it is ideal or great for sure.

I think it is the lesser of two evils. But I don't accept most premises made by anti-abortionists

I think if there were "ought's" that would be problematic. For example should we give all excess wealth that we have away to save starving children? Should we rescue as many animals as possible from natural harm?

It could be argued like Peter Singer does on an ought's framework we would be compelled to do a lot more than we do currently and sacrifice a lot more. And then the following argument is that, that puts an impossible burden on us.

Also if morality involves choice then we can't simply be compelled to do something it would seem, and retain freewill.

I think one thing you can objectively say about genocide is that it is extremely harmful and causes massive suffering. That really should be an incentive not to do it but yet humans have done it unfortunately.

I am not convinced abortion causes any suffering to the aborted child mainly because we have no memory of being in the womb or suffering the womb or having desires in the womb etc.

Is a dead person a human? At what stage after death do they stop being human?

I am bringing the bible up in the context of these debates and asking whether or not people that are opposed to abortion have a hidden religious motive beyond their allegedly "rational" arguments.

I said "I would like someone(..)" I didn't say you in particular. I just attached the comment to your post for convenience.

I see no evidence reason leads to morality and you can't derive an ought from an is.

And if reason did lead to a morality it is not clear who's position that morality would favour. At the least however you can point out flaws in peoples argumentation though and common fallacies such as appeal to emotion, shifting the goal post etc.

Personally, I believe there are at least some moral truths, including that genocide is morally wrong. — Noah Te Stroete

Where do these moral truths come from and what do they consist of?

They bible is not a good source because it is contradictory along with other problems

If genocide is "wrong" then how come nature freely allows it? I think unfortunately unless we can find some rule book outside of nature then what nature allow nature allows. You can't break the laws of nature.

I would like someone on here to come out and admit to being religious and try and defend the bibles morality and these two quotes that I put in a previous thread.

.................

"But most fortunate of all are those who are not yet born. For they have not seen all the evil that is done under the sun." Ecclesiastes 6:3

"A man may father a hundred children and live for many years; yet no matter how long he lives, if he is unsatisfied with his prosperity and does not even receive a proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he." Ecclesiastes 6:3

You cannot win a moral argument because there is no evidence of any moral facts.

If there were moral facts and rules nature breaks them all.

I think you can argue for the value of falsehood. See Kant and lying to an axe murderer at your door.

Also I think the truth is hard to come by so people tend to resort to pragmatism I suppose.

I think if we knew "The Truth "it would probably alter all our beliefs and values.

People who claim to know the absolute truth become dogmatists and have committed some serious crimes against humanity..

They can also have different assessments at different times, and those assessments can change as they come to different beliefs about facts, or different mental health states, etc., but that doesn't amount to their assessments being right or wrong. Their assessment isn't the same as any of those other things. — Terrapin Station

Quality of life is a belief and beliefs can be false. You seem to be unjustifiably pinning quality of life down to one individual instance and how someone felt at that time.

So for example a woman may be very happy for a long period of time then the police knock on her door and tell her that her son has been killed in a road accident. She immediately feels distraught and suicidal and would rate her quality of life as terrible.

But a short while later the police come back and tell her they knocked on the wrong door and it is not her son that died.
Then she feels massive relief and is overjoyed. Now you are pinning her quality of life down down to that one instant when due to a false belief she felt awful and not on the all the moments of her life when she was not in that state. But the only reason she had this bad moment was a false belief.

However if a woman had been depressed for years and had a few months of happiness due to a romance before declining again I would accept that the overall quality of her life was poor.

I think the quality of someones life is caused by circumstances and not how they feel. Because feelings can be temporary and readjusted but overall quality of life throughout a person existence is a measure of how much positive things happened to them.

Sure. But that doesn't make any state objectively preferable. — Terrapin Station

The fact that someone can only express a desire after their body has reached a certain level of functionality means that there is a certain necessary level of functionality required to even have this debate and make judgments, so these are things we are subservient to.


I see no reason to assume someone is right when they make a claim about their quality of life. I have given reasons why they could be wrong such as having false beliefs. But also I don't think someones personal judgement has that much power.

For example I might kidnap someone and they strongly desire not to be kidnapped but I easily overrule that. So in this sense someones life could be meaningful even if they reject the idea. Someone can be mentally ill and forced into hospital treatment and then their mental health improves and they have a better quality of life by force.

