Instigator / Pro
21
1740
rating
23
debates
100.0%
won
Topic
#4767
On balance, the majority of abortions performed in the US are immoral [for @SkepticalOne]
Status
Finished
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
Winner & statistics
Better arguments
9
0
Better sources
6
6
Better legibility
3
3
Better conduct
3
3
After 3 votes and with 9 points ahead, the winner is...
Savant
Parameters
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Rated
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- One week
- Max argument characters
- 15,000
- Voting period
- Two weeks
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
- Minimal rating
- None
Contender / Con
12
1551
rating
9
debates
66.67%
won
Description
RESOLUTION:
THBT: On balance, the majority of abortions are immoral.
BURDEN OF PROOF:
BoP is shared equally. Pro argues that the majority of abortions are immoral. Con argues that the majority of abortions are not immoral.
DEFINITIONS:
Abortion is “the willful and direct termination of a human pregnancy and of the developing offspring.”
Conception is “the fusion of a sperm and egg to form a zygote.”
Immoral means “morally wrong.”
RULES:
1. All specifications presented in the description are binding to both participants.
2. Only SkepticalOne may accept.
Round 1
Pro
#1
Framework:
Definitions
Harm: To adversely affect
Modus ponens: A logical argument form
Person: An individual with inherent moral value
Prima facie: True under default circumstances
Burdens
This debate should be judged on the basis of natural rights—rights that individuals are due, whether or not anyone else acknowledges them. Furthermore, the importance of a prima facie right is proportional to the loss in utility caused by violating it. A teenager’s right not to be stabbed, for example, is more important than their right to a high school education. We should default to prioritizing more important rights unless there is a very compelling reason to do otherwise.
There are two ways in which someone can behave in an immoral manner:
- Direct harm: This action has a direct adverse effect on some other person.
- Neglecting a moral duty: Someone ought to do something (like follow an agreed-on contract) but fails to do so.
Note that both of these things are immoral prima facie. If abortion involves either of these, then abortion is immoral prima facie. There are extreme circumstances under which these things can be justified, but I will argue that avoiding the burden of pregnancy is not a sufficient justification for abortion.
I will make frequent use of analogies throughout my opening, and I suspect that my opponent will as well. I think that abortion is best discussed by starting with more obvious moral statements (such as “stabbing people is wrong”), and then remaining consistent with these ideals. Note that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. If the necessity of taxes outweighs my right to $50 of gold, then it would also outweigh my right to own $50 of silver, all things being equal, if I had silver instead. Similarly, if my right to $50 of gold outweighs the necessity of taxes, then my right to the silver would as well.
Uncertainty Principle
For the sake of argument, suppose we are uncertain about the moral status of an unborn child. In this case, abortion is akin to drunk driving, where the risk of killing someone is low but not negligible. People have the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car prima facie but not when such actions risk harming an innocent person. Similarly, if there is a non-negligible chance that an unborn child is a person, abortion is morally impermissible.
My Case
Arguments 1-4 will deal with establishing the personhood of the unborn. Arguments 5-6 will show that as a result, abortion is immoral.
1. Persons Should Not be Harmed:
Criteria for Personhood
I hold that any human being who can be harmed is a person. Furthermore, having one’s lifespan reduced is a harm. Someone with CIPA may not physically suffer when they are killed, but they have been harmed nonetheless. Prima facie, we ought to follow the non-aggression principle—if a human being can be harmed, we should avoid harming them without a sufficient justification. Hence, my criteria for personhood follows.
Definition of Harm
I will distinguish here between (1) removal of bodily functions and (2) not adding bodily functions. The first is a harm, while the ladder is not.
For example, (1) removing one of someone’s limbs is harming them. Furthermore, if someone is in danger of having one of their limbs removed, either by a hostile third party or from some other threat, we should do our best to protect them. (If a serial killer threatens to cut off my neighbor’s arm, I should call the police.) However, if someone requests an operation which would add a third arm to their body, (2) refusing to perform this operation is not harming them.
Furthermore, starvation and suffocation fall under (1) as well. Despite the fact that starvation results from a lack of resources, it results in direct adverse effects on the body. If your child is starving, for example, that is a direct harm which you ought to prevent.
Other rights are implied from (1) as well. Someone in a coma who will later awaken has the capacity to develop consciousness, which will then grant them the natural rights to liberty, property, etc. They also have the right for this bodily function not to be impaired (we should not stab someone in a coma, preventing them from ever waking up).
