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From: saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: laura's axioms
Message-ID: <7455@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Apr-84 13:22:58 EST
Article-I.D.: watmath.7455
Posted: Tue Apr  3 13:22:58 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Apr-84 03:35:15 EST
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 81


Laura, I just cannot agree with your choice of axioms.  First I do not
think that the axioms are obvious, secondly, I do not think that your
axiomatic system is complete enough to model the problem you are trying to
model, and thirdly I am not convinced that abortion is something that
can be modeled out as you are trying to do, in order to reach a conclusion.
Abortion is a very specific problem and unless you include all the elements
you are dealing with, you are not approching it, but simply a model of it.

Notably missing in your deduction system were the goodness and badness of
the following elements:
(on the pro-life side) impacts of abortion on the respect for life in
society, (on the pro-choice side) relationship between abortion and
women's place in society, the right to control our bodies, the risks
involved in all the alternatives, from death at the hands of quacks to
impacts of adoption to the health impacts of birth-control methods and
pregnancy, abortion and economics, abortion and overpopulation, etc...

I personnaly agree with your choice of "life is good" as an axiom, but 
I do not agree with the implied corollary that "taking away life is bad".
I think that both of these cannot be taken as absolutes and need to be
better redefined.  Missing also, but which to me seems as important is:
"suffering is bad".

I do not think that you can really defend your choice of "human life
is better than animal life or vegetable life" except by natural chauvinism
i.e the fact that you are a human.  If you take a holistic view of life
(again) you might reach the conclusion that right now vegetable life seems
to be more precious than human life, simply because humnan life seems to be
endangering all kinds of life on this planet (including itself) and that one
of the things that will be needed to save human life is to emphasise vegetable
life more than we do (For every puzzled person:  I am thinking of the fact
that our wildlife (and forests) which provide us with the living material we
need if we want to survive is greatly endangered by our presence)

If you look at animal species, you will see that if there is one rule they
live by, it is not "life is good", but "survival of the species is good".
This implies that what would be considered atrocities such as mass suicide
or euthanasia, are accepted facts in many animal societies because they are
for the good of the species.  
I am not pointing out that "life is good" is not a good axiom, but that it
is not the obvious one to choose as a basic axioms and that other animal
societies seem to have chosen different ones which often work out better as
a whole than ours does.

Your last rule:  "there is an objective reality" is something you might be
hard pressed to prove (I know axioms are not meant to be proved).  Even if
it is an acceptable axiom you seem not to be using it, but rather a corollary
of it:  "there is an objective good", which I think is very debatable, and as
far as I know has been debated forever without anybody ever coming to an answer.

Finally, I do not agree that the deductive system you use to model reality is
adequate.  You seem to use a very binary one which leaves no room in between
black and white for shades of grey (talk about cliches).  This is all very
good for logic or philosophy, but has only a very vague relationship with
reality.

I just don't think you have proven anything in your deduction exercice exept
show us that you can prove anything if you really want to and if you are
really adept at manipulating symbols.  You will fool quite a few people this
way unfortunately, but hopefully most of us won't be fooled.  

The unfortunate thing about the fact that logic and deduction are used as
weapons in real life is that people who do not know much about them will
tend to view them to be only what they experience them as: weapons used
against them.  This will turn off quite a few people from philosophy and
mathematics because of the fact that they have been inadequatly handled.
One of the reasons the feminist movement is so much agaisnt mathematics and
logic is that as women they have experienced them as weapons that men use
against women and often are lead to believe that it is in the nature of
mathematics to be used as a weapon, so they have rejected it as another tool
of "male opression".
I find it to be really a shame because I like mathematics a lot and I which
I could share my love of mathematics with other people, but because of all
the nastiness involved in it, many people are repulsed.  I am very glad that
I have a formal training in logic and mathematics because I can see through
people's abuse of these wonderful tools and I will try to point out such
abuses whenever I see them.  This was one such case.

				Sophie Quigley
			...!{decvax,allegra}!watmath!saquigley