I guess it is a pretty good size.

When the driver is really powerful, a bunch of boundaries can be crossed. There’s no denying that morality and law are often tossed aside during the chase for fame, fortune, or power. I certainly don’t claim to be an exception to this. On many occasions I’ve done someone wrong while trying to get something I deemed more valuable than their feelings, thoughts, or property. As someone who’s openly harbored political ambitions, I frequently consider the lengths to which I’d go to capture the influence I crave (Oh, its far. Further than you’d think). But recently I have to admit; more of often than not reaching seems, well, greedy.

There is such a thing as luck you know. Now, the very wise among you will remind me that Obi-Wan disagrees with me on this. To you I would say: “Not so fast nerd. Let me finish.”

I don’t think luck is a personal trait; something you either “have” or “don’t have”. I don’t think certain people are “lucky” while others are “unlucky”. You can’t carry it with you, or make up for it. But each of us, as individuals, sure can get smacked in the face by luck – good or bad. It isn’t a thing you can possess, but it’s something you’d better account for.

Like everyone, I get pissed about my luck sometimes. Some mornings I just see negative. Asshole cuts me off. No good parking. Excruciatingly long work day. Jerk doesn’t hold the elevator. Some days that shit piles on until I start to think I’m not happy with where I’m at. I suspect this happens to everyone. I’m not sure how other people handle it, but I tend to retreat to what I consider to be a pretty objective truth:

• I am one of the luckiest human beings to ever live.

I don’t think I’m “luckier” than you are. But when I get really pissed about my life, I tend to compare my circumstances to those of a feudal serf’s. I can’t help it. When I get really mad or start to stress about my lame first-world problems, my brain almost automatically starts counting the ways my 21st century life is superior to a feudal serf’s.

Think about that kind of existence for a minute. Then consider how many centuries of progress it took to even get to feudalism. Think about how many people lived that life and how many lived lives so much worse. The list of ways my (and your) life is better is long and fucking comprehensive.

If you’re rich enough to own a computer and have enough free time to read my stupid blog, you’re one lucky human being. Next time you’re feeling shitupon, think about cavemen and feudal serfs. With practice, instead of wanting to murder that asshole that just cut you off, perhaps you’ll think about how awesome it is to have a wheeled box with customizable music, climate-control, upholstered furniture, and the ability to move you from place to place at superhuman speeds.

I think I have my father to thank for this. He’s without a doubt one of the most positive individuals on earth. He’s always looking on the bright side and counting his blessings, and I guess it rubbed off. I’ll never be able to properly thank him for that. My similarly boundless optimism has spared me from quite a bit.

But going through life as a close approximation of Pollyanna isn’t all gumdrops and rainbows. Take for example blunted ambition. I can’t help it, but the older I get the less dissatisfied I become. When I engage in the mental exercise described above, I almost always come out feeling better, richer, and luckier. I continue to engage in it because I consider those feelings to be very, very close to objective truth.

And while we’re striving for objective truth, the real truth of the matter is this: the “feudal serf” exercise is the easy way out. The feudal serfs are effective as comparisons but you don’t have to feel too badly since they’re all dead, right? But with enough practice, your mind will start to wander into the modern era. You’ll think about the quarter of the world without electricity, or you’ll wonder how rich you are compared, not to the rest of the richest population in human history, but to the global population. Once you stop making yourself feel better by looking down upon an abstraction from a bygone era and start thinking about your true place amongst the current human population, your ambition is in real trouble. Well, mine is at least.

If I’m so rich and live a life of historic luxury (and I do), why am I staying late at the office again? Why am I stressing out over raising my income from the top .01% of all humans into the top .001%?

The answer is: I’m not. I try as hard as I can to not let the limited time I have on this planet slip by while I wish things were different. I accomplish this by reminding myself that if I give thorough, careful, and objective (as close as I can get anyway) thought to my situation, asking for and wanting more makes me an asshole.  Doesn’t it?

College roommate gets laid off and loses his house? He’s a good person who hit hard times, totally willing to help. National housing crisis? Lazy assholes bought more house than they could afford. Fuck ‘em.