Support for this Definition
Moral statutes only make sense in practice. To say that an action is wrong is to say that the effect of that action is undesirable; hence, the importance and existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable effects. Murder prevents someone from living a human life—a life as it is experienced by the human mind. If removing someone’s ability to live part of a human life is a grave evil, then removing someone’s capacity to live an entire human life must be immoral as well. Rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations; if reducing a human lifespan is an undesirable effect, then we ought to attribute personhood to all humans with lifespans.
Harm from Abortion
I bring this up to distinguish between (1) abortion and (2) contraception. An unborn child will develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed (if their bodily functions are impeded). But sperm will not develop into a person unless combined with an egg (if bodily functions are added). This is more of a preemptive rebuttal to a common objection, but with this out of the way, I will argue for why (1) is wrong.
2. Humans as Persons:
Unborn Children are Human Beings
The overwhelming scientific consensus holds that a human being is formed at conception.
Rights of Humans
Note that a human being has the right not to have their lifespan reduced, regardless of their stage of development (infant, teenager, adult). A toddler and an adult are not exactly the same thing, but they are both persons. It hardly makes a difference to someone whether they are aborted as an embryo or killed painlessly in their sleep minutes after their birth. Both actions are immoral, as they achieve similar effects.
An alternate view holds that moral value should come from intelligence, past experiences, ability to feel pain, level of dependency, or level of development. But a number of obvious counterexamples show this view to be flawed:
- An infant born in a coma with no past conscious experiences is a person, and killing them is wrong.
- Pigs are smarter than newborns, but killing a newborn is more evil than killing a pig. Eating the flesh of babies is significantly more problematic than eating bacon.
- Newborns are dependent on their parents and on society, but killing them is wrong.
- Killing a child is as bad as killing an adult, if not worse. Thus, it is clear that the potential to live a long life is morally significant, while a human’s level of biological development is not.
3. Future Like Ours:
Coma Analogy
Suppose there is someone in a deep coma, who will awaken in nine months. They have lost all their memories and will not recognize anyone. Clearly, killing them is still murder. (We’d save a lot on social security by killing dementia patients in their sleep, but doing so would clearly be evil.) Note that any argument against killing the comatose individual can also be used to show that abortion is wrong. Murder affects a person’s future, and unborn children have a future like ours.
The harm principle holds that actions should generally be considered moral unless they cause some kind of harm to someone else. Therefore, if the action of killing the comatose person is wrong, it must be because it has one or several harmful effects. I can think of several:
- Missed opportunities: Upon awakening, the comatose individual could have lived a long life
- Lack of choice: No choice was given to the individual whose opportunities were lost, because we made the decision for them
- Violation of a social contract: We would not want someone to kill us or steal our opportunities, so it would be wrong to do so to someone else
All of these harms also occur when an unborn child is killed. If these harms make killing the comatose individual wrong, then they certainly make killing an unborn child wrong.
4. Harm of Removing Potential:
Operation Thought Experiment
Suppose there exists an operation that can be performed on an unborn child—one that will hinder their eyesight in the future with no medical benefit. Performing this operation on an unborn child would be immoral, even though it removes potential experiences, rather than ones that the unborn child is currently capable of.
Removing more potential experiences (hearing, taste, etc.) would be worse, not better.
Modus Ponens
- P1: Removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences is wrong.
- P2: Abortion is removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences.
- C1: Therefore, abortion is wrong.
5. Killing vs. Letting Die:
Direct harms vs. Indirect harms
It is often noted that there is a difference between (a) directly killing someone and (b) simply letting someone die. I will argue that both are immoral, but first I will argue that abortion qualifies as the former. To explain the difference between (a) and (b), consider the following scenario:
Sam, a doctor, is driving well above the speed limit. He (a) strikes a child, who falls to the ground and begins bleeding. Despite being able to save the child with his medical knowledge, (b) Sam does not do so. Striking the child was a direct harm, but refusing to save the child (though it was immoral) was not a direct killing.
Some philosophers would argue that pregnancy is analogous to (a), while abortion is analogous to (b), but this is a mistake. Refusal of bodily support can still equate to direct killing in some circumstances. To understand why, consider the following variation:
A woman carries a child into a forest on a camping trip. For whatever reason, (a) she leaves the child there, where it is eaten by wild beasts. Clearly, this is immoral.
