• Abortion,  Economics,  Law

    The mother of all abortion posts

    Glen Whitman has pretty much all of the abortion analogies (all five of them) that enter the logical debate about the topic.

    It’s an odd thing. I used to debate him quite frequently on a now-defunct website, and he caused me to change my position on what the legality of early-term abortion should be with analogy number five

    The Negligent Driver. When you negligently or deliberately cause harm to another person, the law requires you to provide compensation, either with money or some kind of action. If your negligent driving puts a pedestrian in the hospital, you are liable for his medical bills. Likewise, one might argue, your sexual behavior creates the risk of placing a fetus in a very precarious situation. If so, you are liable for the fetus’s care during that time. This analogy emphasizes the responsibility of people for the risks they create, thereby dodging the previous analogy’s “no invitation” problem. The difficulty with this analogy comes from the definition of “harm.” Harm doesn’t mean being in a difficult situation – it means being in a worse situation than you would have been otherwise. Were it not for your reckless driving, the pedestrian would (in all likelihood) still be walking around, safe and sound. Were it not for the act of sex, the fetus would not exist at all. To sustain the claim that the act of sex creates a risk of harm to the fetus, you have to insist that existence in a dependent state is worse than sheer non-existence. If the act of sex constitutes a tort, it is the only tort I can think of that creates the very person it victimizes.

    I’m the only person I know of who changes his mind on abortion due to a logical argument.

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  • Society,  Weirdness

    Crazy vegans and social evolution

    This horrifying article appeared in today’s AJC

    Vegan parents guilty in infant murder
    6-week-old died of starvation after being fed diet of soy milk, apple juice
    The parents of a baby that died of starvation after being fed a vegan diet have been found guilty of malice murder, felony murder and first degree cruelty to children.

    Prosecutors said it was a chilling case of murder by starvation, a painful and prolonged death. Attorneys representing Sanders and Thomas told jurors the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to their vegan lifestyle. Vegans typically live free of animal products.

    It’s troubling in many ways; it raises the question of do we need an official (i.e. government) of raising children (no), and how could these two be so stupid as to not notice that their baby was shrinking?

    The truly rare thing is how did these two avoid the self-appointed legions of women who see an infant as an invitation to ask the parents questions on every conceivable subject? It’s not like you have to seek out child-rearing advice when it comes flying out of the woodwork in public places. I imagine it’s decent advice too, just repetitive.

    Perhaps it’s an evolved behavior. Post-partum depression being common a society with an army of cooing watchdogs is the first line of defense against neglect or abuse.

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  • Music,  Weirdness

    It’s hard to sell domestic violence

    While on my way to the Open Mic last night I passed a street performer/near vagrant. As I walked by I got the a pitch for money, with the memorable opening line of “Can you help me out man, I just did six months for domestic violence”. I gave him a dose of the evil eye (look at a spot an inch above his eyes, try it, it works) and he backed off rather quickly.

    Why would he think that would be a good way to get money out of anyone? Then again, thinking probably isn’t a strong suit.

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  • Adages,  Economics,  Quotes

    More wisdom from my old econ professors

    The same professor mentioned in the previous post said that it is the natural order of things for

    “Those who study the very big see the study of the very small as true, but not relevant. Those who study the very small see the study of the very big as relevant, but not true”.

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  • Science,  Tech

    Science and truth

    Via this episode of BloggingHeads, I came across an interesting article about the philosophy of science, specifically that of Thomas Kuhn. Money Quotes:

    Scientists, as Kuhn describes them, are deeply conservative. Once indoctrinated into a paradigm, they generally devote themselves to solving “puzzles,” problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this “mopping up.” But there are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that directly contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored. But if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

    Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn asserts that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative event. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and then bashes them over the head.

    In other words, science advances funeral by funeral.

    On the first day of my Advanced Macroeconomics class in 1994 the professor (I forget his name, I think that was the last class he taught before he retired) said that we should think of the truth as “the consensus of informed opinion”.

    In other words, for practical purposes, the truth is the state of the art, as of right now, and we should expect it to change over time.

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