January 2005 Archives

Given how often assertions of terrorism are made hither and thither, and the appallingly obvious fact that no-one seems to have the same idea as anyone else as to exactly what consitutes terrorism, we here at the Cerebrate’s Contemplations would like to offer the simple, yet elegant, definition we use as a standard for future postings, debates, and quibbles on the subject. We feel that this will eliminate a great deal of confusion, talking past one another, and pointless heat - which is why it almost certainly won’t work, but what the hell. At least it will make sure people know what we’re talking about.

Our definition runs as follows: “The use of techniques, including but not limited to violence, intended to cause fear and intimidation, in order to coerce changes in government policy or societal attitude.”

Examples:

Blowing up a car-bomb outside a crowded shopping center to further your pet political cause.

TERRORISM.

Blowing up a car-bomb outside a crowded shopping center because you’re a depressed sociopath who hates people.

NOT TERRORISM.

Intimidating the people and businesses of a local community to compel them to shun a certain business which tests products on animals.

TERRORISM.

Intimidating the people and businesses of a local community to compel them to give you money.

NOT TERRORISM.

Entering a family’s home by force, searching it, and arresting some family members, in order to create a climate of fear and a sense that resistance if futile.

TERRORISM.

Entering a family’s home by force, searching it, and arresting some family members, in order to secure weapons believed to be hidden there and people who might use them against legitimate authority.

NOT TERRORISM.

We here at the Cerebrate’s Contemplations hope this simple guide has helped anyone who might be confused on this point. Thank you for your patience.

So, it seems we - the people living in my little enclave - had the scum to visit last night - drunks on a Tuesday, who would have thought? - who managed to tear two big parking signs of the walls, tear them to pieces, and scatter them about the place. It’s vaguely depressing to know that, had I taken a shotgun and improved the average IQ of this town by a good ten points, I would have been the one arrested.

In other news, it seems that salesmonkey is not an acceptable gender-neutral form of salesman. Who knew?

"Scotland, my auld, respected mither!
 Tho' whiles ye moistify your leather,
 Till whare ye sit on craps o' heather
 Ye tine your dam,
 Freedom and whisky gang thegither,
 Tak aff your dram!"

- Robert Burns, "The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer"

a.) If it involves doing meaningless busywork to keep people I don't care about on a deep and personal level happy, I prioritise it appropriately at "sub-dogwash".

b.) And I don't have a dog.

[Editor's note, 9/18/2007 - this remains in effect even though I do, now, have a dog.]

WHEREAS the Cerebrate is sitting on his ass waiting for unit tests to complete;

and whereas the Cerebrate is tired of reading bloody stupid irrational emotionally-manipulative rantings on this subject;

the Cerebrate will hereby burn some philosophical oil thinking about the Modern Moral Issue that has nonetheless been around since, oh, pre-Hellenistic Greece, which is to say, herein the Cerebrate shall think about abortion. In doing so, the Cerebrate pretty much expects to cause some controversy, largely because he firmly believes that both the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" sides are walking around with truly massive philosophical lacunae xor irrationalisms ("Baby!" "Foetus!" "BABY!" "FOETUS!"), patched over by sheer volume, and sheer volume.

So, to begin with, let us examine the arguments of each side, and their associated lacunae, with a brief side-note on exactly why the Cerebrate believes the whole issue creates such a mass of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Namely, everyone's defending a pre-eminent human right:

The "pro-life" side of the debate holds the individual right to life pre-eminent. And, well, if you can't defend an individual's right to live, what can you defend? (Very little, because one's own death is an inarguable answer to just about everything.) If you have an absolute right to life, then you can't compromise on this one.

The "pro-choice" side of the debate holds the individual right to liberty (in its self-ownership manifestation) pre-eminent. And, well, if you can't defend an individual's right to dispose of themselves as they will, what can you defend? (Very little, because one's own slavery is an only slightly less inarguable answer to just about everything.) If you believe in personal freedom, then you can't compromise on this one, either.

So, you've just agreed with both sides? ("He can't do that, can he?")