I’ve never been able to fully understand this line of thinking, but I suspect feelings of superiority have something to do with it. When you and yours are the righteous, and those outside the line you arbitrarily draw are not, this leads to something. That something is commonly known as the GOP, and this week they have illustrated my theory beautifully, albeit unintentionally.

They’ve done so in two ways:

First, Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio reversed his longstanding position on gay marriage to one of acceptance. His son came out two years ago and Senator Portman openly admits that this event spurred his policy shift. As a staunch supporter of equality under the law for all citizens, I must first say that I’m thrilled Senator Portman has come around. Man, is this even the same Senator?

Well, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet. Nine years ago, he was willing to impose his view on everyone by voting for a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage, but now?  He says “change should come about through the democratic process in the states”.  When it was other people’s gay children, he had the reaction my theory would suggest: Fuck ‘em all, my righteous ass knows what’s best for you.  But even now, when the pain of his own son has caused him to understand how harmful his previous policy positions can be, he can’t bring himself to impose. Isn’t it interesting that even as he empathizes with his son, he seems unable to do so for those gay sons and daughters in states with no hope of equality outside of federal action? Even when given a blatant example, this conservative finds it difficult to expand his empathy.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out the clear abdication of duty this shift illuminates. I’m not the first liberal to point out that Senator Portman has admitted that he was unable or unwilling to consider the impact of his policies on others until they directly impacted his family, and I’m sure as hell not the first to point it out in writing. William Saletan of Slate says that liberals who have reacted that way are the ones with the empathy problem, since we can’t seem to understand that Senator Portman’s experience is more or less the way these issues get resolved. But in his rush to defend the Senator, Mr. Saletan completely abandons the expectations and duties of democratically elected officials.

I’m willing to accept that some people just aren’t good at imagining how others feel and are only able to do so when someone they give a shit about is in pain. But shouldn’t we expect a tad more from our elected officials? Senator Portman is one of two Senators from a state with over 11.5 million people. What is his job if not to consider policy and how it impacts others?

If Joe Blow is willing to admit that it takes close, personal pain for him to think about how his worldview might impact other people, fine. I pity him, but fine. If a United States Senator admits this, it is time to find another person to consider policy issues that impact an entire fucking state.

Then, as if on cue, the RNC comes out with a report that reinforces my little theory. In 2012, the Republican Presidential candidates fought hard to be the toughest on immigration. The nominated candidate, Mitt Romney, openly advocated for self-deportation, the nice little policy that says “golly, we hope you folks will decide to leave on your own”. Of course, as my pet theory would dictate, the Republican party was largely unable to think in detail about how such a  policy would sound to those that it would impact, since they 1. don’t know any undocumented immigrants, and 2. would therefore avoid direct impact. But then it did impact them, and pretty fucking directly. A second straight Presidential loss and wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly the GOP can’t move forward without an immigration policy that treats other people like, well, people.

Twice within a few days we’ve seen pretty compelling evidence that the GOP has a problem. They don’t think about the broad population when considering policy, can’t empathize effectively with distant individuals or groups, and will only give adequate thought to the impact of Republican policy on others when it directly harms individual Republicans or the party. In a republic, this is highly problematic.

If only Republican children could come out as poor or uninsured.

I strongly disagree that “politics” is getting in the way of solutions to prevent crimes like those perpetrated at Sandy Hook or is incapable of providing them. In fact, I think politics is doing precisely its job by preventing the solutions the author offers. To explain why, I begin with a question:

What is a nation? How do you define it? Is it the landmass whose contours are only visible on the maps we create? It is a population? Is it a philosophy? While geography undoubtedly plays a big role, the connection I feel to my country is not to the land itself, but to the underlying philosophy of how people should deal with one another. How we should govern ourselves. If the purple mountains’ majesty and amber waves of grain decided that despotic fascism was the way to go, I’d stop being a fan.

I mention this because I have seen a confusing trend among American conservatives. On one hand they enthusiastically identify as patriots, professing an undying love of country, while on the other they denigrate the government of that nation as an inefficient, intrusive, bumbling destroyer of morality. Simply put, both of these things cannot be true. To love America without loving her defining characteristic is an odd thing, and I do not think it hyperbole to anoint our system of politics as America’s defining characteristic.

