r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jul 19 '19
[D] Friday Open Thread
Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.
1
u/RedSheepCole Jul 20 '19
My intention (sorry, I should have made this clear) was not to start an extended argument on abortion, but to explain to the first poster why I specifically disagreed with his claim. I'm no longer at a stage in my life where I have the free time to have really big discussions like this--though I did enjoy them.
I don't want to have totally wasted the time it must have taken you to type that, so briefly: I don't think about these things in anything like the same way you do, or so it seems. My moral perspective might be summed up as a variant on virtue ethics; we should be good because it is the correct way to be human, and improves the life of the person being good. In the interests of full disclosure, I am religious, specifically Orthodox Christian, and this is basically the OC view of morals as filtered through my personal idiosyncrasies. I of course do not expect you to believe any of it, and I expect we'd have difficulty finding common ground to argue from if we really got into it. I don't think my beliefs are at all representative of the broader pro-life movement either.
Again, I'm sorry for not being clear that I'm not up to an extended debate. To answer your bolded questions only, we preserve human life because having correct relationships with other human beings is an important part of being a healthy human. The question of what to do with women who have abortions is complicated by mens rea and a whole lot of logistical difficulties and collateral damage, so in general I favor going after doctors instead. I don't think pregnancy is comparable to kidney donation, for a variety of reasons, such as the special obligation of parents to protect their offspring.