I think that if you had a very depressed person and a very happy person they would still both responded negatively to being burnt on the hand.

I think even for people who consider life to be almost worthless they can still experience pain objectively and differentiate between levels of pain. So that even with a very poor quality life it can objectively be made worse and a very good quality of life may get even better.

I think biology does prove that there is ideal functioning of a human body and that organs can be defined by their ability to form a specific function.

The mind is a more complicated place and I think this is where the subjective defense or vagueness lies. But if we knew exactly how the brain and mind worked we could probably objectively manufacture well being here. Therapies and antidepressants already have positive effects for some people.

No state is objectively preferred to any other state. — Terrapin Station

But some physical states are functional and relied upon to keep a human body alive. No one could flourish in an environment that was lethal to the human body.

Before anyone can express a desire about their life they need to have come to exist and survived in an environment conducive to human well being.

I could concede to some degree on the idea that what is most important for well being is possibly how someone feels.Although I think how they feel still relates to objective circumstance.

But I think there are also enough objective facts that influence quality that we don't need to make a judgement solely based on persons subjective testimony.

Which has to be about how they feel about things, — Terrapin Station

What physical benefits someone is not about what they feel.

Someone without access to clean water will be prone to disease. We know how to make environments that are at least physically healthy for people. Emotional well being is a more complicated matter but there can be facts of the matter.

You can manipulate someones mental states with drugs or brain interventions like deep brain stimulation and change the way they feel. It is not solely in their control.

Why do you think that the action of reproduction is an exercise of any right? — tim wood

If society allows us to do something then it is a right. Anyone can do any action that is possible and ignore societies strictures but if you want to discuss abortion in the framework of societies strictures and morality then society allows people to have children.

My point is that why should people have to defend having an abortion and not have to defend creating a child. As I have said someone can suffer far more after they are born than in the womb, or if they weren't born, so creating a child has a lot of ramifications and the child is not created at her request.

Antinatalists consider creating a child worse than terminating a pregnancy. The anti abortionists do not seem concerned with the ethics of creating a child in the first place and the lack of consent involved and the future suffering of the child preferring to focus on the time in the womb which no one has in memories and where no apparent suffering is involved in that brief existence.

No problem

Assuming they do tolerate child neglect and do nothing to alleviate it, or, better yet, assume they actually advocate child abuse and also are opposed to abortion, that's entirely irrelevant to the question of whether abortion is justified. The best you've shown is that there are some fucked up hypocrites in the world. — Hanover

I think a lot of objection to abortion is simply virtue signalling. If someone claims to be concerned about children and their outcomes and potential then what have they done for any of the children in need that exist to day.

I think children suffering and starving is a defense for abortion because abortion would prevent unnecessary suffering and neglect and over population etc. And Because arguments against abortion are based on the alleged value of the life being aborted.

I think it would be better for a child not to have existed than to have starved to death or committed suicide after school bullying etc. The abortion debate is silly if we clearly do not have just outcomes for children.

↪Andrew4Handel so my 21 year old daughter is suffering from depression. She tells me she wants to take her life. Should I let her. Or assume that her ideal desire if it was not handicapped by her illness would be to live and get her help — Rank Amateur

I think when it comes to the unborn child it has no similarities with someone who has already experienced life and formed preferences. Your daughter may have shown that she has a the ability to enjoy life and has interests that might be restored to her.

I suffer from long term depression and anxiety. Everyday you weigh up the goods and bad's of a the situation. It is not a simple dichotomous decision where you know the right course of action or outcome.

I think the problem is that once you are born and have lived some years it is not easy to commit suicide because you have an array of conflicting desires and some instincts for self preservation. This can make the situation worse. So people are like in limbo or purgatory. That is why it can be better to abort a fetus before it is trapped in this quagmire.

There is far more capacity for suffering after you are born than as a fetus.

I would not help someone kill them self but I don't think I can know whether it is the wrong decision for them to make. You might prolong someone's suffer inadvertently by helping them

You're trying to claim that the quality of life assessment can be objective. — Terrapin Station

I think there are two aspects to a quality of life assessment. How someone feels about their life and the physical facts.

If you are a building a society you are going to try and build it considering the physical facts concerning what harms people.

