Reddit reviews Defending the Undefendable

We found 5 Reddit comments about Defending the Undefendable. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

5 Reddit comments about Defending the Undefendable:

u/anechoicmedia · 14 pointsr/news

I once knew this as "the Walter Block argument", which I used to find convincing, but now regard as a bit obtuse.*

Our legal traditions have long recognized that parents have legal obligations to their children. More generally, we recognize that the present self can bind the future self - we can incur debts, which we then cannot be rid of later by asserting our autonomy. There are in fact many circumstances in which the law compels people to support someone else over their protest.

Excepting situations of rape, the unborn are in their situation because two people engaged in conduct that they knew had the possibility of creating new life. It is not a stowaway that just appeared. If one sees the fetus as a rights-bearing entity, it is not much of a leap to think that it holds a claim on the parent that was consensually entered into.

As an analogy, to the opposing side, someone defending abortion on the grounds of absolute control over her body is like someone refusing to pay a debt on the grounds that she has absolute control over her wallet. They don't disagree that she has control of her wallet by default, but having rights implies the ability to cede a portion of that control in interacting with other rights-bearing entities. Many would regard a willing pregnancy as consenting to a debt, and debts do not go away because someone changes their mind.
The way you stake your position is like a property rights maximalist arguing that they have the absolute right to throw anyone they want out the airlock at any moment, because it's my spaceship, darn it!. It's possible to disagree with that view without framing it as being opposed to the owner's autonomy as such.

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* I was impressed with this argument about a decade ago when I first read Block make it in his book. It's kinda clever in that it tries to render itself valid along every point on the "does a fetus have rights" spectrum, via an a priori logic orthogonal to that whole mess. Why, said Block, people have rights too, but what human has the right to live as a parasite off of another? After all, does a landlord not have the right to evict an unwanted tenant? I thought this a handy dodge, and spent years eagerly showing people how clever libertarian ethics were by having this escape hatch that bypassed the complex question and yielded a categorical answer.

Later on I was able to get my head out of those rigid, "point-in-time" ethical toy models, and realized, wait, we do actually have lots of legal circumstances in which we compel landlords to tolerate tenants, and leases are a thing, and so are bonds, and maybe that answer was just too convenient. Eventually I realized that maybe landlord-tenant law was a poor analogy for the sensitive abortion question, and perhaps I shouldn't be taking my ethical pointers from authors that weren't entirely sure whether it should be a crime to starve or sell your own child.

u/stupid_doesnt_sleep · 2 pointsr/Libertarian

They're not literally undefendable. It's just an expression that I picked up from the book defending the undefendable.

I find them undefendable on the basis that it is very easy to frame the issue as a bunch of trigger happy, paranoid, Christian right wing extremists, and this leaves me to play Devil's Advocate by proclaiming that said trigger happy, paranoid, Christian right wingers should still be allowed to keep their firearms as stated in the 2nd amendment. It's possible, but it's not easy.

As for myself, I'll probably be arrested for some form of hard drug use.

u/unstoppable-cash · 2 pointsr/btc

In my limited searching I could not find Blocks stmt. If I remember right, he talked about it in his book Defending the Undefendable.

u/tgjj123 · 1 pointr/Libertarian

u/thedude37 · 1 pointr/Libertarian

Defending the Undefendable, by Loyola University New Orleans professor Walter Block. Great intro to libertarian thinking.