3 year old starved to death by her parents
I do not mean to offend anyone here with this, but…
There are very few things that illicit an emotional reaction from me and this is one of them. People ask if I believe in the death penalty. Truthfully, I would volunteer to put the bullets in their heads myself. These two are complete, total, and 100% evil. They deserve to die.
There are very few things that illicit an emotional reaction from me and this is one of them. People ask if I believe in the death penalty. Truthfully, I would volunteer to put the bullets in their heads myself. These two are complete, total, and 100% evil. They deserve to die.
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Parents being morally obliged to bear responsibility for their own voluntarily chosen actions — such as a moral obligation to care for their infant children or put them up for adoption so that some other adults can care for them — has starved millions? It's a stretch, but OK. If you say so.
>Your premises allow for a Mao, Hitler, Stalin, etc to exist. therefore you are the enemy of human advancement.
Boo-hoo.
The truth is, you're not aware enough even to discern your own premises (which are monstrous, if taken seriously); how then could you possibly discern anyone else's?
Nope. But according to you, parenthood stands for slavery.
>according to you it would be illegal for someone with wealth to withhold resources from someone starving.
Nope. Unless the "someone with wealth" was mommy or daddy; the withheld resources were food, clothing, shelter, warmth; and the "someone starving" was their own infant.
>Objectivism never allows one person to hold another in slavery.
No, but it allows one person to hold another in DEBT if such has been incurred. If you understand why you have to repay a gambling debt that you never intended to incur (even if you went to the casino for your own pleasure expecting to win), then you're on your way to understanding why you bear moral responsibility for the consequences of other kinds of freely chosen actions you engage in — even fun ones, like sex.
No. The grandparents didn't choose to bring their daughter's fetus into existence, any more than the supermarket that provides the daughter with food, or the highway department that maintains the road that allows the daughter to drive to the supermarket (or the hospital). That they all indirectly help the mother and father through the division of labor doesn't make them morally responsible for actions freely chosen and taken directly by two people: the mother and father.
Hey, here's an unexpected upshot of your argument: if the grandparents, and the great-grandparents, and the highway department, and the grocer, and the telephone repairman, etc., etc., bear some moral responsibility for mom and dad's fetus (because their work all "helped", in some way at least, to create the fetus), then Ayn Rand's mother, her father, their grandparents, the Soviet Highway Authority, the pen and pencil manufacturers that made the pens and pencils Ayn used to write out (in long-hand) the manuscript of Atlas Shrugged, the graphite miners who manufactured the pencil lead used in the pencils, etc., etc., they all deserve some of the credit for having "helped" Ayn create Atlas Shrugged. Right? Right. So, by rights, they should all be listed in the book as contributors. They should also be sharing some of the royalty income now accruing to the Ayn Rand estate.
Same argument — brought to a reductio ad absurdum — you made regarding a fetus's grandparents having a moral responsibility for actions freely undertaken by their grown daughter.
Doesn't sound as if you're trying to go back to square one. Sounds to me as if you're trying to find some "clever" way of wiggling out of a moral dilemma for you. It's not clever. It's dumb.
Why don't you indulge me by applying a little common sense to a fairly straightforward issue? It's pretty evident that the mother and the father of the fetus have a moral obligation to care for it until it's born, and then to care for it if they intend to keep it. If they don't intend to keep it, they should put it up for adoption because someone, somewhere, wants it.
>Also the child doesn't necessarily depend on the parents, it depends on something to survive.
I've already made the point above. Indulge me by reading what I wrote.
>To say the child depends on them, you have to state what it depends on them for
Gee, that's a tough question to answer. I'm just guessing here, but, uh, maybe food, warmth, shelter, medical care, to name just a few things. If the parents are too Objectivist to provide these things — preferring to think of themselves as "slaves" instead of "good parents" by doing so — they should put the infant up for adoption. That's not so difficult, and shouldn't interfere too much with their own personal pleasure contributing product-placement for Atlas Shrugged, The Movie, Part 3.
>why the parent is morally obligated to take care of something because it created it.
Love it. First you ask why the grandparents don't bear as much moral responsibility for the daughter's fetus as does the daughter herself; then you ask why the daughter should bear any responsibility whatsoever.
Profound. Here's another "gap" you can fill with your own hot air:
Why is Ayn Rand entitled to profit from something because she created it? If you can answer that, then you can answer why Ayn Rand is obligated to bear responsibility for the consequences of her own actions. It's a tough one, I know.
Why don't you try going back to square one? (Let us know when you get there.)
Also the child doesn't necessarily depend on the parents, it depends on something to survive.
To say the child depends on them, you have to state what it depends on them for, which I'm assuming you mean survival.
This creates another gap, ignoring the grandparents part which I would still like an answer to, as to why the parent is morally obligated to take care of something because it created it.
I'm trying to go back to square one, I hope you'll take the time to indulge me.
You say an embryo is a human being but in early stages of development. Development you say? into what?
I believe your error is one of equivocation. You seem to confuse two possible and slightly different meanings of the term human. You seem to mean human as the entire process from the merger of two sex cells until death. Human is meant by Dr. Peikoff to mean a living organism possessing a rational faculty, meaning it is matured from the reproductive state to a certain point. The concepts are different, which is ok as long as you keep it straight and don't mix the two up when drawing conclusions.
Potential human is very accurate, if you use Dr. Peikoff's concept. If it continues to develope, then it will be human. If it stops developing, but somehow stays alive, it will not be human.
If we use your concept of human, then I need to ask why you think humans have rights since the rationalization you're using to justify an embryos' rights seems to go: embryos are human and humans have rights; therefore, embryos have rights. Well, what attributes of humans is the source of their rights? Do embryos possess that attribute or is it under development?
Because another human life that her actions helped to create now depends on it.
Starving one's own child is an example of abandoning one's moral responsibility toward the consequences (i.e., the child) of one's own voluntarily chosen actions (i.e., having sex).
It's irrelevant to the moral issue if the abandoning of one's responsibility takes the form of doing something one shouldn't (e.g., choking the child), or not doing something one should (e.g., withholding food until the child starves).
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