I don't accept that quality of life simply reduces to how someone feels about their situation at a given moment. there are objective facts about things that are likely to increase someones well being. I think the cases you are relying on are in the minority where someone is happy with poor circumstances

But what would anyone be matching or failing to match re quality of life assessments? — Terrapin Station

As I mentioned with the just world fallacy they have false beliefs about the external world so they the emotions they feel are being generated by falsehoods. For example someone might feel happy because they believe poverty has decreased then you can hypothetically show them statistics that refute this belief showing that their feelings had a false basis.

You'd have to believe that people should feel the same way, should make the same assessments, as most other people. But what would be the argument for that? — Terrapin Station

Like I said you can judge that someone has a poor quality of life based on their own standards. So before I suggested someone was making a wrong assessment about the quality of their life I would have to examine their beliefs methodologically.

Like I also mentioned people can acknowledge they have a below average quality of life whilst being happy. I could be happy but wish my eyesight was better and that I earned a higher wage.

So after you have ruled out all these possibilities then you can see whether they still believe they have a good quality of life. I think if someone had lots of problems but still considered they had a good quality of life that would suggest they were just lucky with their brain chemistry and biochemistry and that the quality of life claim could not come from their actual circumstances.

I don't think one person claims about their quality of life is relevant in the wider picture of society per se when you are making a calculation about the average desirability of life. I don't think if some people are happy in poverty that mitigates poverty.

Yes, it's invalid speculation.

I highlighted the problem with the speculation about others desires and pointed out they are your desires not the other persons.

An unborn child has no desires real or imagined. So you are imposing a biased values system on them.

. The concept of ideal desire is what would i want if the handicap was removed. If I were able to express my desire, i would desire the life support to save my life. — Rank Amateur

I think if you save someone's life who is unconscious after an accident then you are acting on your desires not there's. (Unless they have left a living will)

If you want to imagine what someone might ideally desire that is a quagmire. There are lots of things people might desire and not achieve or things they might want to change about themselves. Would a child want to grow up in poverty for example? Would a child want to have a large nose or autism or live in religious household or country?

It is not clear what life someone might choose for themselves if they knew all the facts about life.You can only create a child based on your own desires and standards (or lack thereof)

I don't see why it is acceptable to create a life and not acceptable to end a life.

Why does someone have the right to create someone without that persons consent and expose them to suffering?

A fetus does not express desires and we can only speculate about what it might think about existing. It that is the nature of creating someone.

The problem is this: what does that fact have to do with whether someone can get their quality of life wrong? — Terrapin Station

If statistics and other external facts go against someone having a good quality of life yet they believe they have then that raises questions about their judgement.

Something subjective can still be wrong. For example illusions such as where one line seems longer than another or when a bush looks like a cow in the night.

So I think false beliefs can make people judgement wrong.
For example lots of people have been shown to exhibit thejust world fallacy or just world hypothesis where they show that they believe the world is more just or fair than it actually is and the fundamental attribution error where they misattribute causality and peoples degree of responsibility in a scenario.

I think that you can judge that someone has a poor quality of life based on their own standards.

For example if someone wanted to get married and have children but never did. Or if someone wanted to see an end to cancer and poverty. Or if someone wanted to be a musician but failed to be. And so on.

I think you can refer to biological facts. Facts about how the body functions and what a likely outcome is going to be such as whether an event will cause pain or illness. Relatively poverty is more likely to cause early death, depression and mean you live in an area with a higher crime rate.

Maybe they even think it's better to live in poverty — Terrapin Station

This where it seems absurd. Very few people want to live in poverty but some religious people might take a vow of poverty. I think the likelihood of people enjoying a situation is fairly objective. It seems the most diversity of tastes comes in less important areas like what music you enjoy as opposed to physical well being.

There was the case of Bhutan that was considered one of the happiest countries. They introduced television in 1999 and experienced a sudden crime wave. It was suggested that this was because people could see things on televisions that they didn't have an now aspired to.
They suggest this is why there is substantial unhappiness in the western world.

So it seems you can discover that you do not have a good quality of life compared to X. But I am by no means saying that you have to be wealthy to be happy. I just think there are objective reasons for being unhappy or unwell or feeling a sense of injustice.

What would you say is the process for establishing an objective standard? — Terrapin Station

In that definition it says to be measured against other things of a similar kind.

So it would probably involve comparing states of being. So If you live in poverty you know there is a better state of being you are not in and compare badly to.