Well, no and yes. Ultimately, you can't simply agree with both sides, simply because they're fundamentally inconsistent with each other. (And either - if their respective partisans applied them consistently - have rather unhealthy effects; you can draw the lines from life-primacy directly to slavery, and from freedom-primacy directly to infanticide, at any time up to the age of majority.)

(Just to get it out of the way, I suppose this would be the point at which someone accuses me of wanting to control women's bodies. Well, that's really rather silly, isn't it? If I were under the delusion that I had standing to control women's bodies, then abortion restrictions would come in down at the bottom of the list, way below, say, restricting tattoos and breast implants. And some really fierce restrictions on exposure to sunlight, because creamy-pale skin just looks - and, for that matter, feels - so much better, y'know? A blow struck against ultraviolet light is a blow struck for aesthetics and civilisation, by God!

It's a good thing that I don't have any delusions of such standing, really.)

Anyway, where were we? Ah, yes, those nasty clashes of fundamental principles. To resolve things, let's step way back down into the murky underpinnings of the Cerebrate's philosophy, and ask ourselves the first fundamental question: So, what is it that has rights, anyway, and what are they?

In the interests of time and space, this is where I'm going to ask you to accept two axioms; namely, that rights are a corollary of sophoncy. Sophoncy, for these purposes, I define as the combination of sapience - the faculty of rational thought - and self-will - the ability to select and pursue goals. I assume here free will is possible, largely because without the assumption of free will, ethical arguments become quintessentially meaningless as we would lack the facility to make ethical choices, or any other choices for that matter. (If you don't believe that we have free will, you might as well stop reading here. You will, or you won't, anyway, so what the hell.)

The second one, concerning what rights are, is that the fundamental rights inherent in sophoncy are the Lockean rights: life, liberty and property. However, the Cerebrate likes to boil these down into a single principle: the right to do as one wills with what is one's own, subject only to the limitation that one may not damage or coerce that which is not one's own, save in the defence of that which is. In this system, the right to life is, for the most part, a property right - the individual (in the form of the sapient and self-willed algorithm that runs things; my readers of a religious bent are free to insert "soul" here if they'd like) owns their living body.

So, how do these apply in the abortion case?

Well, the first question we have to ask is "How many sophont individuals are we dealing with?" That question is actually easier to answer, being purely a technical, rather than philosophical question. Unfortunately, however, we're limited in answering it by the current state of neuroscience; while some might be comfortable at pointing at parts of the human brain and declaring "here lies the seat of reason", no-one has yet come close to the point of being able to say "here, in this group of cells, lies consciousness! behold, the free will of man!"

What we can say, however, is that reason and consciousness correlate with the activity of the human brain; we know that when such activity ceases, sophoncy departs, and we can reasonably infer that in the presence of such activity, sophoncy arrives. This answers the initial question: we can say definitely that a foetus at such an early stage of development as to lack the capacity for such activity is not a sophont being (note that while we cannot infer that the start of such activity implies sophoncy, we're playing it cautiously and asserting that it might; and basing our judgement here on the lack of such activity which definitively implies the lack of sophoncy).

(Note: yes, I know some people assert that life begins at conception. However, per axiom 1 above, we've already covered that life is not adequate to confer rights, which requires sophoncy. After all, if we based rights on life, we'd have to confer full sets of rights on animals, plants, and bacteria. It also breaks hard on reality because individual cells are technically alive, which runs hard into the problem that many, many fertilised eggs spontaneously miscarry all the damn time without anyone noticing. Not to mention the number of eggs and spermatozoa that never participate in fertilisation. Or the skin cells we all shed all over the place, for that matter. All cells, all alive. Deal.

Ah, yes, you say, but those things aren't human. Well, I would argue, you can't base rights on humanity either, because there's nothing distinctive about humanity per se [apart from being The Known Sophont Species, which reduces to my axiom, overgeneralised]. It's just a species-centric restatement of discredited race-based or nation-based rights arguments.

Besides, that kind of homocentrism will really piss off our new robot overlords...)

