Chinese advertisements

[kirisutogomen]

The answer is the tag, rot13'd, but to save you the trouble, I'll tell you. First, the original ad before I mucked with it. (Yes, it was left-right mirrored like most people guessed. I'm still curious as to why among people who are entirely illiterate in Han characters the mirroring was blatantly obvious to some and not at all to others.)




And another for the same service from a competing provider:



These are ads for abortion clinics. Chinese abortion clinics advertise on prime-time television. They offer student discounts. Not sure if they have special holiday sales, nor if you get abortion coupons with your newspaper.

Now, unless you take the position that a fetus at any stage has the moral standing of a lintball but that magically at the moment the head crowns it suddenly becomes a full human person endowed with a complete set of inalienable rights plus a stylish carrying case, there's got to be a point at which you say, "Hrm. My liberal sensibilities tell me that I should advocate fiercely for a woman's right to choose, but I don't actually want people to treat abortion like a trip to the hair salon. What does my victory condition actually look like?"

And then there's the issue of sex selection, which really kicks over a Pandora's hornets' nest of other issues.

Comments

[jmandresen.livejournal.com]

I tend to feel that a fetus at any stage has the moral status of a lint ball, but I feel the same way about a six-month-old infant. As early human brains (and skulls) grew bigger over hundreds of thousands of years, it was a selective advantage to be born before development is complete. (Big head through small pelvis equals dead baby and dead mother.) A six-month-old human infant is about as functional on most "human" traits as an eight-month-old fetus. Comparative animal studies also support this.

I'm not arguing for legalizing abortion on demand for six-month-old infants. I'm just pointing out that birth is not a watershed for moral standing. It's just a convenient place for a safe maximum upper bound to ensure society never allows termination of an individual with even the tiniest shred of moral standing. That's how I get around the seeming paradox of "sudden" moral standing for a newborn. We're just being conservative and generous by giving each newborn infant its own stylish carrying case.

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Just to muddy the waters even further here: I have the impression that if you're older than, say, 35 or so, there's a pretty good chance your mother smoked and/or consumed alcohol during pregnancy (assuming she did either of these things regularly beforehand).

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

Also: backslashes. No one uses those.

[dpolicar]

Short answer: my ideal victory condition looks like people having the power to make the choices that affect them, and people using that power to make choices I endorse.

I don't expect that to happen, certainly no time soon, but that's my ideal victory condition.

Various real-world approximations of that ideal are possible, but you're right that at some point in any real-world approximation I will need to draw some more-or-less arbitrary thresholds to compensate for regions where the ideal function just ain't computable.

So, yes, in the real world choices arise between people not having the power to make the choices that affect them (on the one hand) and people using their power to make choices I decry (on the other).

My sensibilities mostly tell me that given that choice, I err strongly on the side of people having the power to make the choices that affect them. Whether those sensibilities count as "liberal" I really don't know, but I'm comfortable enough with that label if I have to pick a label.

That said, I'll admit that in the real world situations arise where the reason I decry person A's choice is precisely because it takes away person B's ability to make the choices that affect them. And yeah, as you suggest, those sorts of situations throw my sensibilities into a muddle. "Let people make their own choices" as a guiding principle has a way of short-circuiting when faced with people who make the choice to prevent other people from making their own choices.

With respect to abortion in particular, one can go down the rabbit hole at this point of "but there isn't a person B, there's just a fetus!" Which I mostly consider a distraction, since I tend to think one can always in principle evaluate the value of an existing system in terms of the expected value of the evolution of that system, even if one can't always actually compute the result. In other words, I would say that the value of a fetus is expressible in terms of the expected values of the people that fetus can become, so the personhood of the fetus doesn't really matter much -- whether the fetus is a person or not, the value of a person is relevant in determining the costs of terminating its development.

That said, it's a damned effective distraction, which is why abortion is so beloved as a topic of discussion among people who would rather confound their opposition than think clearly. But I digress.

Anyway, yes, examples like this are problematic for me. I don't feel too bad about that... I'm mostly a Godellian in such matters. That is, I believe that for any decision system powerful enough to make useful decisions at all, there will be decisions that system is incapable of making. And when it comes to those decisions, users of that system will have to do something annoyingly ad-hoc.

I'm not crazy about that fact, but I don't see any way around it.