Alabama Court’s Inhuman Ruling

In a thoroughly inhuman decision, an Alabama Supreme Court ruling has equated children to mere embryos. Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff reports:

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people and someone can be held liable for destroying them, a decision that reproductive rights advocates say could imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) and affect the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on treatments like it each year.

The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could, writing that it had long held that “unborn children are ‘children’” and that that was also true for frozen embryos, affording the fertilized eggs the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

An embryo is obviously not a person. An embryo is a POTENTIAL person, not an ACTUAL person. Persons are actual human entities you can see walking, talking, working, and generally going about the activity of living a life.  The embryo-as-a-person claim is a religious view, not a rational, observable, fact-based view. This law will saddle the IVF industry with unwarranted, potentially crippling liability, preventing countless potential human beings from being brought into existence for people desperate to become parents. It will literally turn innocent people into outlaws, ruin people financially—and ultimately landing innocent people in jail for non-murders, if the principle is developed to its logical end. This law is unConstitutional. It is also a moral abomination. It dehumanizes actual people. If the lives and properties of living human beings can be subordinated and sacrificed to potential human beings, it's the end of freedom and flourishing.

IVF is a crucial human value, and the embryo is crucially important because it is central to that end. But no value can ever be put above the value of an actual, individual, living human being—not the state, not society, not the race, not future generations, not God . . . and not the unborn, including embryos. That is the very definition of evil. This law is based on a thoroughly anti-human premise.

Related Reading:

Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos By Tim Craig and Sabrina Malhi

What to know about the Alabama embryo ruling and its IVF implications By Maham Javaid and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

Alabama ushers in the theocracy by Ruth Marcus

My Facebook Post on the Subject

QUORA: ‘How natural is capitalism to human nature?’

 QUORA: ‘How natural is capitalism to human nature?’

I posted this answer:

Capitalism is 100% consistent with human nature.

Some say Capitalism is not “natural” because it liberates man to alter nature to man’s benefit. The natural world, they claim, is a planet unimpacted by human intelligence, productive work, and ingenuity.

But this is bogus and contradictory—i e, a logical fallacy. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about unaltered nature. Nature “created” man. And like all life forms, man has a nature, an identity, and means of survival. 

Man’s unique means of survival is his reasoning mind, which he can apply to his physical efforts to alter his environment to suit his needs. It is this attribute, which no other known living species possesses, that Naturalists hate and resent.  

The social condition that man needs to successfully apply his means of survival is individual freedom governed by individual rights. The only social system that systematically establishes these conditions is Capitalism. Hence, the Naturalists, driven by hatred of the vastly improved-upon world they see all around, absurdly claim Capitalism is not natural.

Naturalists look around with horror and see roads, buildings, farms, and every other product of human productiveness we take for granted, and see something unnatural. They fantasize about the time when man will return to the state of nature of animals and, like their hunter-gatherer ancestors, live in “harmony” with nature, with the misery, poverty, short, and brutal stone-age existence that that implies.  

The question is: How can an entity that arose in nature, by natural processes, be unnatural? It can’t. How can the social system most consistent with man’s fundamental nature as a being of reason and freedom be unnatural? How can the resulting advanced industrial civilization we see and live in be unnatural?

Of course Capitalism is natural—that is, consistent—with human nature. No other answer to the above question makes a shred of logical sense.

Related Reading:

Why Capitalism is Selfish--and Why That’s Good

Books to Aid in Understanding Rational Selfishness

Capitalism and the Moral High Ground by Craig Biddle

Why Capitalism Needs a Moral Sanction

Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights

The Capitalism Tour

What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand

Introduction to Objectivism

QUORA: ‘I’m black and I wonder when white people will pay us reparation. Why not?’

 QUORA: ‘I’m black and I wonder when white people will pay us reparation. Why not?’ [alternate link]

I posted this answer (pending as of 1/29/24):

The collectivist premise of your question indicates what you are up to. 

When someone collectivizes their argument, they’re usually up to no good.

When someone collectivizes their argument, it ‘s because they have no case.

Let me give you a clue: There is no “us” in any fundamental, real sense. You can only rightfully speak for yourself. Reparatory justice is only valid when you have an actual victim[s] and an actual perpetrator[s] provable by direct evidence of wrongdoing.  In what way are you entitled to reparations? Who harmed you? How? That’s a question for a court of law. 

