Comment of the Day

Texas Abortion Law Freakout Friday Presents Comment Of The Day And Response 2 On “Texas’s Clever Anti-Abortion Law”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Down Syndrome abortion

I guess I could also call this “Isaac Comment of the Day Rebuttal Friday,” but it’s not quite as catchy.

Here is Here’s Johnny’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Texas’s Clever Anti-Abortion Law,” followed by, as in the earlier post today, Isaac’s Comment of the Day response.

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“I am of two minds when it comes to abortion. My left side says people have a right to privacy in medical stuff (especially from government), and an absolute right to control of their own bodies. My right side says killing humans is wrong (mostly).

“The left, generally, when it comes to abortion, shies away from recognizing that a human life is being ended, while otherwise, mostly, proclaim the sanctity of human life. The right, generally, when it comes to abortion, shy away from privacy rights, while, otherwise, mostly, proclaiming that government should just leave us alone.

“The suggestion posed here, that the fetus/unborn child be carried to term and placed for adoption, has merit. The last time I checked, there were a lot of potential adoptive parents.

“But, consider a real-world case that I am all too familiar with. The fetus/unborn child is diagnosed in utero as having Down syndrome. The list of potential adoptive parents shrinks considerably. But, the parents are opposed to abortion, the child is born, and the severity of Down syndrome is far worse than expected. The list of potential adoptive parents would be close to zero. Several surgical procedures are necessary soon after birth, significant expense in money to taxpayers and in both money and time to the parents.
But, the parents never considered placing the child for adoption anyway.
Advance the calendar about a decade and a half. The teen cannot communicate, although she seems to understand some things. She cannot feed herself. She cannot manage using a toilet. She has reached puberty, but cannot manage pads. She can walk, clumsily, but cannot be allowed to wander too far.

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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”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Baby in grave

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.

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“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.

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Flea Market, 8/28/21: An Atheist Chaplain And Other Exotica”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

triple facepalm

In this potpourri piece, I linked to a Salon rant by a regular contributor named Chauncy DeVega, who, I summarized, “believes conservatives have been programmed by Fox News to believe in an ‘alternate reality’ based on anger and outrage while he proves that he exists in an alternate reality based on anger and outrage.” DeVega’s perspective is genuinely frightening (but then so is “Salon,”) as it is literally what he accuses conservatives of creating, a mad, counter-factual delusion fueled by hate. I consider the piece self-indicting, but I also didn’t have the energy to fisk it. Thus I am grateful to veteran commenter Michael Ejercito for accepting the challenge to a significant extent.

I hope Michael forgives me for injecting a few editorial notes as we proceed. They will be bracketed in italics. I couldn’t resist.

Here is Michael Ejercito’s Comment of the Day on the Chauncy DeVega head-explosion hazard linked to in “Ethics Flea Market, 8/28/21: An Atheist Chaplain And Other Exotica.”

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I will reply to some of this article….

“In my public warnings about the Age of Trump and America’s descent into fascism, I have often been far ahead of the hope-peddlers, stenographers and professional centrists of the mainstream news media. But I am no Cassandra or otherwise possess any preternatural gifts. I simply pay close attention to what the Jim Crow Republicans, Trumpists and other neofascists say and do — and I take them at their word. As a black working-class person in America I do not have the privilege and luxury that many white folks do — especially those with money — of pretending that everything is going to magically be fine, that “the institutions are strong,” that the “norms” of democracy will hold, or that “we are a good people.” I know for certain that the Trumpists and other neofascists are not “exaggerating” or engaging in “hyperbole” in their threats to create a new American apartheid.”

Government executive officials (not legislatures) have taken unprecedented coercive actions purportedly to combat the spread of COVID-19. This recently includes vaccination requirements to go to bars and restaurants, even though no such requirements existed with respect to polio, measles, or mumps.

So he has a point there.

[ME is being arch. That wasn’t DeVega’s point, but that “Trumpists” are trying to create an “apartheid” nation where only whites are protected. I also have to note that this is a great example of DeVega accusing the Right of advocating what the Left is doing. See today’s post on segregated classes at American University.]

