I have taken some time to reply on this thread, for two reasons. In the first place, I have been occupied with other things. Having written these two responses, however, I have let them cool on the window sill for a couple of weeks, to allow me the chance to detune my personal comments about Dean. Many remain, and I have no excuse of haste. So, on with the show....

It is with a vague feeling of dread that I respond to Dean Stretton's posts on the topic "Killing infants". I am despondent because it is such a chore. There are times when Dean offers a coherent posting; there are others when steeling oneself to follow his argument is like sitting down to Speech Night in Hades. This is one such occasion. I will look on it as a penance. Mea culpa.

The posts in question were in large part a reaction to my describing abortion as "a cold-blooded conspiracy to kill". I later defined the terms.

"Cold-blooded" means pitiless, merciless, not done in the heat of the moment. "Conspiracy" is a plan, hatched in secret between two or more people, to carry out an illegal or harmful act.

I will not inflict the full text of Dean's posts on any long-suffering reader who has followed this discussion. I'm sure you will remember Spot the dog. Let's look at Spot. The honest reader will ask, as Scott Gilbert did, what Spot is doing in here in the first place. It's a good question, and Dean takes two further posts and a good deal of his usual "I am the master of logic" blather to avoid answering it.

For example, Scott Gilbert asked, re me (the poster) and (Spot's) family,
>> At what point does the poster propose that the family described were
> > being cold blooded?
>
> Neither of us explicitly proposed that the family were being cold-blooded.
> However, Peter _implicitly_ proposed this, since it was a logical consequence of
> his position.

Which position is that? My definition of "cold-blooded". What implication? Why, the "implication" that any act "not done in the heat of the moment" is "cold-blooded", in the sense of the above definition.

Is there a competent English speaker out there who believes that defining "cold-blooded" as "merciless, pitiless, not done in the heat of the moment" carries the implication that "cold-blooded" is *identical* in meaning to "not done in the heat of the moment"?

Yep. Dean.

> Now, getting back to the discussion at hand, Peter was in effect saying that
> "not done in the heat of the moment" means the same as "cold-blooded". In other
> words, he is saying that:
>
> An action is done in a cold-blooded fashion if and only if it is not done
> in the heat of the moment.

There is reams of this stuff, all equally enthralling, including a "formal proof" using Symbolic Logic! It is mountain-goat country, and there is the constant sensation of being lost in a Hall of Mirrors. Scott Gilbert came close to the problem, though, in this extract, in which Scott is quoting Dean. Scott follows on from Dean's comment which I quoted immediately above.

> Ah, I see now where I have misunderstood you. Peter wrote:
>
> > [...] "Cold-blooded" means pitiless, merciless, not done in
> > the heat of the moment.
> >
>
> And you concluded that you could replace commas with "and/or"
> whereas I concluded that I could replace commas with "and". I'm not
> sure about the kind logic that you enjoy, but in programming, the logical
> operator "and" is significantly different from the logical operator "or".
> > In the analogy you used, you concluded that since it filled -one- of
> the conditions, then Peter's definition would describe their action as
> cold blooded (since with "or" logical operators, you need only fulfil -one-
> of the conditions.)
> > I looked at Peter's definition in a fundamentally different way.
> The
> way I understood Peter's definition, all of the conditions needed to be
> fulfilled (Pitiless, Merciless and not done in the heat of the moment) in
> order to be "Cold Blooded" as defined by Peter.
> > If you replace the commas in Peter's statement with "and"s, your
> refutation of Peter's statement unravels. Which is the correct
> interpretation
> (and whether your refutation works) is a matter for Peter to decide.

It is not, in fact, for me to decide. I don't have to. Common or garden English language usage does the deciding for me. Scott had only to understand such usage to draw his (correct) conclusion.

However, Dean's argument is actually more confused than in this substitution of OR for AND; he in fact mixes AND and OR freely. Let me try to put it in a nutshell.