What is the United States if not a mutual agreement to operate under certain rules, certain philosophies? The United States rests upon the idea that if the population is given an opportunity to choose their leaders from among themselves, and those leaders are forbidden from legislation favoring race, gender, or creed, policy will trend along favorable lines; along lines that benefit the whole. Representative democracy demands that politics is the vehicle by which everything is accomplished. War? Politics. Peace? Politics. Civil rights? Politics. Budgets? Politics. Politics is the way we get stuff done in this country, precisely because we have chosen a system of government that demands it. Our politics and our government are permanently intertwined. We designed it that way. Our politics has solved large problems in the past, and I believe it will continue to do so.  But it will do so with proper limitations.

Do you believe that the political system the United States has developed is philosophically sound or not? It is not illegitimate to say no, of course. But to blame our politics for policy or societal trends you disagree with is to blame gasoline for your automobile accident. Politics does not get in the way. Politics IS the way.

This is not to say that I disagree with the author on all his complaints about what politics has wrought. I agree that the political process played a role in significant cuts to mental healthcare and has proven (time and again) a roadblock to gun control.  But it is silly to primarily blame politics for these realities. If you want something to blame, blame the people who feel (and elect representatives who feel) that tax rates or other budgetary concerns are more important than world-class mental healthcare. Blame people who think (and elect representatives who think) that more firearms will reduce the number of shootings. They are the guilty. Politics, and the power it grants their representatives, is merely the mechanism by which their idiocy becomes law or prevents sensible law. The politics are not too hard, the people are too stubborn.

If politics cannot be directly blamed for healthcare funding and gun control legislation it certainly cannot be said that it:

• “trivializes, mocks and denigrates the importance of strong fathers in a healthy family

While I suspect that the author chose not to cite a single instance of this and instead refer to the market-driven popularity of a cartoon character because no legitimate examples exist, it cannot be denied that studies have shown that children in single parent households are at risk for more negative outcomes. What should be noted is the fact that these studies do not show a significant difference between single-father and single-mother households, rendering the importance of a “strong father figure” decidedly in question when it comes to child-rearing. What causes a child to be successful is an extremely complex question that has not yet been answered. Many children from single-parent homes are quite successful, some are not. Why? Is it the absence of a parent or the skill of the remaining one? We don’t fully know. Furthermore, the government has no place to encourage relationship stability or length because many relationships deserve neither, and because of what follows.

• “It is politics that makes marriage and divorce too easy and homosexual marriage legal. We don’t need a parcel of studies to tell us that it is a mother and a father — together — that provide the healthiest environment for child-rearing.”

Since the government has no religion, the religious implications of marriage are rightfully of no concern to it. The matrimonial concerns of government are simply the enforcement and backing of the marriage contract. Marriage is after all, from the government’s view, a contract between two people concerning property rights, tax status and (among other things, of course) hospital visitation rights. It is for this reason that the government cannot, and should not, interfere with two legal adults who choose to enter into this agreement or end it.

Religions may have something to say about what marriage means, how long people should stay married, or who can get married and that is their right. It is not their right to enforce those views, just as it is not the government’s place to take them into account. The author blames “politics” for the individual choices of its constituents and indeed, comes dangerously close to authoritarian reasoning. Politics or the government cannot be at fault for divorce rates and drive-through chapels, because it is not their place to determine these things. It merely backs the contract from when it is agreed upon until it is terminated.

Additionally, the author does in fact need a parcel of studies to tell you about healthy child rearing, because those exact studies directly contradict his conclusion. The healthiest environment for child rearing is complex, and more importantly a luxury not provided to all. We don’t have all the answers. We are starting to understand what is not harmful however, and two loving parents (gender aside) is never a bad thing. Even if homosexual couples were to have a partially detrimental impact on child development (and no modern, legitimate studies suggest this) the author would apparently deny a child in need of a family a good environment, because an optimal one was not available. Unacceptable.

• “It is politics that makes violent video games a nom de guerre for “freedom of expression” in too many households in America. While the Bill of Rights may prohibit making violent video games illegal, they’d cease to exist if we’d quit buying them.”

I’ll refute this simply with: One could say the same thing about guns, and both observations help not at all.