(Note: yes, I also know that many people assert that rights - on whatever basis they consider them; "human-ness", I suppose - are conferred magically and totally at birth. The Cerebrate will go into this one if anyone really wants him to, but the Cerebrate finds it painful enough to try to understand how anyone could assert such a thing that he'll pass for now, thanks.)

So, in this case, before the foetal brain has developed sufficiently to manifest such brain activity, there is no reason to disallow abortion. There's only one sophont involved, and by the principle of self-ownership, she is perfectly free to dispose of any non-sophont (and thus incapable of possessing rights) tissue however she wants.

The tricky case, of course, comes later in the course of development, when we actually do have two sophont beings involved. In this case, whichever way you look at it, you're violating someone's fundamental right. Allow the abortion at this stage, and you're violating the (now-presumed-sophont) child's right to self-ownership by killing it. Disallow it, and you're violating the mother's right to self-ownership by part-enslaving her to look after the child.

Reality's a bitch, that way.

Fortunately, we have a mechanism to trade off rights against each other, when they irrevocably clash; that principle being, in this case, that we should take the course producing the smallest net infringement. In this case, I'd like to introduce an analogous situation involving the use of property:

If someone is on my property, say, a yacht, I have the right to demand they vacate it whenever I wish it; because it is, after all, my property.

However, if I am in the middle of the Atlantic at the time, I don't have the right to insist that they vacate it right there and then, because that would kill them. They have, in essence, the obligation to depart as soon as possible, but the right not to be killed instantly by my enforcement of my property rights. (If they had boarded me piratically with the intention to violate my property rights, that would be another matter, but if I invited them aboard or if someone dumped them there without their intent, it is so.)

Now let's consider the applicability of the analogy. On one hand, we have the child, who absolutely depends on  the mother's body in order to live. Removing it from that location will kill it. On the other hand, we have the mother, whose property rights to her body are equally absolutely being violated by the child.

Either way, someone's rights are going to be violated. However, there is no intention to do so on the part of the child, who is - after all - not responsible for its existence. (Any more than someone who was knocked unconscious, tied up, and dumped in the cabin of my yacht is responsible for their presence.) In this case, I would assert that the (presumed-sophont) child may have the obligation to depart forthwith, it is under no obligation to die in order to avoid trespass, any more than the unwanted guest is (after all, in most of these cases, the child is in the position of an invited, then disinvited guest). And thus, at least until someone invents the uterine replicator, the ethical position is that we must grant the child an easement, in effect, to make use of the mother's body until it is capable of departing safely. While this violates her property rights, it is overall the smallest net violation.

(There are, of course, two "special" cases here worthy of additional comment:

1. Rape, and children resulting therefrom. Yes, the notion of the victim having to carry the child of the rapist is appalling; well, the whole crime is, per se, appalling. But we do need to bear in mind that, should such a pregnancy not be caught in time, that the alternative is to kill someone who has committed no crime against anyone.

Sometimes the universe doesn't give you a pleasant solution.

2. Medical reasons, wherein - of the child and the mother - for one to live, the other must die, and vice versa. Well, it's not like this one has never come up before, either. I would argue for this to be permitted, on the grounds that it is better for one to live than both to die.

Of course, then we come to the interesting question of who gets priority. Well, notwithstanding the mother's ability - as a person equipped with free will - to voluntarily relinquish her life, from a purely rights-based analysis the scales are exactly balanced, life for life. I would be inclined to favour the mother myself, based on the "a life more entangled" argument, but you could rationally argue specific cases either way.)

Right. Unit tests run, service pack installed, firewall reconfigured, services trimmed, Cisco reprogrammed, and serial port registry entries trimmed and cut and poked and blasted until I'm thoroughly sick of all things serial. Also, no doubt, many people reading this intensely annoyed. Now I need to go poke another client.

First skull-splitting not-quite-pseudo-migraine of the New Year. Ouch.

(Worse ouchness: cost of one-way ticket ORD->MME == $2210.90. Thank a quite remarkable number of deities and one even more remarkable lady that I can get away without needing one, now. Many, many thanks.)