So, I was pretty frustrated with this conversation and was trying to think about how to explain what I was saying up there in as simple and straightforward a way as possible. Is the problem that people aren't appreciating the difference between giving someone the legal right to do something and simply failing to legally
prohibit them from doing that thing?
Maybe this will work - suppose that an abortion is about to take place.
- Person A thinks that a foetus is a moral person with rights that need to be taken into consideration. According to person A, those rights are so important that they cannot be superceded by the rights of the mother to bodily autonomy. Accordingly, Person A thinks that the abortion is wrong - i.e., morally impermissible.
- Person B thinks that a foetus is not a moral person and therefore does not have rights until it is born. Therefore, there is no reason that the mother, who has a right to bodily autonomy, shouldn't be able to simply terminate it as she wishes, regardless of when she chooses to do so. Person B thinks the abortion is not wrong - i.e., morally permissible.
- Person C thinks that a foetus is a moral person with rights that need to be taken into consideration. However, Person C thinks that the rights of the mother to bodily autonomy supercede the foetus's rights, and that those rights cannot prevent her from exercising choice about whether to carry a foetus to term. Person C, accordingly, thinks the abortion is morally permissible.
- Person D thinks that a foetus is not a moral person in the early stages of pregnancy, because at that point it has not developed enough to truly be a person yet. However, after a certain number of weeks, it does develop to a point where it attains moral personhood, even though it is not yet born. Once it does, Person D thinks that those rights cannot be superceded by the mother's right to bodily autonomy. Whether Person D thinks that the abortion is morally permissible or not depends on when it takes place.
- Person E is like Person D, but thinks that even after the foetus has developed enough to attain moral personhood, the mother's rights are still more important than the foetus's until it is born. Person E thinks the abortion is morally permissible.
- Person F is agnostic whether the foetus has moral personhood or not, at any particular point. Accordingly, Person F takes no particular view about whether the abortion is morally permissible regardless of when it takes place.
... That is more or less the whole field, although there are other iterations of Persons D and E (i.e., importing medical necessity or other conditions on top of or in place of a term requirement). But if you're like Person A or Person D, you really don't have a place to stand to hold your beliefs about abortion being wrong in the applicable circumstance, while also supporting unfettered access to it.
It's logically consistent to say, "I think what you're doing is morally impermissible, but I think you should have the right to do it", in general. That's a pretty standard argument some people make for unregulated free speech. But if I thought that the wrong thing you were doing was
killing a baby, in a situation where I don't think it's morally justifiable to do so, it's hard to imagine how I could rationally justify a legal right to do it.
To suggest, for example, that it makes sense to say, "I think it's morally wrong for you to kill that baby, but the laws people have proposed to stop you from doing it aren't particularly effective and under the current regime of laws the number of babies being killed is dropping over time, so I think you should have a legal right to kill it," is, on its face, an absurd position. At
most if that person were rational, they'd say "I don't think you should have a legal right to kill that baby, but for practical reasons I don't support the currently proposed laws to stop you from doing it".
As I said earlier I'm willing to hear a lot of arguments on this topic, but they have to have SOME internal logic to them.