Since this is Texas Abortion Law Freakout Friday, I ask, though do not insist, that abortion related posts be entered on one of the specific entries here on that topic.
Month: September 2021
It’s Texas Abortion Law Freakout Friday! First Up, Comment Of The Day And Comment Of The Day Reply On “Texas’s Clever Anti-Abortion Law”
First up on “Texas Abortion Law Freak-out Friday is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s timely exploration of the popular “we should be able to kill unborn babies while they can’t think, before they can” justification for legal abortion. As that characterization might suggest, I hate that argument, which has been made passionately by some abortion advocate every time the topic has arisen on Ethics Alarms. The reason I find it ethically objectionable is that the theory was devised to justify a position that had already been decided. Extradimensional Cephalopod’s comment begins by calling it intellectually honest. I admire his presentation of the argument, but that’s exactly what it isn’t. Abortion advocates, desperately seeking a way to get around the inconvenient fact that a human life was being snuffed out in the procedure and not willing to embrace the “Baby? What baby?” shrug that defines most pro-abortion rhetoric, came up with the “not sentient, ego not human” dodge after already endorsing abortion. This is scientifically and logically dishonest, because a bias—“we really, really want abortion to be legal”—drove the conclusion.
As E.C. makes clear, it is still a better defense of abortion than the fiction that only one human being’s life is at stake. As Isaac also makes clear in his Comment of the Day in response, it’s still not good enough.
First, here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on “Texas’s Clever Anti-Abortion Law.” Isaac’s rebuttal will follow.
***
“The intellectually honest argument for abortion, which I’m still baffled most proponents don’t seem to bring up, is that a person–a sapient being–is not defined by having human DNA or a heartbeat, but by patterns of information in their brain (or whatever module they use to think with).
“There’s disagreement on whether to draw a meaningful distinction between patterns that are sapient and patterns that are subsapient–often called animals–as well as what ethical obligations sapients have to animals. In any case, proponents of abortion regard any information patterns in the brain of a human fetus as being less than sapient, and therefore not subject to the same ethical protections as fully sapient humans. For at least some of a human pregnancy, that belief would be supported by a developing brain not yet having achieved the complexity required to support a sapient consciousness. At some point, it may be that the brain is decently complex but hasn’t absorbed enough information to start forming a consciousness.
I’ve read somewhere that developing humans may start learning sounds and linguistic phonemes while still in the womb, though, and while I haven’t investigated the studies supporting this claim, it’s a claim that must be challenged by those who would argue that unborn humans haven’t absorbed any information.
Unethical Website Of The Month: And Just When You Might Have Been Thinking That Gabriel Gipe Is An Anomaly…[Updated And Corrected]
…we have this: The Zinn Education Project.
A website named for anti-American, Marxist, fake historian Howard Zinn has gathered thousands of signatures of teachers nationwide. The signers pledge to teach the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their classrooms in defiance of any bans by any state government or local school districts.
Josan Perales of Estes Park, Colorado wrote: “We must ‘go for broke’ as fierce and conscious educators fighting for liberation for ALL. THIS is the work.”Fairfield, Connecticut teacher and signer Chris Parisi explained his acceptance of the pledge by writing, “During the Cold War and throughout the 150-year reign of Confederate-apologist revisionist historians, our textbooks were sanitized. The truth about slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and white male supremacy were purposefully buried under a romantic Lost Cause Mythology.”
You know, “the truth.” Teachers have the authority to teach “the truth” as their political ideology moves them to see it, and if communities, schools, parents and legislatures believe that their indoctrination is inappropriate, then they intend to teach what conforms to their agenda anyway.
To: State Legislators
From: [Your Name]
“One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” – Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 1963
“We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events.”
The petition has so far attracted 7,357 signatures from teachers in at least 27 states.
The preamble reads [forgive me from interjecting along the way, but I get to have some fun!)…
Texas’s Clever Anti-Abortion Law
The Texas law, which went into effect yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block it on a 5-4 vote. (Guess which justices were on each side. Next question: Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?) The law bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is after about six weeks of pregnancy. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to abortion until a fetus was viable (by the medical standards of 50 years ago), would seem to preclude such laws, which other states ( Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and Ohio) have passed only to have them held in limbo by the courts The Texas law is the first to be implemented, in part because it approaches the issue from a clever (some might say diabolical) perspective.
