| Yes, this is a complete straw man, as you say. Don't put words in my mouth I never said. I don't think that's what "moral(ity)" commonly means. "The values that society can agree on" is all we have. The laws are just a codification of that. If they were not (at least in theory) an expression of the values that society agrees on, something would be very wrong. You seem to imply there was a magical way by which we can know right and wrong that was not "moral". Again, you seem to think of "morality" as something connected with unreflected obedience to a (possibly outdated) belief system, or maybe even a fundamentalistic interpretion thereof. It's not. You totally miss what I say (and you missed what your parent said, which is why I posted my first comment). I will make crystal clear why I posted that: > You are confusing what the current law is, with what the law could, or should be, based on accepted moral values. You claimed that abortion was some black-and-white topic, because there might be some law which draws a clear line at the time of birth. Nobody ever argued against that, but it was not the topic of discourse. The discourse was not about law, but about how we should deal with abortion. There's a lot uncertainty, and all OP said is that it makes a difference whether abortion is 3 days before conception or 3 days after insemination. THERE IS A GRAY AREA. (Nobody disputed that, if you make a law, you have of course to somehow set a somewhat arbitrary limit by which it is allowed, given certain circumstances, to proceed with abortion). There need to be (and there are) public debates on what's the right way to deal with abortion, given that there are good and widely accepted reasons both for and against abortion. It's not that simple with abortion - that's all OP said. |