I don't know if you believe that we can talk about levels of happiness in a society. Do you think that if 70% of people report being happy that we can refer to society as mainly happy as an objective fact?

I think that you can't add emotional states together like that really because it is based on subjective claims but i think we can compare states of being like levels of inequality and disease.

on the other hand you could be what i consider nihilist and say that all that matters is what someone claims and there can be only objective scientific facts about the constituents of matter interacting (and not psychology).

Here is one of the first definitions of "Quality" that I found: "the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind" So this to me implies an objective standard something being a measured against as opposed an opinion.

We could simply ask people and then report the results — Terrapin Station

What kind of questions would you ask them? I think you would have to ask a lot of sophisticated and nuanced questions to get a genuine well thought out answer.

The examples I was referring to is where someone acknowledges that they have a poor quality of lifelike a profound disability or are comparatively poor but is not unhappy. You can make this kind of distinction in judgments between your emotional state and facts abut how your life is

What about the quality of lives that people are happy? Without mention to happiness, your thesis leads, at best, to a negative utilitarian calculation. — Purple Pond

I think it is harder to pin down the causes of happiness compared to pain. For example stamping on someones foot will most likely hart them but I don't think any actions can guarantee happiness and I am not sure that there is somewhere in the nervous system equivalent to the pain system for pleasure.

Pain can be caused by chemical and neuronal activity caused by injury. It is often guaranteed to occur if the nervous system is working.

Nevertheless pain and pleasure could mislead us if they were somehow generated wrongly. Maybe winning the lottery is a situation where some happiness should be guaranteed? Knowing you may never have to work again and may not have to worry about funding your old age.

Sure, no argument there, but those things just aren't the same thing as their assessment of their quality of life. — Terrapin Station

I am not convinced quality of life is based on how someone feels. People can be happy whilst suffering. They don't believe they have a great quality of life but they have found some things to be happy about. So I don't think feeling happy means you have a good quality of life or that you believe that you have a good quality of life.

But someone can have a privileged lifestyle but be unhappy for some reason. I don't know what to make of that. There is not many circumstances it seems that can guarantee a fixed emotional response. I think it is easier to generate suffering than happiness but I don't know what the depression statistics are for people in the wealthier brackets. it raises the question of how we can increase happiness.

It is hard to find a framework to judge quality of life and value of life so I think facts about inequality, poverty, disease, mental illness etc are the best metric. Things that generate happiness can be in an equation I just find those things harder to find.

Aren't you arguing from particular to the general here? What is your justification for the case that we can make an empirical judgement about all the quality of life issues, and not just the cases where people are in deep suffering? — Purple Pond

I am pointing out the absurdity of claiming people in famine and genocide etc cannot be judged to have a poor quality of life
The equation then is how much of this suffering is in our world?. We live in the world and co exist with this suffering.
I think reflection on historical evils and current suffering in the world could easily be seen as something that could affect ones quality of life by reflecting on it and reflecting on falling victim to something like it.

I think this is the problem with claims of happiness because happiness seems absurd in certain contexts.
I find it hard to see things that warrant happiness because of the backdrop of problems.

When we're talking about quality (of life), value, etc., we're talking about someone's personal assessment, how they happen to feel towards something. There's nothing to match or fail to match. — Terrapin Station

I think there is something to match and fail to match which is their beliefs about how the world is. Facts about a disease they have, or level of injury, facts about societal inequality. Sometimes people feelings are based on inaccurate beliefs.

What I think is nihilism is the idea that someone who feels that something like child abuse is acceptable cannot be challenged by external facts. If someone feels something is acceptable that is more likely to contribute to how they act in the external world.

If you can't pin values down to objective facts that doesn't help any position.

There is no excuses for causing protracted suffering.

Reproduction causes protractive suffering. Abortion causes no suffering.

I’d say a society which values and respects the lives of its members, especially the weak and defenceless, is better than one which does not. It will be safer, kinder, and happier - at least in my view; doesn’t seem too controversial to me. — AJJ

That is extremely controversial if you read a history book or newspaper about what actually happens in reality.

In what way is an unborn child, entirely dependent on its mother, a member of society? In What way does it contribute?

Societies with limited access to abortion have the worst quality of life on earth anyway.

Your language is not blunt it is simply deceptive, inaccurate and emotive. You have offered absolute zero argument and 110% emotional manipulation. Well Done!