I just posted a comment at the anti-natalism blog. There is moderation there so it won’t appear until James Crawford (aka metamorphhh) approves it, but until then I figured I’d turn my paragraph on abortion into a post of its own here. UPDATE: It is up.
I used to be a fundamentalist Christian (I discussed that here), but even then I didn’t care much about abortion. I still consider it murder, but figure that “murder happens” to paraphrase the profane saying. I used to describe myself as “weakly pro-life”, but I’ve been drifting towards the pro-choice camp, even extending towards infanticide. I’ve ceased to be concerned as much with individual rights (not surprising given that I don’t believe in them) that some sort of platonically ideal rights-enforcing authority will ensure, and more with taking decentralization as far as it can (I don’t trust any authority to look after my interests and the larger/more powerful it is the more frightened I am of it) and contractarian based rules. If I am not willing to invade Iraq to stop Saddam from gassing Kurds, it’s just a few (admittedly large) steps away from declining to kick open Andrea Yates’ door if she wants to drown her toddlers. Among the least desirable rules are those which people have the inclination and ability to flout, and both drug use and abortion seem similar in that respect. Fetuses are not part of any contract and can’t really put up a fight if they don’t like the rules they live under. I’m not a fetus, none of my friends are fetuses (fetusi?), so I am as indifferent to the mass-murder of them as Adam Smith’s enlightened gentleman is to the inhabitants of China.
I expect that some people will find my attitude more repellent than either the prototypical pro-life or pro-choice ones, but I bet most people would consider Half Sigma’s thoughs on abortion vs sodomy to be even worse.
Entitled to an Opinion 
February 9, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Your comment is up now, TGGP. Hope people don’t mind the comment moderation stuff too much; I’ve just seen/been involved with too many boards where idiots and trolls gum up the works.
BTW…I was a fundy meself; a minister, even!
February 9, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I don’t mind the moderation. I’ve been more annoyed with the Kip Esquire (only short posts allowed and not multiple ones in a row), Tom Palmer (my first post disappeared I didn’t realize hyperlinks were removed from my second) and Maverick Philosopher (I still don’t know if my registration was rejected or unexamined yet) blogs.
I’m surprised to hear about you being a minister. I was never very spiritual even when I was religious, and I was raised a boring “mainline” Protestant. I just was willing to take things we all claimed to believe in and follow their consequences to extremes that most don’t.
February 9, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I’ve had some other blogs focusing on religion and atheism, but ended up abandoning them when i realized there were already tons of folks dealing with those issues, in more detail than I had the time or energy to keep up with. I’ve created an off-shoot blog for when I feel like going off subject…I imagine I’ll wind up addressing religion there, eventually…sigh. So much to blog, so little time to blog. And I’ve still got five or six hundred poems to edit and transfer, as well. Keeps me out of trouble, I guess.
February 9, 2008 at 8:51 pm
I was just over reading your overcoming bias ref, and it got me to thinking about the whole ‘recognizing intelligent design in nature’ business. The watch in the desert analogy…stuff like that. It occurs to me that the whole argument can be snuffed out simply by denying the concept of design altogether, and just acknowledging that existence exhibits pattern. All this falls back into the Aquinas contingency arguments, as well as his teleological leanings…maybe I’ll try to scribble something.
February 9, 2008 at 9:44 pm
You can watch clocks evolve in this video.
February 10, 2008 at 12:27 am
[…] post on babykilling Posted by teageegeepea under Moral posturing When I was writing my previous post on abortion I had forgotten about this old comment from the Mises blog, (I think) back when I still believed in […]
February 10, 2008 at 12:48 am
[…] This video is pretty rad. Courtesy of TGGP […]
February 10, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I cherish people like TGGP who are not afraid to horrify and appall if that is what expressing their honest moral opinion entails.
February 10, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Thanks, Richard. They don’t call it a Chamber of Horrors for nothing!
February 11, 2008 at 2:56 pm
incredible. quite vile. paranoid too. but i agree %100.
February 11, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I haven’t been called paranoid before, but I suppose in my remarks on decentralization there is a strong dose of that. All I can say is that governments have repeatedly shown they will grab on to whatever power they can and abuse it. They’re not after me in particular, but I fear them nevertheless.
If you agree 100%, does that mean you hold vile and paranoid opinions?
June 27, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Saw your link at UR.
Okay, so you seem to be conflating the moral problem with the practical problem.
Other than that I agree.
It’s still morally reprehensible to kill your children. Murder doesn’t become unmurder as a function of age and blood relation.
On the other hand, yeah, enforcement. Consider the biological urge to reproduce, then:
“Well, I really want to kill my baby, but it’s illegal! I might be caught!”
Yeah, I don’t see that happening. If the built-in incentives aren’t doing it, the kid’s screwed anyway.
June 27, 2008 at 4:28 pm
I am an emotivist/non-cognitivist. When it comes to morality, there simply is no fact of the matter.
The incentives from criminal punishment do have a significant effect on behavior. That’s why the liberal courts of the 60s gave us more crimes, and the law’n’order backlash reduced it. As for the kid being screwed, read Judith Harris’ “The Nurture Assumption”.
June 27, 2008 at 11:53 pm
“The incentives from criminal punishment do have a significant effect on behavior. ”
But my argument is that is probably doesn’t apply in this case. Biology trumps legality. Similarly, perverted biology still trumps legality.
“As for the kid being screwed, read Judith Harris’ “The Nurture Assumption”.”
Being deliberately ambiguous. If you won’t take that meaning, take the other. The kid is going to die. The mom may have to find a loophole first, but they’ll die.
While primitive societies were often infanticidal, and there may be evidence that SIDs is used as cover – much as I would predict – this is mostly solved by putting kids up for adoption. If this is a choice, resource strapped moms will usually take it.
If they don’t, well, the kid is screwed.
September 4, 2008 at 2:32 pm
[…] I came out in favor of legalized full-blown infanticide here. […]
September 5, 2008 at 12:01 am
The problem with decentralization is that it won’t work. There’s always incentive to band together against the other in order to plunder them, or at least prevent them from plundering you. The best possible alternative is MM’s formalism…or if that doesn’t work and the Singularity hypothesis is true, possibly even (I hate to say it) Islam.
February 21, 2011 at 11:32 pm
[…] sounds better than a singleton. Part of that is also because of the importance of paranoia at the root of my ideology. So rather than focus on the weak as morally superior, I focus on the strongest as […]
May 9, 2018 at 11:18 pm
[…] preference for it with a Burkean conservative openness to other policies deemed useful. After I stopped believing in objective/natural rights I took meta-libertarianism to an extreme of radical decentralism, and rather than make a principled […]
March 13, 2019 at 10:38 pm
[…] laws should remain on the books. Over the years I have taken my libertarian leanings in a more meta/decentralist direction and decided that identifying with an ideology like libertarianism doesn’t pay […]