December 17, 2005

One more for today

Mediagirl has a fine allegory you should read.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It is a fine allegory, but I am increasingly of the opinion that arguements like these are basically useless. I mean, from the point of view of a pro-life, a baby is not a bicycle If you don't want to expend your time and effort to construct a bicycle for someone else, that's fine. The world will have one less bicycle. But making the same decision with respect to baby is a much different thing.

Now, most pro-choicers will say "But it's not a baby!" and that's perfectly true. But if you're dealing with someone who, like many pro-lifers, does not make any moral distinction between aborting a fetus and killing a baby, arguments like this will not work.

I don't know why some people create that moral equivalence between abortion and baby-killing, but they do, and as soon they do the argument is over. Before the allegory can be an effective persuasive argument for the pro-choice position, we need to explain why a fetus is more like a bicycle than it is like a baby.

Noumena said...

The point is that the foetus is like the pile of bicycle parts, not the finished bicycle. This allegory criticizes the anti-choice identification of baby and foetus; and, yeah, someone who dogmatically asserts foetus = baby isn't going to be convinced, but they're not going to listen to anything remotely pro-choice in the first place.