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Entries Tagged as 'Feticide'

Sentience Part 2

November 2nd, 2008 2 Comments

Following on from Sentience Part 1, I will now address the conclusion of Bonnie Steinbock’s argument. Steinbock’s Conclusion Similar ambiguities affect Steinbock’s conclusion. Steinbock asserts that for killing an individual to be unlawful homicide, the individual must be sentient. However, this is ambiguous; as Don Marquis points out, this could mean that the individual will […]

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Sentience Part 1

November 1st, 2008 Comments Off on Sentience Part 1

Following on from my series on the illiberality of Abortion, discussion in the comments section turned to the issue of sentience. Commenters asked whether perhaps sentience is the property that a newborn possesses and a fetus does not that warrants such unequal application of the non-initiation of force principle by liberals. Is sentience the property […]

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Is Abortion Liberal? Part 2

October 27th, 2008 27 Comments

In my previous post, Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1, I argued that liberals who support the non-initiation of force principle can support abortion only on two grounds; (a) the fetus is a person but its existence inside the mother without her consent constitutes a form aggression, and hence, the mother’s action of killing it is […]

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Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1

October 26th, 2008 11 Comments

Laws permitting abortion on demand are often deemed to be liberal. Further, political liberals are frequently ardent defenders of such laws. I think these conclusions are mistaken. In a series of two posts I will provide some reasons why. Most contemporary liberals advocate a form of the harm principle, famously articulated by Mill in On […]

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Praise from our Critics

June 20th, 2008 3 Comments

Despite holding to a somewhat contrary viewpoint and despite having had more than one clash of viewpoints it appears that our critics accord us some praise. I just now stumbled accross this thread on GayNZ.com’s forum discussing Christian blogs and websites and was pleasantly surprised by the comments on our blog. Kay writes: “The M […]

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Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar

March 19th, 2008 26 Comments

David Farrar of Kiwiblog weighs in on the abortion debate. I have met David a couple of times and worked with him on several issues and I have a lot of time for him but on this issue we disagree. Given how widely read Farrar’s blog is, and seeing the ethics of killing a fetus […]

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Genocide ! Who Cares? Tell them about crazy Falwell and Tinky Winky

March 2nd, 2008 1 Comment

A few years ago I heard with amusement the NZ media report that Jerry Falwell had condemned Tinky Winky from the Teletubbies as gay. A little while latter I came across an article in First Things pointing out that the sources of these reports were mistaken. I was not a fan of Falwell but whatever […]

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