• “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist parent to figure out, nor should it take The American Psychological Association to tell them, that playing violent video games correlates with less caring children.” 

I will, in fact, let the APA handle this one: “Violent video games are like peanut butter. They are harmless for the vast majority of kids but are harmful to a small minority with pre-existing personality or mental health problems.” Gosh, again, kinda like guns. Except this time, the observation is helpful and points directly to mental health awareness and coverage. Once again we run into the complexities of child development. Media scapegoating for erratic or violent behavior has been around forever. The results are largely inconclusive. I should also point out that yours truly is one of the biggest and most avid video game players you’re ever likely to meet, having spent his childhood (and now his adulthood) playing them frequently. I have reached my 30s without ever striking another human being. I understand the plural of anecdote is not data, but take it as you will.

• “It is politics that takes God and religion from our schools, our communities, and our military. Stripping God and religion from public view loosens the anchor that held us moored to common ideals of right and wrong. Check the facts. Since the Supreme Court forbade the following simple and nondenominational prayer from being prayed in schools in 1962, our nation’s moral decay has accelerated substantially.”

I will ignore the implicit dismissal of atheist and agnostic parents’ rights to not have religion forced upon their children and simply point out that the author implores us to “check the facts” but does not supply any. So how about these facts: In 1962 African Americans were actively and lawfully denied equality under the law in huge swaths of the United States, and were still three years from seeing legislation that would give them their rights. Just a year later, the Birmingham Campaign resulted in these famous photos:

and in that same year, a church in Birmingham was bombed and 4 little girls died. The first conviction took 14 years to materialize.

In 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union brought the entire world to the brink of nuclear annihilation via their game of chicken during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, women made 59 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man.

Since mandatory prayer was barred from public schools and marked the “acceleration of our moral decay”, the government no longer openly denies equal rights under the law because of the color of someone’s skin (just now because of who they love), the threat of global nuclear war has been all but extinguished, and the gender-based wage gap (although it is still unacceptable) has been almost halved.

On top of the obviousness of the moral shortcomings that plagued US prior to the Civil Rights Act, I’d like to point out that the violent crime rate in the United States has been falling dramatically since the early 1990s, coincidentally I might add, right about the time visually complex and violent video games were hitting the markets. Teen pregnancy is also at a historic low. To suggest that the US has been in moral decay since the early 1960s is to ignore the history of the United States, and be highly selective when choosing your metrics. Moral decay I do not see.

To an extent, the author is correct. Politics will prevent the bulk of his suggestions. But it will do so precisely because our politics demand our solutions be valid, researched, and favor no race, gender, or creed. If within those constraints our politics cannot find solutions, it is not politics’ fault. It is ours. Each of us.

“The Animal Spirits must be lessen’d, or rendred more Calm and Manageable; at least they must not be unnaturally and violently mov’d by such a Diet, or such Passions, Designs and Divertisements as are likely to put ‘em in a ferment. Contemplation requires a Governable body, a sedate and steady Mind, and the Body and the Mind do so reciprocally influence each other, that we can scarce keep the one in tune if the other be out of it. We can neither Observe the Errors of our Intellect, nor the Irregularity of our Morals whilst we are darkned by Fumes, agitated with unruly Passions, or carried away with eager Desires after . . . things and vanities.” (161, 2002 Broadview edition (Springborg))

I will bear Mary’s advice in mind as I try to catch up on prelim reading over the next several weeks. Contemplation requires a governable body, everyone.

Swedenberg’s footnote on George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, gives us fun stuff like this description of him written by Samuel Butler (of “Hudibras” fame):

(I’m bolding my favorite parts and artificially breaking it up into paragraphs to make it easier to read):

“The Duke of Bucks is one that has studied the whole body of vice. His parts are disproportionate to the whole, and, like a monster, he has more of some, and less of others, than he should have. He has pulled down all that nature raised in him, and built himself up again after a model of his own. He has dammed up all those lights that nature made into the noblest prospects of the world, and opened other little blind loop-holes backward, by turning day into night, and night into day.

“His appetite to his pleasures is diseased and crazy, like the pica in a woman, that longs to eat that which was never made for food, or a girl in the green sickness, that eats chalk and mortar. Perpetual surfeits of pleasure have filled his mind with bad and vicious humours (as well as his body with a nursery of diseases), which makes him affect new and extravagant ways, as being sick and tired with the old.