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Comment Of The Day:”Ethics Hero: Prof. Jonathan Turley (And The Indefensible Whitewash Of The Shooting Of Ashli Babbitt), Part 1″

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

TOPSHOT-US-POLITICS-ELECTION-TRUMP

As usual when we discuss policing ethics here, the commentary of Jim Hodgson, who actually knows what he is talking about in that field is especially welcome and enlightening. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Hero: Prof. Jonathan Turley (And The Indefensible Whitewash Of The Shooting Of Ashli Babbitt), Part 1″…

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Three things:

First, I have worked in a crowd-control team facing rioters, and while I had no doubt there were people in the crowds who wanted to harm us, regardless of the the fact that they were unarmed, we used the less-lethal force options at our disposal (riot shields, 36″ riot batons, tear gas) and the crowd control tactics we had learned, to move and disperse the rioters without using deadly force. For me, the January 6th riot seems to be a colossal failure to anticipate and plan for events which were, at the very least foreseeable, and according to some reports, fully expected to occur. With all the demonstrations and protests that occur in DC, I would expect every law enforcement agency in the area to be well-trained in crowd control, and well-equipped to deal with rioters, with comprehensive plans in place.

It remains to be seen what less-lethal force options were available to Capitol Police officers inside the building, but the fact remains that the officer in question was photographed while poised with gun drawn and finger on the trigger, apparently well before the nature of the threat from the rioters was known to any degree of certainty. If rioters had violently fought their way through a variety of defenses including less-lethal force options effectively deployed against them, it would be easier to conclude that a serious threat was posed. But since the rioters gained entry with relatively minimal resistance, no deployment of less-lethal force, and in some cases it seems were even invited into sensitive areas, the “lethal threat” conclusion seems strained. But, if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: ‘….Suicide Ethics’”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Head in the oven

Let’s get away from metaphorical national suicide for the nonce and back to more pleasant topics, like actual suicide. Rich in CT posted an excellent comment last week in the discussion, sometimes heated, of the appropriate societal attitude toward suicide and those who indulge in it.

I ended up banning a particularly obnoxious new commenter in the threads on this topic, and this is as good a place as any to point out some things. First, as is almost always the case, I should have seen what kind of participant I was letting into the fray when I let his first comment out of moderation. This is the kind of mistake you make when you are obsessing over getting more diverse commenters, and it was all my fault. Second, it was clear from the beginning that the commenter never bothered to read the comment guidelines. That’s a bad sign. Third, like so many who are moved to comment on a single issue, never to be heard from again, this commenter was ignorant of basic ethical principles and analysis, and, as with the comment guidelines, didn’t feel it necessary to educate himself on the topic of the blog before issuing his opinion in emphatic terms. Finally, his string of comments were all about how the feelings of suicidal people justified their destructive actions. That statement is signature significance for an ethics dolt. Feelings are based on emotions, and emotions don’t factor in to ethical decision-making. In Reciprocity analysis, the feelings of others may need to be considered, but the process of being ethical requires rational and objective reasoning, and this requires recognizes feelings as impediments to the process. Maybe I haven’t been sufficiently clear on this: one of the mains reasons public discourse on so many topics spins away from ethics is that ascendant view that feelings justify conduct.

But I digress! Here is Rich in CT’s Comment of the Day on David C’s Comment of the Day on the post, Sunday Ethics Picnic, 8/15/2021: Afghanistan Accountability And Suicide.

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“And yes, as far as I know there is research that suggests that if people are fixated for whatever reason on a certain means of suicide, they will not turn to another method if access to that method is removed.”

It took me a few days to get around to addressing this point for the original post. I’ll include the comment here instead.

“Or is the goal to just make sure they give up and go home to swallow sleeping pills?”

Studies have shown this is not the case. Rather, suicide is an impulsive choice at the intersection of desperation and a particular opportunity. The ideation is often linked to a particular method (jump off bridge, pills, etc). Suicidal individuals don’t systematically engage in various methods until they are successful; rather they fixate, as David C says, on a particular method as the solution; they are at most danger when they are at a low point and their preferred method is readily available.

A famous example occurred in England, the trope of sticking one’s head into the oven to suffocate. Prior to the 1970’s, the island used primarily “town gas” for ovens (as opposed to natural gas or propane). Town gas was extracted from coal in a gasworks plant at the edge of town (hence town gas), and piped to each house. As a byproduct of the extraction process, carbon monoxide was produced, and piped directly to each home along with the hydrocarbons.

Carbon monoxide produces a painless death; one loses conscious quickly prior to suffocation. Carbon monoxide is also nearly 100% effective at causing death. Plugging up the vents in the kitchen, blowing out the pilot light, and turning up the gas became an extremely popular method of suicide between the 1800’s and 1970’s, accounting for about half of all successful suicide deaths in England (I believe these statistics hold up elsewhere, too).

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Comment Of The Day: “…Oregon High School Grads No Longer Have To Know How To Read, Write, Or Do Math…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Here’s the third of a run of three impressive Comments of the Day from two days ago: a dissenting take on the pandemic-linked Oregon law allowing students to receive a high school diploma despite not possessing documented proof of basic academic skills at the high school level. Since the author, the much esteemed Curmie, is a professional educator (and not in Oregon) his analysis carries due weight, and is worth pondering.