I say that "cold-blooded", in the context of "abortion is a cold-blooded conspiracy to kill", means "merciless, pitiless, not done in the heat of the moment." Dean offers us Spot, off for a spot of canine euthanasia at the vet. (They first try the vet Macbeth, but she won't be in it.)

Spot is put down out of mercy and pity. Therefore, this act is neither merciless not pitiless. Therefore, it *is not* cold-blooded by my definition. One or more of the terms *is not* met (merciless and pitiless in this case) so the definition does not apply. I.e., in deciding that the definition does not apply, the terms are AND'ed.

On the other hand, this action is clearly "not done in the heat of the moment". Therefore, it *is* cold-blooded by my definition, because one or more of the terms *is* met ("not done in the heat of the moment" in this case) so the definition does apply. I.e., in deciding that the definition does apply, the terms are OR'ed.

Therefore, my definition is absurd, because it contradicts itself. Q.E.D. Dean has found a new logical operator - and/or: it means AND when you want it to mean AND, and it means OR when you want it to mean OR.

There must be a PhD in this, even though I suspect that Lewis Carroll explored it first.

The only useful question here is: does Dean believe this stuff, or does he think that his audience is too stupid to realise that he has a shopfront in the shambles of logic?

Enough of the witch of and/or. All of this terrific logic has concerned the one term "cold-blooded". There are other words to talk about.

Take "conspiracy". Dean does not acknowledge that a "harmful act" can be the purpose of a conspiracy. My Collins gives "secret plan to carry out an illegal or harmful act, esp. with political motivation," and the on-line WordNet 1.6 Database http://c.gp.cs.cmu.edu:5103/prog/webster gives "a group of conspirators banded together for some harmful or illegal purpose".

We are not done with quibbles over "conspiracy" though. Me first, then Dean.

> > This agreement is
> > protected by medical confidentiality, i.e., it is negotiated in secret.
> >
> My, what a dainty clutch at straws! The fallacy here lies in the
> assumption that the _option_ of secrecy is always taken advantage of.
> Now, certainly the negotiation of an abortion _can_ be secret, if the
> mother wishes to keep it so. But this is not always the case. Consider
> the case of a woman who accidentally becomes pregnant and, being unsure
> what to do, seeks the advice of doctor, friends and family (all
> open-minded, non-Catholic) as to whether she should obtain an abortion.
> She ensures that her final decision is known to all these people.

Whenever Dean accuses someone else of a fallacy, you may suspect there's a turkey shoot in the offing. And so there is.

The fallacy here is that the secrecy (medical confidentiality) is optional, the default being complete openness by all parties, including, of course, the referring doctor, the "counsellors", the abortionist, the anaesthetist and all assisting at the abortion. I can't even be bothered ridiculing this. But there is an interesting sidelight.

Dr. David Grundemann, Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of Australia, our friendly local late-term abortionist, gave a paper in August 1994 at Monash on the topic "Abortion after 20 weeks in clinical practice: practical, ethical(sic) and legal issues". He offers the figure of 80,000 - 110,000 abortions performed in Australia annually. I have seen other estimates as high as 140,000. Why such variability in the figures? In a word - secrecy.

In a large number of abortions (say 15,000 to 60,000 odd annually) normal medical confidentiality is not enough. Presumably, the minimum figure is obtained from publicly available statistics, primarily Medicare claims for "therapeutic" abortions. Even though strict privacy regulations govern all of these transactions, such records are too public for a large number of women. They demand an extra measure of secrecy, and so their abortions are disguised as other medical procedures, or conducted outside the Medicare process altogether. Very, very few women are open about their abortions, even among friends and colleagues who ostensibly approve of the process.

All the above is my irrational and unreasonable defence of my definition of abortion: a cold-blooded conspiracy to kill. I will pause here to give readers the opportunity to skip over the next episode, wherein we pass over Spot for Bertrand Russell, the abuse of language, and the culture of death in Australian philosophical ethics. (See `Bad language & Bertrand Russell')

Peter B. West