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2023-03-31 21:54:00
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그리고 그 아래 트위터 백래쉬 맞고 예상 한 부분과 안한 부분을 번호매겨서 defend 한거
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Now to the upset itself. The haters came from various directions:-
Those who are against abortion under any circumstances. The majority fell into this category. I’m not going to get into that old debate. My position, which I would guess is shared by most people reading this, is that a woman has a right to early abortion, and I personally would not condemn her for choosing it. If you disagree, fair enough; many do, often on religious grounds. But then your quarrel is not just with me but with prevailing medical opinion and with the decision actually taken by most people who are faced with the choice.
Those who thought I was bossily telling a woman what to do rather than let her choose. Of course this was absolutely not my intention and I apologise if brevity made it look that way. My true intention was, as stated at length above, simply to say what I personally would do, based upon my own assessment of the pragmatics of the case, and my own moral philosophy which in turn is based on a desire to increase happiness and reduce suffering.
Those who thought I was advocating a kind of mob rule, when I pointed out that a majority of women, when facing this dilemma, as a matter of fact do choose abortion. Wasn’t that like saying “Hanging is right because if you took a plebiscite most people would bring back hanging.”? No, I was not advocating mob rule. I was simply suggesting that those hurling accusations of Nazism, vile, monstrous fascistic callousness etc., should reflect that their fireballs of hatred might as well be aimed directly at the great majority of the women who have actually faced the dilemma. Might that not give you pause before you accuse one individual of being a brute simply because he spells out the thinking behind the majority choice?
Those who thought I was advocating a eugenic policy and who therefore compared me to Hitler. That never entered my head, nor should it have. Down Syndrome has almost zero heritability. That means that, although it is a congenital condition – a chromosomal abnormality that babies are born with – there is very little tendency for susceptibility to trisomy to be inherited genetically. If you were eugenically inclined, you’d be wasting your time screening for Down syndrome. You’d screen for genuinely heritable conditions where your screening would make a difference to future generations.
Those who took offence because they know and love a person with Down Syndrome, and who thought I was saying that their loved one had no right to exist. I have sympathy for this emotional point, but it is an emotional one not a logical one. It is one of a common family of errors, one that frequently arises in the abortion debate. Another version of it is “The Great Beethoven Fallacy” discussed in Chapter 8 of The God Delusion. I combated it in a tweet as follows: “There’s a profound moral difference between ‘This fetus should now be aborted’ and ‘This person should have been aborted long ago’.” I would never dream of saying to any person, “You should have been aborted before you were born.” But that reluctance is fully compatible with a belief that, at a time before a fetus becomes a “person”, the decision to abort can be a moral one. If you think about it, you pretty much have to agree with that unless you are against all abortion in principle.The definition of “personhood” is much debated among moral philosophers and this is not the place to go into it at length. Briefly, I support those philosophers who say that, for moral purposes, an adult, a child and a baby should all be granted the rights of a person. An early fetus, before it develops a nervous system, should not. As embryonic development proceeds towards term, the morality of abortion becomes progressively more difficult to assess. There is no hard and fast dividing line. As I have argued in “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind”, the definition of personhood is a gradual, “fading in / fading out” definition. In any case, this is a problem that faces anybody on the pro-choice side of the general abortion debate.
To conclude, what I was saying simply follows logically from the ordinary pro-choice stance that most us, I presume, espouse. My phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding, but I can’t help feeling that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand.