Amos:
"What I AM in favor of is defining the boundaries of moral imperatives, no matter how strongly felt. This is a difficult principle to parse, indeed. A man who believes that all abortion is murder can easily see that he must stop at nothing to prevent this from happening, even if it means burning down clinics. From a moral perspective he is to be forgiven, because he is in the grip of an undeniable moral imperative. If he trades off the life of a practicing doctor in doing so, I suppose the rationale is that he has saved hundreds of unborns, and therefore done the greatest good for future humanity"

Amos, you must have missed it when i said earlier back on in the thread that i do not support or condone murder of abortion-performing doctors (or their clients)n because murder cannot be prevented by adding further murder (and from my own private religious perspective would be contrary to the law of God). But if I feel morally bound to oppose abortion, there are many ways I could do this (as I've also already said) by debating the topic, trying to convince other people it's not a good thing to do etc., etc.,

Surely, in our wide and tolerant pluralist society, this can be accepted? It seems to me that it can, as long as it doesn't look set to change anything.

As for defining limits on moral imperatives, first we must decide what is moral. How do we do that? I presume you have some moral imperatives of your own that prompt you to argue and act and vote in certain ways.

At least we have a working definition of what it means to be 'fully human' from one side of the camp:

"you weren't FULLY human when you were on the borderline of life and death- you arguably would never have noticed had the medics decided you were too far gone"

So, to be "fully human" means to be a fit healthy adult or young adult. ??????????????????????

Now you see what I mean when people abandon God's morality and go the road of Grenouille....the most outlandish justifications can be found for everything and anything.

Dick Greenhaus has put it succintly:

"[t]he alternative, is, of course, to arrive at a legal definition of the stage of fetal development that qualifies as a human being. THis can make the legalities of contraception and early abortion workable, but only t the expense of the beliefs of those to whom question 1 is inarguably true"

But what informs our legal framework? If we create a law that says everyone must kill a helot, does this make the killing of helots moral? The law is the law and not necessarily either moral or even rational. If we do not have a solid morality to guide us in the framing of the laws, we are in deep doo-dah. Many of the pro-abortion arguments and technicalities I've come across are similar to those advanced by the Nazis to explain why they killed off as many handicapped, Jews and gypsys as they could, as well as sub-human political dissidents. For they too had their own leaglese definitions of who was fit to live.

They managed to rationalise to their own satisfaction that they were acting in the best interest of humanity, and they totally lacked the much-maligned Christian religion (indeed many of them were dabbling in the occult, especially popular among the SS)