Converation thread

The right to live is already not the most important right, that's also why it's not considered murder if you kill someone in self-defense or why the government can't force you to donate blood/organs to someone who is dying. We have plenty of other rights that come before other peoples' right to life as is, and abortion is no different; your right to bodily autonomy means that you have sole control over who can or cannot use your body, at any time, for any reason, and you have the right to stop anyone who violates that consent by any means necessary, even if it means they die.

“The right to live is already not the most important right, that's also why it's not considered murder if you kill someone in self-defense”

I disagree with your conclusion that the right to self defense is in contradiction to the right to life. The fact we value a persons right to defend themselves in fact suggests we believe that ones life is valuable. Instead what is being displayed here is that the right of the aggressor is worth less than the life of the person being aggressed upon.

Killing someone in self-defense being a justified act would show that one person's right to self-defense is more important than another person's right to life. If everyone's right to life was paramount to all other rights, then this action would be considered unjustified. As another example, you are often legally allowed to shoot and kill someone who is trespassing on your property, despite the act of simply walking on privately-owned land not being violent on its own; this further shows that even the right to property is held to a higher priority than other people's right to life in many cases, thus advancing my point that there are plenty of circumstances in which another right takes precedence over another person's right to life, and abortion is no different.

“Killing someone in self-defense being a justified act would show that one person's right to self-defense is more important than another person's right to life.”

No, it merely means that the victims right to life is more important than the aggressors.

You are putting the cart before the horse. People have a right to self defense because we hold the right to life so highly that when somebody threatens it, their right to life becomes less important. The right to self defense isn't more important than the right to life, it is a safeguard of it.

Property rights extend to implicit threats to a persons life from a home intruder. If we didn't value the right to life to a great degree, people would be allowed to booby trap their own living spaces against home intruders. However, this is illegal. Even in the case of a home invasion we take the right to life of the aggressor with some seriousness.

If you can violate someone's right to life via the use of another right, then that right has fundamentally taken a higher priority than the right to life. That's the entire point: the right to life is NOT absolute, as other rights can supersede it under certain circumstances. If the right to life was always the most important to uphold under any circumstances, then killing someone would ALWAYS be illegal, but it is not. That is the conclusion I am getting at. It feels like we are agreeing on the same point but miscommunicating in between somehow..?

That's unbelievably stupid of you – inferring that any right would EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE outweigh a right to LIFE? Hate to burst your bubble, but if you're DEAD you can't enjoy ANY RIGHT AT ALL. And let me tell you this, you so-called ANARCHO-Marxist – in your spirit of anarchism, why would you EVER support taking away the firearms of people while allowed the government (THE ENEMY OF ANARCHISM) to use nuclear bombs, napalm, AK-47s, &c? That's not anarchist at all that is statism if I ever saw it.

Simple: your right to bodily autonomy and consent already does come before other people's right to life, that is why you cannot be forced donate blood or organs against your consent, even if someone else will die without it, because your right to consent over who can or cannot use your body is not conditional on the right to life of others. You have no obligation to give someone your bodily consent, even if their life is at stake, because your right to bodily autonomy comes above other people's right to life, including a fetus's.

Secondly, government is not the enemy of anarchis…  Read morem, hierarchy is. A "government" is merely whatever means of decision-making a society uses to make their group decisions, which can be incredibly hierarchical (like an autocracy), or non-hierarchical (like a direct democracy), or anywhere in-between. Anarchism, as an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of ideologies, is not "anti-government", it is simply "anti-hierarchy". And, as such, my belief against guns are actually predicated on my belief in a non-hierarchical system. I do not think guns should exist in the first place, nor do i think police or militaries should exist either, but since they do right now, I believe in both public safety AND abolishing hierarchy. Hopefully that cleared those up for you...

Your donating blood illustration does not work. When you refuse to donate blood, someone dies because of your inaction. When you murder your own child, someone dies directly as the result of your action. These are two completely different scenarios. I believe in natural, God-given rights, not human rights. Sometimes they are called "negative rights". A right to life means no one can murder you, a right to liberty means no one can enslave you, and a right to property means no one can steal from you, etc. You, however, seem to believe in "positive rights" were instead of hav…  Read moreing a right to be protected from the harm others may inflict upon you, you have a right to DEMAND FROM OTHERS CERTAIN THINGS. The example of donating blood is an example of someone demanding something else FROM someone else (which defies the right to liberty as it is involuntary servitude) whereas abortion deals only with the negative right of the baby not to be HARMED BY someone else. Negative rights protect you from harm, positive rights allow you to harm others. That's why I only believe in negative natural rights and why your blood illustration makes no sense. The same can be applied to your argument over donating organs – both are VERY different from murder.

Firstly, my blood donation example was not meant to be a comparison to abortion, it was simply another real-world example of a right that you have (consent and bodily autonomy) that is held above other people's right to life, which was the sole point I was making. There is no perfect analogy to abortion anyway, so I ultimately find it easier to just argue in support of abortion directly. As such, if you agree that 1) you have the sole right to decide who can or cannot use your body, at any time, for any or no reason, and you also agree that 2) no one has the right to use your body against your consent, then there is no logical reason why you should be opposed to "pro-choice" without blatantly omitting one of these premises. That is literally all this comes down to: can another person use your body against your consent? If not (which should be the only correct response), then a fetus does notRead more have the right to use its mother's body without her constant consent. It is that simple.

If the donating blood illustration was not intended to be a comparison to abortion it's pretty ridiculous that you used it as an argument for abortion. I do not believe that abortion has anything to do with a woman's rights to use her own body (how many ties have I said this now) because it is scientifically proven that from the moment of conception the baby and the mother are two separate bodies. I agree that no one should use your body without your consent, but I also agree that no one has a right to kill another human being. Therefore I must evaluate which right is more important…  Read more, and the right to life is always more important because if you're dead you cannot enjoy any other right. Natural rights can come into conflict, but because some natural rights are more important than others, with life being the most important of all, these conflicts can be rationally resolved. I don't know how I can put it any simpler than that for you, if you still don't understand my position I guess it's a lost cause trying to explain it to you.

If the donating blood illustration was not intended to be a comparison to abortion it's pretty ridiculous that you used it as an argument for abortion.

I didn't. As I directly stated, I was using that example to argue in support of my point that there are a plethora of situations in which one of your rights are held above another person's right to live. It was not, as I stated, a comparison to abortion, it was merely a tangential argument regarding the autonomy of individual rights. I was not directly talking about abortion during that specific argument, I was talking about righ…  Read morets...which I had explicitly clarified last time.