The “cutoff” always comes up in abortion debates, and when someone argues for a very late term abortion, the other side is sure to bring up infanticide. Polite people/amateur philosophers leave it there. Professional philosophers pick up the slack and deal with the heinous leftover questions…
If it’s in relation to abortion cutoff times it’s an important question to ask. I’ve never met someone with a rational answer to that question. It mostly boils down to what they personally feel comfortable with emotionally (and that’s fine, but not something you can apply in law for all people).
> It mostly boils down to what they personally feel comfortable with emotionally (and that’s fine, but not something you can apply in law for all people).
Well yes, obviously there are laws based (maybe) on majority opinion or average opinion. What I mean is that opinions will vary and you can’t satisfy everyone. There is no objective right or wrong cutoff hence why there is philosophical debate about it.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Do you have more recent information that shows it is now illegal to forcefully terminate the functionality of a 40-week fetus while in the womb in Canada?
Calling it a hole in the rules is inaccurate. It's not a person. You can disagree if you want.
My post was informational and intentionally lacking opinion.
The hole in the rules called out, from the OC you linked:
A handful of private member's bills introduced in Parliament over the last couple of decades have tried to remedy what seems to be an arbitrary distinction in law. The most recent was in 2016, when Saskatchewan MP Cathay Wagantall tabled Bill C-225, which would have made it a "separate offence to cause injury or death to a preborn child during the commission of an offence against the child's mother."
Cultures that don’t practice infanticide are the exception in the historical and anthropological record. Not killing your children was invented by the Egyptians, taken up by the Jews and spread by the Christians, Muslims, presumably other Abrahamic faiths and cultures derived from them. It has not been obvious to the huge majority of people ever born that there was anything wrong with infanticide. If you think it is obviously wrong you might want to make an argument of some kind.
> Cultures that don’t practice infanticide are the exception in the historical and anthropological record
That's a non-argument. People did all kinds of horrible things in the past (human sacrifice, cruel corporal punishment, slavery) and yet it is now obvious to us that these things are bad. I think it is safe to say that infanticide is one of the things that we don't need to debate in modern times.
You’re saying that it’s obvious infanticide is wrong. I’m pointing out that most humans ever have disagreed. Then you’re saying it’s obvious again and that it doesn’t need to be debated. Your “argument” is that the current moral fashions of your society are true and that this is obvious to all.
At best this is an attempt at persuasion by “Everyone else is doing it and so should you.”
Well, I am a former embryo and fetus. I was given the opportunity to be born, and so I became pro-life. That seems like a pretty obvious and logical decision.
Relevant context. Singer has a lot of clout because people read some of his stuff in a first year philosophy class. For those who didn't get the memo that the man is a crazy misanthrope, him taking the idea of infanticide seriously is a pretty good indicator of what his specific grift actually is.
Some of the text is copied and pasted below, but it should be read and interpreted in context:
ABORTION AND INFANTICIDE
There remains one major objection to the argument I have
advanced in favour of abortion. We have already seen that the
strength of the conservative position lies in the difficulty liberals
have in pointing to a morally significant line of demarcation
between an embryo and a newborn baby. The standard liberal
position needs to be able to point to some such line, because
liberals usually hold that it is permissible to kill an embryo or
fetus but not a baby. I have argued that the life of a fetus (and
even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than
the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality,
self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. etc., and that
since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as
a person. Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply
to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby
is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many
nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness,
awareness, capacity to feel. and so on, exceed that of a human
baby a week or a month old. If the fetus does not have the same
claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does
not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it
than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman
animal.
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