“Continual wine, women, and music, put false values upon things, which, by custom, become habitual, and debauch his understanding so, that he retains no right notion nor sense of things. And as the same dose of the same physic has no operation on those that are much used to it, so his pleasures require a larger proportion of excess and variety, to render him sensible of them. . . . He does not dwell in his house, but haunts it like an evil spirit, that walks all night, to disturb the family, and never appears by day. He lives perpetually benighted, runs out of his life, and loses his time as men do their ways in the dark: and as blind men are led by their dogs, so is he governed by some mean servant or other, that relates to his pleasures.

“He is as inconstant as the moon which he lives under; and although he does nothing but advise with his pillow all day, he is as great a stranger to himself as he is to the rest of the world. His mind entertains all things very freely that come and go, but, like guests and strangers, they are not welcome if they stay long. This lays him open to all cheats, quacks, and impostors, who apply to every particular humour while it lasts, and afterwards vanish. Thus, with St. Paul, though in a different sense, he dies daily, and only lives in the night. He deforms nature, while he intends to adorn her, like Indians that hang jewels in their lips and noses. His ears are perpetually drilled with a fiddlestick. He endures pleasures with less patience than other men do their pains.” (258-59 n. 541)

I love how his immoral pleasure-seeking is figured here in terms of a monstrously grotesque and diseased body (also notice that nice little ethnocentrism at the end there that casually racializes him in a weird way). Fantastic.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that his father, George Villiers the 1st Duke of Buckingham, had a much more luxurious mustache (click to enlarge):

Truly, it is a thing of beauty.

And all KINDS of juicy stuff about Titus Oates who, you might remember, kind of started (with Israel Tonge, great name) the Popish Plot chaos of 1678 when he testified to a widespread conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, put his Catholic brother James II in his place, massacre the Protestants, and burn London. Swedenberg describes him as “violently choleric and overflowed with self-importance” (268 n. 647) and helpfully notes that “Titus’s face was said to be ‘ ‘rainbow-colored,’ ‘vermillion,’ ‘coffee-colour,’ and purple”” (268 n. 649)(HOT).

Mrs. Oates had this to say about her son Titus, in 1679:

“You know . . . I have had a great many children, and by my profession I have skill in womens [sic] concerns. But I believe never woman went such a time [i.e. was pregnant] with a child as I did with him. I could seldom or never sleep when I went with him, and when I did sleep I always dreamt I was with child of the Devil. But when I came to my travail [birth], I had such hard labour that I believe no woman ever had; it was ten to one but it had kill’d me: I was never so any of my other children. Then when he grew up I thought he would have been a natural [mentally challenged]; for his nose always run, and he slabber’d at the mouth, and his father could not endure him; and when he came home at night the boy would use to be in the chimney corner, and my husband would cry take away this snotty fool, and jumble him about, which made me often weep, because you know he was my child.” (265 n. 632)

At age 18 he went to Cambridge, “where one of his fellow students later remembered that Oates and the plague came to the university in the same year” (ibid.). Soon after he became a curate; there he accused one man of sedition and treason and the man’s son of sodomy (both were enemies of his father). These claims were revealed as perjury, and he left to become a chaplain in the navy before being dismissed for accusations of sodomy on the ship. After more failures to succeed in any priestly or educational capacity, he returned to London and took up again with Tonge. Then he spent the next three years (1678-81) using his general mandate mostly to punish his enemies: “[t]he very breath of him was pestilential, and, if it brought not imprisonment, or death, over such on whom it fell, it surely poisoned reputation” (268 n. 664-671).

Eventually, in 1681, his powers were revoked, and in 1684 the king threw him in the Tower of London, were he remained until 1688 when William released him. He died in 1705.

A chin only a mother could love.

All notes above see:

Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden Vol. II: Poems 1681-1684. Ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Print.