The law does not make exceptions for rape or incest, as it should not: if the objective is to protect the human life of the unborn child, how that life came into being is irrelevant. It does permit abortions for health reasons, allowing a termination only if the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or might lead to “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” The clever part is this: the Texas law doesn’t require state officials to enforce it, meaning that abortions won’t he halted by government action. The Texas law deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure. Any citizen has standing, regardless of connection to the patient, the abortion doctor or the clinic and may sue and recover legal fees along with $10,000 if they win.
This means that the Supreme Court will have to consider not only whether the Texas law in unconstitutional, but whether it can even be challenged in court, what the SCOTUS majority called “complex and novel” procedural questions. Predictably, while the majority opinion was relatively restrained, the dissenters freaked out.
Ethics Observations On The Antifa School Teacher Scandal
A “reporter” (I use the word loosely) for James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas somehow got Gabriel Gipe (above), an advanced placement teacher at Inderkum High School in Sacramento, California, to blather on happily about how he was indoctrinating his students in Marxist ideology and was proud of it. All of this was recorded, as is Project Veritas’s way. Gipe said, in part,
“I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries…Scare the f*ck out of them… I’m probably as far left as you can go….I post a calendar every week…I’ve had students show up for protests, community events, tabling, food distribution, all sorts of things…When they go, they take pictures, write up a reflection — that’s their extra credit…So, they [students] take an ideology quiz and I put [the results] on the [classroom] wall. Every year, they get further and further left…I’m like, ‘These ideologies are considered extreme, right? Extreme times breed extreme ideologies.’ Right? There is a reason why Generation Z, these kids, are becoming further and further left…I have an Antifa flag on my [classroom] wall and a student complained about that — he said it made him feel uncomfortable. Well, this [Antifa flag] is meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable, so if you feel uncomfortable, I don’t really know what to tell you. Maybe you shouldn’t be aligning with the values that this [Antifa flag] is antithetical to…Like, why aren’t people just taking up arms? Like why can’t we, you know — take up arms against the state? We have historical examples of that happening, and them getting crushed and being martyrs for a cause and it’s like — okay well, it’s slow going because it takes a massive amount of organization…I think that for [left-wing] movements in the United States, we need to be able to attack both [cultural and economic] fronts. Right? We need to create parallel structures of power because we cannot rely on the state…Consistently focusing on education and a change of cultural propaganda. We have to hit both fronts. We have to convince people that this is what we actually need…There are three other teachers in my department that I did my credential program with — and they’re rad. They’re great people. They’re definitely on the same page.”
Ethics Quiz: The Hitler Photo
Officer Craig Eichhammer, a 31-year veteran of the Williamstown, Massachusetts police department, kept a photo of Adolf Hitler in his locker for two decades without incident. Two years ago, the photo was removed and thrown out when when the department staff moved into the new police station. The presence of the photo was raised as part of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in August 2020 by Sgt. Scott McGowan, who claims that he was retaliated against for decrying racial and sexual harassment by the Williamstown police chief.
In his statement to the town manager last year explaining the presence of a photo of Der Fuhrer, Eichhammer wrote that his former partner on the night shift in 1999 was kidded in the station for his supposed resemblance to Adolf. “I stuck the photograph on the locker wall just as one would of possibly hanging a comic strip or picture they thought was funny,” he wrote.
“The photo was out of view and could not be seen even with the locker door open. The photograph was put up for no other reason than a laugh factor poking fun at [his former partner]. The photo was left there and basically forgotten about. It stayed in the same spot for 20 years and no one knew it was there….At no time was it my belief that the picture was nothing more than a figure from a history book,” he added. “I had no ideologies of Nazi Germany, swastikas or anything terrible that happened during WW2. Again, the photo was simply just to get a laugh of the likeness of [his former partner].”
Okaaaay. But predictably, many are not satisfied with the officer’s explanation. A letter demanding his dismissal from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, stated,
Ethics Dunce: The University of Wisconsin-Madison
That flyer above may tip-toe through the legal tulips adequately (though I would love to see it challenged), but it stomps its way through the garden of ethics.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will host a “Welcome BBQ” on September 12, four days after the start of the academic year “intended” only for students of color. White, like everyone else, are “welcome,” of course, but they have been warned that the event isn’t “intended” for them. “We don’t want you white devils to come, but you’re ‘welcome’ if you do.” Boy, I bet the legal staff worked long and hard on that wording. They should have worked harder. If a “welcome barbecue” is only intended for one type of student, how are other students still “welcome”?
