Republican beliefsFollow

i bet you talk like the guys from Oasis.

Find a candidate that everyone agree's with on everything Smash. It's pretty much impossible to do. Heck. A candidate will not always agree with the folks who push issues within a party. In fact, most often they will not.

But here's an article to shed a bit of light into the debate.


And there is debate. Huge amounts. Within the Republican party. Some major points:



Hmmm... Bush *not* following along with what the Religious Right wants? Odd...



Hey! There he goes doing it again! Amazing...





Ok. So Hyde is a Religious Right guy. And Bush isn't toeing his line. What can we conclude from this?

Seems like Bush is a bit more moderate then the Religious Right to me Smash. You are once again assuming association equals agreement. If some in the Republican party want to overturn Roe v Wade, and someone is a Republican, then that person must also want to overturn Roe v Wade. That is clearly flawed. Your entire reason for assuming these things about Bush is because he's a Republican, and he doesn't vocally attack the Religious Right (um. He does need them to vote for him).


Look. I agree with you to a point. Bush is more Religious then I'd like. However, he is not so much so that I would prefer a Democrate in office instead. And ultimtately, that's what making a choice is about.

Bush has stated that he wants to overturn Roe. It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Even while President, he's gone out of his way to make his position clear:

http://www.nationalreview.com/document/document012202.shtml

He's pushed for every legal step that errodes Roe. Partial birth bands, whatever.

I'm assuming that when the PResident says something it reflects what he bleives.

Unless you're saying he's a bold faced liar.

Take the fuc[b][/b]king blinders off. The man belies in nothing that you do aside from a hairbrained ecnomic theory that he isn't even carrying out.

If you wanted to outlaw abortion would you have to overturn Roe?

Wrong party.



No, that's an assanine argument.

What it would be like would be overturning Brown vs Board of ed, which would let states re-segregate schools.

There's nothing good that comes out of overturning Roe unless you want abortion to be illegal.

You know, I really don't think that's true, much as I'd like it to be.



No it's not, it's an identical situation in legal terms. The only possible benefit of overturrning Roe is to allow states to ban abortion. That's it, that's all, there's no other reason to do so.



"Right" is a moral question. If you're asking me, personally, I genuinely don't think it's morally "wrong". In point of fact, I think you can make a fairly compelling argument that infantacide isn't particularly "wrong" in most cases.

That's got nothing to do with Roe, though, or US law.




Of course it is. If you're going to make these arbitrary moral equivlency arguments you may as well say that ************ is the same as shooting thousands of people in the face, because all of the sperm will die and all of those poor unborn children will never get to live.

Sure. Are you fammiliar with Peter Singer's work? I just want to know where to start the argument without patronising you.

Ok, this will be long. You've been warned.

I am, in general an advocate of an ethical system known as "Utilitarinism". I say in general, because there are things I disagree with, and things I agree with in the abstract, but wouldn't practice personally. Infantacide falls into that second catagory.

Let me clarify that a bit. In my oppinion there are two very general stances people take on "right and wrong". Let's call them the tolerant and the intolerant stances.

The tolerant stance is as follows: I belive that certain things are absolutely right and absolutely wrong, in a large snese for society, however, what I find right or wrong for me personally exists as a more constrictive subset of that larger belief system.

The intolerant stance is as follows: I belie that certain things are absolutely right and absolutely wrong both in a large sense for society and for me personally.

I find myself of the tolerant stance. Let me demonstrate with a abortion.

Personally, I'd do everything in my power to prevent a woman who I had impregnated from aborting a child (or fetus or embryo, whatever, I don't want to argue the semantics of it at the moment). In a larger sense, however I think that others should make that decision on their own. That would be a tollerant stance.

The intollerant stance would be to say that because I personally find the practice repugnant that no one should ever enage in it, and indeed it should be illegal.

So, I'm what you might call a tolerant Utilitarianist. That is, in a large snese I think it's a logical, practical ethical system even though in a personal sense I really don't practice all aspects of it most of the time.

On to what Utilitarianism is, in a larger sense.

It gets it's name from a John Stuart Mill book entitled "Ulitarainaism". There were advocates for the philosophy previously, but that's not worth getting into a the moment. What Mill's book argued, in a simple sense is that the "right" thing to do is almost allways what will benefit the most people the most signfigantly.

Simple example: If you are in a box with 100 other people, held by a string, and the string will only hold 2000 pounds, but the combined wieght of the people is 2350 pounds and one of them weighs 400 pounds, the right thing to do is to throw the 400 pound person out of the box.

This violates a triditonal ethical view where the 400 pound man's life is of equal value to anyone else's in the box.

Let me provide a more extreme example.

A surgeon has six patients: one needs a liver, one needs a pancreas, one needs a gall bladder, and two need kidneys. The sixth just came in to have his appendix removed. Should the surgeon kill the sixth man and pass his organs around to the others? This would obviously violate the rights of the sixth man, but, given a purely binary choice between a) killing the man and distributing his organs or b) not doing so and the other five dying, violating his rights is exactly what we ought to do.

Ethical decisions in a large sense should be guided by the precepts that what is best for the most people is the right thing to do.

Let me try to get this quickly to infantacide so you can reply.

I think, again in the abstract, I'm not advocating killing babies arbitrarily, that if a situation exists where killing a child has more long term benefit to the parents of the child than not killing him it would be the ethically "right" thing to do. While I could and would never do so myself, I am able to accept the idea that in the abstract it may very well be the correct decision.

This is my view of the policy in China. It is very likely detrimental to allow every child born in China to live and this outweighs the negative of the death of the individual children.

Kant would agree with you, so you're not in bad company.