Below is his Comment of the Day on my post, “It’s A “Ripley”! Oregon High School Grads No Longer Have To Know How To Read, Write, Or Do Math At High School Levels.” And I apologize for the inexcusably clichéd musical accompaniment. At least it isn’t the Art Garfunkle version…

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I’ll stipulate that the argumentation is stupid. That said, the actual change in policy is at the very least far less laughable than you suggest; indeed, I’d argue it’s a net positive.

What has actually happened is that Oregon has decided not to put all its faith in a standardized test run by a for-profit corporation. I don’t think that’s a bad call. Even the most professionally run of these exams have histories of major problems. Numerous math questions aren’t age-appropriate. (The people who write the exams aren’t educators–they’re often education majors who couldn’t get a job as a teacher.) There was a case few years ago where a reading comprehension problem was leaked, and a poet got two out of five questions “wrong” about his own work!

But the writing sections are the worst. Even the testing companies aren’t brash enough to argue that computers can score writing (although some are experimenting with the idea). So they hire graders. These jobs generally pay less than $12 an hour and require only a college degree… in anything! For that kind of money, you’re not going to get someone who can tell the difference between a sonnet and a laundry list.

So the company makes it easy for them: there’s a formula. Five paragraphs. First one says what you’re going to say. Next three, you say it (actually saying anything is more or less optional). Last paragraph: say what you just said. Follow this, without any enormous grammatical errors, and you’ll be fine. But woe betide the student who writes a coherent and persuasive essay… but wraps it up in four paragraphs. (The sonnet/laundry list line is an exaggeration; the five paragraphs or you fail part is not.)

The serious decline in writing skills I see in today’s students relative to their peers of even two decades ago (in the same courses at the same university) has occurred not despite the Great God Accountability (worshiped by both political parties, albeit in different ways), but because of it. I’ve seldom had students question their grades on essays, but when they do, I almost always have to control my urge to scream at them, “you got a bad grade because you didn’t freaking say anything.” But… but… it was five paragraphs, and…

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Comment Of The Day: “‘Kill A Western Cultural Institution, Wear Its Skin’: The Case of Classical Music”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Orchestra2

Ethics Alarms’ resident musician has a fascinating Comment of the Day humming with informative observations, and best of all, it has nothing to do with the Wuhan Virus vaccine

Here is David Rohde on the post “‘Kill A Western Cultural Institution, Wear Its Skin: The Case of Classical Music”…

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Jack, it makes perfect sense that you bring Heather Mac Donald’s very long, two-part screed to your readers’ attention. It’s gotten a lot of notice in the music world. Personally I respect Ms. Mac Donald’s place in the overall cultural and political discussion, whether I agree with her writings or not. I’ve noted either her research or simply her references to the variables of two-parent families and basic levels of educational attainment as fundamental explainers of personal achievement, independent of ethnic background. Her views are part of the overall discussion in America today, or should be.

All that said, her big article about classical music is flawed in at least three ways. Here are those issues:

1. A lot of the article confuses music with musicology. The latter field has been kind of nuts for a while, extending way back before last year. The principal educators of today’s and tomorrow’s performing artists are not theoretical musicologists. They’re a combination of distinguished performers themselves and effective pedagogues, often combined in the same person. I’m not going to excuse some of the crazier things that have recently come out of Juilliard and elsewhere, but conservatory education remains very rigorous and performance-focused, indeed arguably too much so given the supply-demand imbalance for classical music talent.

2. The article is not really fair to the Sphinx Organization. One of the things that Sphinx does is to deal with the same overwhelming problem of expenses for families of limited means that you see in sports such as baseball and soccer. This time of year they bring in, for example, string players – yes “black and brown” ones – to top schools and institutions for intensive education and opportunity for rehearsal and performance experience. An example of someone who came out of the Sphinx Organization is the fantastic violinist Melissa White – yes that’s her name. Melissa has performed in our region at the Phillips Collection in D.C. and the Richmond Symphony, and she has numerous recordings to her name with the Harlem Quartet (which actually performs a huge range of traditional classical and other, adventurous music). And as you know, I believe it is completely valid to assert that, just as in other fields of employment, classical music employers should assess the whole person and what they can bring to an institution, even if their performance chops are obviously the primary criterion.