The idea that you are entitled to be paid off because someone of your dark skin color was harmed in some distant past is textbook racism, the lowest form of collectivism. Racism is the idea that a person’s thoughts, values, character, and moral standing are inherited through one’s body chemistry (genes, bloodline, skin pigmentation, and the like). Your question indicates that you believe that attributes like victimhood and guilt are passed down to future generations of non-victims and innocents through skin pigmentation. The gross injustice is obvious to any morally upright person. The idea that someone else of a lighter skin color owes you because someone of light skin color harmed someone of your darker skin color in some distant past is textbook racism, the lowest form of collectivism. That tribal mindset is not the perspective of an enlightened person. 

To be sure, reparations should have been paid to freed slaves. In fact, the process of reparatory justice was begun in earnest in 1865 by order of General William T. Sherman. Sherman, acting with the sanction of the Republican Lincoln administration, ordered land seized from former slave owners be given to former slaves in 40 acre parcels. Tragically, Lincoln’s assaination lead to Andrew Johnson becoming president. In one of the most shameful presidential acts in American history, Johnson, a Democrat (no surprise there), immediately rescinded the reparations, and kicked the former slaves off of their rightfully awarded land. 

So I am not unsympathetic to the justice of slave reparations. But at some point, time changes things. It’s been generations since slavery ended. Paying “reparations” today is itself an act of injustice.

My advice to the questioner is to stop living in the past, and start looking forward to making your own life the best it could be by your own efforts. I’m sure you are capable without begging for handouts dressed up as reparations. You are not a victim. The people from whom you want to seize money from are not perpetrators. The only person standing in the way of your economic success is you.

Related Reading:

Should Reparations Include White Victims of Anti-Black Racism?

On New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations

SUPPLEMENTAL TO ‘New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations’: The ‘Slavery is Good Economics’ Argument

‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism

The Dem's Jim Crow 2.0

You Can’t be Pro-Rights and Anti-Rights Simultaneously

Alyssa Rosenberg has an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Post—interesting, but not in the way she means it. 

I’m pro-choice, but I’m grateful for what pro-life groups did this week, Rosenberg opines. Why?

In today’s fractious political world, it’s important to extend credit where it’s due. And so, as a pro-choice liberal, I want to thank a group of pro-life organizations that spoke up this week in support of a congressional deal to improve the child tax credit. Antiabortion Americans United for Life hailed the bill, which will primarily help lower-income families and families with a larger number of children, as “a core part of an American pro-life and pro-family future.” Pro-choice Center for American Progress President Patrick Gaspard described the legislation as “an unmissable opportunity to reduce poverty among low-income children and families.”

Why is Rosenberg grateful?

The often-justified liberal criticism of pro-life conservatives has long been that they elevate the lives of unborn babies over the lives of mothers, and that they’re eager to prioritize children in the womb but not in the world. [true] After birth, it becomes more important to refuse “attempts to expand the welfare state” [true] than to feed poor children when school is out during the summer [which means, to feed poor children at taxpayer expense]; more vital to enforce a traditional heterosexual nuclear family where women stay home than to make sure children have access to safe, quality day care [“access” here means access to other people’s wallets to pay for the day care]; more essential to reject federal help than to make sure children have health insurance [again, meaning at taxpayer expense].

The contradictions in the stances of liberals and conservatives becomes obvious here, though the contradictions are flipped. Both the welfare state and abortion bans are rights-violating. The welfare state, which is based on forced redistribution of wealth, violates the individual right to decide how, when, and if to use one’s own money for charitable purposes. Abortion bans violate the individual right of women to control one's own body and doctor’s right to perform abortions if the doctor so chooses.

Now, as far as welfare statism goes, the tax credit is one of the least bad options, because it allows the parent or guardian to keep more of what they earn. True, sometimes the tax “credit” is not a credit at all, but becomes “refund”—i.e. a handout—at taxpayer expense if the parent’s tax liability is less than the allowable credit. But at least the tax credit idea requires the parent to file a tax return, which means to be working.

But the broader point here is a moral one: To be a principled individual rights advocate (individual rights properly understood), one must be against the welfare state and in favor of legalization of abortion. 

Note what is going on here. Both conservatives and liberal are supportive of rights violations in their own spheres of interest. But it is the conservatives who are caving, and moving toward the liberals’ pro-welfare state principles. The liberals, the most consistent violator of individual rights, is winning, thus validating the truth of Ayn Rand’s observation that “In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins [italics in original].” 

Related Reading:

Biden’s Concept of Freedom is the Path to Slavery

A Right to Pursue versus a ‘Right’ to Provision: The Declaration and its Reactionaries

My Challenge To the GOP: A Philosophical Contract With America

The U.S. Constitution is About Individual, Not ‘Human’, Rights

Collectivized Rights—Ayn Rand

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society—Craig Biddle for The Objective Standard