What's the wedge that lets you accept quarantining people with infectious diseases but not accept preventing very late-term abortions? They are both instances of someone other than X having a say with what X does to their body with the purported goal of protecting Y.
Wow, great question! Well, let me work it through. My starting point is normally some variant of "what is good for society?". (Related tangent: I think a somewhat-confusing-the-issue #3 in my reply above is: the woman in the West Coast who had sextuplets via public healthcare. It's bad for society for a woman to have 6 kids when she has arguably limited means to support them, but I think it's better for society to accept that cost if everyone else gets better* healthcare. The devil is in the details of the asterisked "better", of course.) So quarantining someone isn't done for their benefit, it's done for the benefit of the people around them.
Nrgh, I'm going to be lazy and go into Analogy Land. (I consider analogies to be sloppy thinking; apologies for resorting to such, but I can't take too much time this morning.) I think it's okay for me to play my music at whatever volume I want; I think it's also okay to have noise nuisance statutes. I think it's okay to ingest a bottle of Instant Plague, so long as I quarantine myself beforehand. Cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Aha, okay: so yes, the cost to me (and the rest of society) of someone having a baby who I (and miraculously, the rest of society agrees with me) think shouldn't have a baby is that now we have to bear the cost of raising that child. I'd rather have that cost, then open the possibility that I (or anyone else) gets to say whether or not she can elect to not have the child.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
winterfish
no subject
Date: 2011-09-28 02:15 pm (UTC)Wow, great question! Well, let me work it through. My starting point is normally some variant of "what is good for society?". (Related tangent: I think a somewhat-confusing-the-issue #3 in my reply above is: the woman in the West Coast who had sextuplets via public healthcare. It's bad for society for a woman to have 6 kids when she has arguably limited means to support them, but I think it's better for society to accept that cost if everyone else gets better* healthcare. The devil is in the details of the asterisked "better", of course.) So quarantining someone isn't done for their benefit, it's done for the benefit of the people around them.
Nrgh, I'm going to be lazy and go into Analogy Land. (I consider analogies to be sloppy thinking; apologies for resorting to such, but I can't take too much time this morning.) I think it's okay for me to play my music at whatever volume I want; I think it's also okay to have noise nuisance statutes. I think it's okay to ingest a bottle of Instant Plague, so long as I quarantine myself beforehand. Cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Aha, okay: so yes, the cost to me (and the rest of society) of someone having a baby who I (and miraculously, the rest of society agrees with me) think shouldn't have a baby is that now we have to bear the cost of raising that child. I'd rather have that cost, then open the possibility that I (or anyone else) gets to say whether or not she can elect to not have the child.