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by antiterra 4727 days ago
Swooping down to declare a fallacy then immediately swishing your cape and dashing away is highly unlikely to gain much social traction or admiration.

Also, when arguing if something is in a particular spirit, it's appropriate to discuss emotions and principles.

1 comments

It was just a brief way of saying, "All you've communicated is that the equation of the two doesn't feel right, without giving anyone a reason to deem your view more persuasive."

This is basically what happened:

A: That seems dangerously close to eugenics, in that it's weeding out people with bad genes.

B: Oh yeah? If you distorted your view by listening to crying moms who agree with me (and not similar weepers on the other side), you'd agree with me.

Me: Argument from emotion.

Let's try something a little more intellectual: there's also the aspect that eugenics is an idea directed to the improvement of humanity (an idea I'm... suspicious of) and abortions are decision by individuals reflecting individual circumstance. I don't believe these decisions are made on the eugenics basis: that disabled people are somehow worse than other people.

Eugenics is relatively easy to judge: you can get all the facts. Individual decisions are always harder: you don't know the full circumstance. I'm not saying that their aren't abortions made for obscene reasons (terminating girls is an obvious example), but not all are.