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Comment Of The Day: “Comment Of The Day: ‘Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics…’”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

It has been a hugely informative and entertaining knockdown, drag-out comment battle over vaccine hesitancy the last few days on not just one but two posts on the topic. It’s time to add another. One irony of long comment threads, which make me happy as a blog proprietor, is that many readers don’t have the patience to pick through them. I’m sometimes guilty of that myself.

This Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkins on Humble Talent’s own provocative (to understate it) Comment Of The Day on my post, “Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics: If I Were Still Running My Theater Company And We Had A Large Cast Show In Production…” deserves to be highlighted. Here it is (and I forgive Ryan for not calling the virus by it’s rightful, earned non-partisan name.)

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First, I want to take exception to conflating hesitancy to take the COVID-19 vaccines and anti-vaxxers. There’s a huge difference between being skeptical about one particular vaccine and being skeptical about all vaccines. And conflating the two blurs the issues and dismisses out of hand legitimate arguments and concerns.

I stand in an odd position, because I oppose getting any of the COVID-19 vaccines, and I have been vaccinated. I took the double doses of the Moderna vaccine when it became available at my workplace. Was it to protect my family (my wife is pregnant with our fourth)? Not at all. We’re all healthy, and the odds of the coronavirus having any effect other than a harsh cold for my household is surprisingly small. Was it because my workplace pressured me into it? No, though I will cite that the 14 days paid sick time goes away if I snag a sufficiently large batch of SARS-CoV-2 and I’m not vaccinated.

So why did I get the vaccine? At the time, I believed it the right thing to do to help the efforts of reaching herd immunity. So what has changed since then? Let’s consider my thinking, meandering as it is.

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Comment Of The Day: “Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics…”

/ Jack Marshall / 127 Comments

I was getting ready to write about Sen. Rand Paul’s manifesto above ( he really is a libertarian, isn’t he?) when Humble Talent’s Comment of The Day, on the post “Theater Ethics Meets Pandemic Ethics: If I Were Still Running My Theater Company And We Had A Large Cast Show In Production…”

Perfect timing, and my favorite kind: it saved me the effort of writing a post. This should open up the pandemic and vaccine debate nicely, and get it out of the constricting limitation of live theater.

Heeeeeeere’s Humble…!

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I find these Covid threads just… really tedious.

I have found common cause with the American left on precious few issues in my lifetime, and I often find that even when I agree with them, they put the issue forward in the most obnoxious and useless way possible: They mock, they demean, they use bad arguments, and even when they’ve come to the right conclusion they rarely understand the source material. It’s frustrating.

But on this one discrete topic…. I understand mocking anti-vaxxers.

Sorry guys, if you’re in the vaccine skeptic group… You are being dumb. Your body your right, yada yada yada. Sure. You have the right to be dumb. Just because it’s your right to be an idiot doesn’t shield you from the consequences of being an idiot. And while telling you that you’re an idiot, pressuring you not to be an idiot, and there being consequences to being an idiot might harm your tender egos, America isn’t going to end.

The reason why I feel on this one discrete topic, mocking anti-vaxxers, particularly American anti-vaxxers is appropriate is because there was no convincing you. On this topic, more than any other in recent history, you are completely information resistant.

“Well Jeff! Look at Israel, they’re having a spike right now, and most of their cases are breakthrough cases, how do you explain that?!?!”

Because everyone is experiencing a spike right now, international travel isn’t completely locked down, the vaccines were never sold as being 100% effective and as new variants come out the efficacy is only going to lower, and because more than 95% of Israeli adults are vaccinated. So when anyone in Israel gets Covid it is orders of magnitude more likely that the case will be a breakthrough than a non-vaccinated case.

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Comment Of The Day: “Not Cakes, But Advocacy: The Tenth Circuit Rules That Compelled Expression Is Constitutional”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

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I often feel like issues and discussions fly by too quickly on Ethics Alarms, as trivial matters like an old Star Wars fanatic’s vulgar window sign and the desperate efforts to frame a celebrity gymnast’s ill-timed choke blot out the ethical controversies that are most important to ponder and understand. Fortunately the commenters here often take steps to ameliorate that flaw, as veteran reader Dwayne N. Zechman does here. His Comment of the Day amplifies a post from a week ago that came in the middle of the earth-shattering question of Simone Biles’ “twisties” and only inspired 22 comments other than mine (my replies to comments don’t count). This, despite the fact that, to evoke Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) at the end of “All the President’s Men,” nothing’s riding on what a Federal Appeals Court ruled in the case at issue “except the First amendment to the Constitution…and maybe the future of the country.”

Here is Dwayne’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Not Cakes, But Advocacy: The Tenth Circuit Rules That Compelled Expression Is Constitutional.”

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So . . . true story:

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