Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The need for world government

kk.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 133 posts

Re: The need for world government

#121

Post by pandaman »

danaris wrote: post #107
tasuki wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand your comment. > In no other case is a human being, living or dead, legally required to give up their organs, bodily fluids, or other part of themselves, nor to literally risk their lives, for another human being. In many other cases are humans legally required to literally risk their lives for another human being. Would you like me to give you examples? > Corpses have more bodily autonomy than wom…

If abortion is murder, then is refusing to donate your kidney when someone else needs it to live also murder? Is refusing to donate blood, bone marrow, etc, murder? Is not mandating the donation of viable organs after death murder? None of these things are required of people, in the name of bodily autonomy. None of these inactions are considered murder. And yet you expect women to donate their bodies for 9 months to…

Positive and negative rights are different. There is a negative right to life, there is no positive right to life. Ergo, you are forbidden from actions that cause somebody's death in general and you are not compelled to actions that prevent somebody's death in general. Existence of a negative rights does not imply a corresponding positive right.

Re: The need for world government

#122

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

yucky wrote: post #118
freedom2099 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authoritarian is forcing a mother to have a child she doesn’t want! It’s her body! If you force your opinion on something that should be exclusively her concern then you are the “authoritarian”

I think the argument is that there is effectively zero difference in a 39 week old fetus and a newborn baby, so that argument only works if you're willing to extend the logic to getting rid of a newborn to... OR we acknowledge that there has to be a cutoff somewhere in the pregnancy where abortions are no longer acceptable. Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the bir…

> Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly.

You're right, that is silly. It is a silly, misleading straw-man argument.

Sentience isn't and never was the test. People in long-term comas still have rights.

Also, it's hard to define precisely, harder to test in new-born infants, who are not all that "wired up" anyway at the time of birth.

Re: The need for world government

#123

Post by thomassmith65 »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #116
thomassmith65 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the proposition: potential bad government instead of potential extinction.

No thanks. Easy. Bad government is a predictable outcome. Extinction risk is wildly overrated and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I'd be uncomfortable emphatically staking a position on the whether a global government would go bad. There are many factors aside from ideology that determine if a government functions well; if someone tells me "I'm forming a new liberal democracy" it is too little information to predict if it will be a good one, or a bad one.

People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortunately, people also overestimate, gravely, the capacity of humanity to refrain from nuclear war. It has been less than a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we've come close to a nuclear conflict on several occasions.

Re: The need for world government

#124

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #123
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks. Easy. Bad government is a predictable outcome. Extinction risk is wildly overrated and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I'd be uncomfortable emphatically staking a position on the whether a global government would go bad. There are many factors aside from ideology that determine if a government functions well; if someone tells me "I'm forming a new liberal democracy" it is too little information to predict if it will be a good one, or a bad one. People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortu…

“I’m forming a new government, and everyone is subject to it and you can’t leave,” is a heavy enough ask for me to take my chances and oppose it. It’s also not clear to me how you plan to bring the nuclear powers in question to heel without some sort of a war.

Re: The need for world government

#125

Post by thomassmith65 »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #124
thomassmith65 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be uncomfortable emphatically staking a position on the whether a global government would go bad. There are many factors aside from ideology that determine if a government functions well; if someone tells me "I'm forming a new liberal democracy" it is too little information to predict if it will be a good one, or a bad one. People do overestimate the risk that a nuclear war would lead to human extinction. Unfortu…

“I’m forming a new government, and everyone is subject to it and you can’t leave,” is a heavy enough ask for me to take my chances and oppose it. It’s also not clear to me how you plan to bring the nuclear powers in question to heel without some sort of a war.

I assumed it was understood that entry of any country into a world government would be decided by a referendum. In normal times, most people see the benefit in cooperation. If it is impossible to imagine the people of a nation voting to join a world government, that is because we are living in strange times.

Re: The need for world government

#126

Post by yucky »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #122
yucky wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that there is effectively zero difference in a 39 week old fetus and a newborn baby, so that argument only works if you're willing to extend the logic to getting rid of a newborn to... OR we acknowledge that there has to be a cutoff somewhere in the pregnancy where abortions are no longer acceptable. Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the bir…

> Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly. You're right, that is silly. It is a silly, misleading straw-man argument. Sentience isn't and never was the test. People in long-term comas still have rights. Also, it's hard to define precisely, harder to test in new-born infants, who are not all that "wired up" anyway at the time of birth.

So at what point should we no longer be ok with ending the life of the developing human? 39 weeks? 24 weeks? 16 weeks? Somewhere else?

Re: The need for world government

#127

Post by squabble »

freedom2099 wrote: post #67
zthrowaway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mother decided to have unprotected sex. There’s a reason women get pregnant. This isn’t some magical thing that is forced on women. Cause and effect. The body inside her body is not hers. Unfortunately biology does not conform to our fantasyland. Forcing those who are against this to pay a fine is against their will.

This is such bulshit! First and foremost willing unprotected sex is not the only reason for getting pregnant! Contraceptive are not 100% effective and there is rape. Second the body inside her might not belong to her (although… debatable) but her body is still hers and therefore she is entitled to remove anything inside of her. Third sometimes there are medical reasons for abortions (Malta recently almost killed a mo…

My understanding of the pro life view is that if someone chooses to put sperm in there, they are agreeing to give up some bodily autonomy and carry the child to birth.

Re: The need for world government

#128

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

yucky wrote: post #126
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise, we're pretending sentience is magically conveyed as the baby passes through the birth canal, which is silly. You're right, that is silly. It is a silly, misleading straw-man argument. Sentience isn't and never was the test. People in long-term comas still have rights. Also, it's hard to define precisely, harder to test in new-born infants, who are not all that "wired up" anyway at the time of birth.

So at what point should we no longer be ok with ending the life of the developing human? 39 weeks? 24 weeks? 16 weeks? Somewhere else?

At what point do you stop reducing issues to misleading "trick questions"?

Re: The need for world government

#129

Post by zthrowaway »

freedom2099 wrote: post #91
zthrowaway wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An embryo I agree cannot survive out of the womb, but what an embryo is, is a stage of human life. It’s still a human. Let’s not start trying to decide who is human enough to live. In Colorado you can get an abortion up to 9 months. There’s legislation trying to pass abortion allowance up to the moment of birth, and some have been recently successful in passing. Many states in the US allow abortions in 2nd trimester…

> Let’s not start trying to decide who is human enough to live. But you are already doing that stating that abortion should be illegal altogether! You just set the threshold very early on!

That makes no sense.

Re: The need for world government

#130

Post by yucky »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #128
yucky wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at what point should we no longer be ok with ending the life of the developing human? 39 weeks? 24 weeks? 16 weeks? Somewhere else?

At what point do you stop reducing issues to misleading "trick questions"?

It's not a trick question, it's a recognition that abortion support is rarely binary. The majority of people (even pro-choice) believe there is a point in the pregnancy where an elective abortion would be grotesque and shouldn't be allowed. What drives the divide in the debate is where we should draw that line. Conception? Viability? Birth?

It's the fundamental point in the debate, so it's far from a trick question?

Post reply on HN