“How to resist force without striking again, or how to strike with reverence, will need some skill to make intelligible. . . . He therefore who may resist, must be allowed to strike. And then let our author [Barclay], or anybody else, join a knock on the head, or a cut on the face, with as much reverence and respect as he thinks fit. He that can reconcile blows and reverence, may, for aught I know, deserve for his pains a civil, respectful cudgelling, wherever he can meet with it.” (part 235)

Yes we can, indeed.

• Pick up wake boarding.
• Complete Cert III and IV in Fitness Personal Training.
• Finish a course in First Aid.
• Work out political philosophy, ethics, metaphyics and epistmology.

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).

The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.

The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.

• One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes. That’s 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the US. (Reality of Aid 2004)
• Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases – that’s over 30,000 per day and one every 3 seconds. (80 Million Lives, 2003 / Bread for the World / UNICEF / World Health Organization)
• Over 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day with nearly half the world’s population (2.8 billion) living on less than $2 a day. (UN HDR, 2003)
• 600 million children live in absolute poverty. (SCF, Beat Poverty 2003).
• The three richest people in the world control more wealth than all 600 million people living in the world’s poorest countries. (Source:ChristianAid)
• Income per person in the poorest countries in Africa has fallen by a quarter in the last 20 years. (Source:ChristianAid)
• 800 million people go to bed hungry every day. (Source:FAO)
• Every year nearly 11million children die before their fifth birthday. (Source:UNICEF)

Here ends the ramble for now.

To have moral status is to be an entity towards which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations. However, this does not necessitate an entitlement to rights, which transcends merely having interests worthy of moral consideration; it is to possess interests that require respect even at significant costs. (Warren 1997)

Many proponents of abortion posit that these interests are only vested in persons, of which a human may only possibly be one. A foetus, being a genetic member of the human species, clearly is of the latter but it fails the separate criteria for personhood, thereby denying it full membership to the moral community. (Singer 1979, Warren 2000) The characteristics often held to be central to personhood is self-awareness and rationality. (Singer 1979, Warren 2000) Lacking these qualities, the foetus is unable to possess a concept of itself as a continuing subject of experience, without which a desire for its continued existence is impossible. Many have argued that one’s right to something is only violated if one’s desire for that thing is frustrated. If the foetus cannot desire life, it does not have a right to it, thereby allowing for its termination. (Singer 1979, Tooley 1972).

However, it has been pointed out that infants (Singer 1979), the severely retarded and acutely senile (Pojman 2000) like a foetus often lack self-awareness and rationality, thereby failing to qualify as persons also. The logical consequence is that the abortion of these non-persons should also be permissible, which in fact is the precise conclusion drawn by the likes of Singer and Tooley, who are at least honest enough to be intellectually consistent. A majority of abortion advocates however do not possess the same integrity, choosing instead to apply the law in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner.

Moreover, given time and opportunity, a foetus has the potential for those intellectual and cognitive capacities so valued by abortion supporters. (Forrester 1996) This is important when examining certain metaphysical considerations regarding identity. If I was once a foetus, I-as-the-foetus and I-presently are one entity at different developmental stages. (Pruss 2002) If I was never a foetus, the foetus ‘X’ and I are two different entities altogether, X ceasing to exist when I came into being. Logically X must have been terminated at that point, but nowhere in its continuous history did it confront an event that could typically be identified as termination. Rather a process of growth is observed, where X’s cells divided, differentiated and developed. While X did cease to be a foetus at birth, that was no more a literal termination as the progression from childhood to adolescence is. X and I are therefore one entity and if killing I-presently is wrong, aborting I-as-the-foetus is similarly wrong.

WORD COUNT: 498

Bibliography

Forrester, Mary Gore, Persons, Animals, and Foetuses, Dordrecht; Boston & London: Kulwer Academic Publishers, 1996

Pojman, Louis P., Life and Death: Grappling with the Moral Dilemmas of Our Time, Belmont: Wadsworth, 2000

Pruss, Alexander R., “I was Once a Foetus: That is Why Abortion is Wrong”, Life and Learning XII, 2002

Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 Tooley, Michael, “Abortion and Infanticide”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1), 1972

Warren, Mary Anne, Moral Status: Obligation to Persons and Other Living Things, Oxford: Claredon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997

Warren, Mary Anne, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion” in ed., White, James E., Contemporary Moral Problems, Belmont: Wadsworth, 2000