There Are More Important Ethics Stories On The Runway, But This One Gets Priority Because It’s Soooo Stupid…
ESPN, which we can now safely conclude is incompetent as well as being unethical in that very special way the Great Stupid demands, released this statement:
“We regret that this happened and have discussed it with Paragon, which secured the matchup and handles the majority of our high school event scheduling. They have ensured us that they will take steps to prevent this kind of situation from happening moving forward.”
What was “this kind of situation”? Oh, just a national sports network televising a high school football game between one of the the top teams in the nation and a fake team fielded by a fake high school. That’s all.
On Sunday, ESPN broadcast a high school football game between featuring Florida’s IMG Academy, one of the top rated teams in the country, and Ohio’s Bishop Sycamore, an obscure high school with a team nobody has written about or paid much attention to. ESPN had been assured by Bishop Sycamore—schools get compensated when their teams’ games are televised– that its football squad was stacked with top players. Uh, no. This was a primetime match-up on ESPN, but nobody there did any due diligence to check on the juggernaut IMG Academy’s competition. IMG won by the heart-pounding score of 58-0. The broadcasters were reduced to telling funny stories and expressing concern that the Bishop Sycamore players were at risk of serious injury.
But wait! There’s more!
From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…
But one brief observation: The chart gives me one more reason to say “Oh, bite me!” to the vaccinated mask-police who recoil in terror and tell me to “Get back!” because I am maskless and intend to remain so. So far, I’ve responded thusly only twice, but I plan on upping the frequency.
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/1/2021: Ethics Happenings In September
Ah, I remember it well: in 1972 on this date, American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer defeated Russian Boris Spassky to become the first U.S. player to achieve the World Championship. At the time, this was seen as a major Cold War victory, because Soviet players had essentially been trading the crown back and forth for decades. The feel-good story soon turned sour, however, because Fischer rapidly proved himself to be emotionally unstable, not to mention a massive jerk and an anti-Semite. I thought about this as the Emmys approached, with Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” carrying several nominations into the broadcast. That show is about an emotionally damaged female chess champion, also, like Fischer, a former child chess prodigy. As far as I can determine, all chess prodigies are maladjusted, and their parents are guilty of child abuse for allowing them to devote their childhood to a single-minded obsession with a game, however valuable it is as intellectual stimulation. A current American child chess whiz revealed that he practices ten hours a day.
I used to play competitive chess, but like the lifetime underachiever I am, I refused to do the work to become really excellent. That would have required spending many hours memorizing chess opening and classic games, and I had other interests. I was a talented instinctive player, but eventually plowed under by pale-skinned, dead-eyed contemporaries who may well be in rubber rooms now. Bobby Fischer was a warning, but not one that has been heeded as well as it should.
1. As promised, a CVS update! The original post is here. As of today, I have called CVS’s complaint line three times over the episode described here. In total, this has cost me almost three hours that I will want back when I am on my death bed. The first call resulted in the usual scripted sympathy and apologies (one I had reached a real human being) and a promise that I would receive a call from someone in authority in “24 to 48 hours.” I did not receive such a call, so I called the complaint line again, adding the failure to live up to the commitment to my list of complaints. This time, after the wait for a human voice and the scripted sympathy and apology, I was told that there was no notation mentioning a follow-up call on my complaint report “That’s your problem,” I replied. “I know this game: you make that promise, and hope the complaining customer gets busy, or forgets, or otherwise moves on without you having to do anything. That won’t work with me.” The nice woman swore that this was not the case. This time, she read me my complaint report number, and gave me the name of the “group leader” who would be calling me in—yup!—24 to 48 hours.
Again, I did not receive the promised call. So yesterday, I called for the third time—same wait, same scripted sympathy and apologies—and said that I now had three complaints: the outrageous treatment I received in the initial incident, the failure of CVS to follow up as promised after my first call, and now the failure to deliver as promised with a call from the “group leader.”
This time, I got a different story. The agent said that it takes 7 to 10 days to investigate such complaints, as the process includes reviewing store video. I told her that no one mentioned that at all previously, though it made sense. Now I know there’s security video of me being accosted by a women who had just walked into the store while I was objecting to the handling of my problem. It will show her pointing and gesticulating, and making the bluff of taking out her phone to call the cops on me. Since it will not have sound, however, its probative value will be limited.
Meanwhile, I’m moving our prescriptions to Walgreen’s, and doing incidental shopping elsewhere. Stay tuned…
Ethics Alarms 