“Should we build a slave army of cracker conscripts to fight the Nazis” is a fun thought experiment, but the logistics would be a nightmare! That’s how you get conscripts fragging their superior officers. I suppose you could maybe keep them under control with bomb collars or something, but uh, at that point we have firmly left moralism far behind us.
Also, can you give me a justification for 100% of abortions that ignores whether the baby is a person or a clump of flesh?
If you want to bring the practicalities of a hypothetical moral scenario into this then the violinist argument, which involves stitching an unwilling person to a sick person to share a kidney, fails even harder.
My point in the abstract is this: the violinist argument is one that myopically focuses on individual rights. It proposes that an individual cannot be forced to do anything that may result in bodily harm in service of a “greater good”. The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good. Mandatory service to fight Nazis is merely the clearest cut example.
I support abortion rights for many reasons. However, the violinist argument itself is incredibly flawed both logically and rhetorically and I don’t think it’s a helpful argument to make. It can be so easily reframed into a scenario where both sides have reasonable arguments and doesn’t really prove anything. It’s main crux is just the visceral reaction to the disgusting nature of the scenario.
I brought in practicalities because I didn’t feel like addressing the horrific implications of your hypothetical moral scenario. But! Okay.
The argument fails because most of society (even a socialist society) agrees that it is sometimes moral to force a person to risk bodily harm in service of a greater good.
Again, you have left moralism behind. Using your logic, it is sometimes moral to ban abortion: if we need to increase the population to fight off the fascists, if we need to repopulate after the antifa war, etc. In fact, using your logic, it is moral to force people to get pregnant in the first place. Without bodily autonomy as a basis for ethics, how do you avoid forced birth baby factories?
My scenario is not a hypothetical scenario. It is one that happened between 1941 and 1945. Millions of people lost their lives to defeat fascism. I consider mandatory service as imposed by the USSR to be morally defensible, even if the bodily autonomy of millions of people were violated. Do you consider that forcing Soviet citizens to take up arms was morally indefensible?