I argue that abortion is morally comparable to abandoning the child in the second scenario. Despite the fact that carrying the child into the forest puts the child in a state of physical dependency, it is not a direct harm. Parents bring their children all sorts of places, but harm does not occur until the child is abandoned. Similarly, despite the fact that the unborn child is in a state of physical dependency, removing bodily support is directly killing them.
Modus Ponens
- P1: Making someone dependent on oneself and then removing bodily support is a direct harm.
- P2: Making someone dependent on oneself and then removing bodily support.
- C1: Abortion is a direct harm
The forest analogy establishes P1, and P2 is true for the vast majority of abortions, which arise from consensual sex. P1 follows even if the pregnancy is not the intended consequence of sex—the woman from our earlier analogy might have gotten lost in the forest by accident, yet bringing the child there is still a result of her actions. Hence, abandoning the child would still be a direct killing.
Insufficient Justifications
Direct killing (such as stabbing a child) is wrong prima facie. So the question that matters here is not whether the woman has a moral duty to help the child, but whether a justification exists in the case of abortion for directly killing an innocent person. For the ends to justify the means, the good achieved from an action would have to at least outweigh the bad. But being killed as a child prevents one from experiencing their entire life, while pregnancy burdens someone for only nine months. Hence, the former is a greater harm, and the ends cannot justify the means.
6. Duty to Save:
Moral Obligations Summarized
Even if abortion were simply “letting someone die,” I argue that supporting the fetus that one directly created would still be a moral obligation. This obligation follows from a more broad moral duty, which I will defend below.
Obligation from Responsibility
I argue that parents have specific responsibilities to children, based on (a) their familial relationship and (b) the responsibility to help those whom one has directly put in a dangerous situation. These responsibilities fall into two categories:
(i) Responsibilities to address needs caused by the creation of the child (such as hunger, need for shelter, etc.)
(ii) Responsibilities to address new needs that arise later on (for example, a parent's child becoming beginning to drown in a riptide)
I suspect that (i) is likely a stronger duty than (ii). A parent’s responsibility to feed their child (even if food is extremely limited and very expensive) is likely a stronger obligation than the responsibility to endanger oneself by running into a strong riptide, even if both pose the same risk to the parent. (These may still be moral obligations, but it is likely the case that parents have stronger obligations of the former kind.)
Note that a child’s dependency on the mother’s body during pregnancy falls under the former kind of responsibility (i). As such, we should compare pregnancy to similar moral responsibilities of that kind. It may be the case that parents also have moral responsibilities of the latter kind, but I will not address those here.
Infanticide was common in Ancient Rome. These killings were clearly unjust, so it stands to reason that parents have a moral obligation to prevent their children from dying. In ancient times, this would include carrying a child around, feeding them, housing them, and in many cases, breastfeeding.
Comparison to Pregnancy
- P1: A child’s right to live outweighed their parent’s right not to raise them in ancient times.
- P2: Pregnancy in modern times is less inconvenient than raising a child in ancient times.
- C1: A child’s right to live outweighs their mother’s right to avoid pregnancy in modern times.
The infanticide example establishes P1. Hence, I will argue for P2. It is simply the case that raising a child in ancient times would require physical labor, which can lead to all sorts of health conditions. The loss in utility from raising a child through adolescence is greater than that lost from pregnancy, but it does not follow that infanticide in Ancient Rome was somehow justified. Recall that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. By similar logic, the right to avoid pregnancy is less pressing than the right to avoid years of labor. The child’s right to live outweighs the parent’s right to abandon them, so it certainly outweighs the parent’s right to avoid pregnancy.
Con
#2
First off, I want to thank Savant for an interesting resolution and for instigating this debate. I am also grateful for his accommodations in argument time allotment so that we may spar over this topic. I look forward to challenging exchanges with a formidable opponent!
To start I think we probably need to clarify terms:
Definitions:
human being: (scientific) an individual belonging to species Homo Sapiens.
person: a being deserving of rights and moral consideration.
individual: a single person, animal, or thing of any kind that exists as a distinct entity.
capacity for consciousness - possessing all brain structures know to be necessary for consciousness.
There are at least two camps of thought for the moral permissibility of abortion. One argues, regardless of personhood of the unborn, abortion is morally acceptable because there is no right to use the body of another person without consent. The other questions the applicability of personhood to the unborn at particular rudimentary developmental stages. I find merit in both and will present and defend each. Each stand alone and both must be defeated for my opponent to claim victory.
1. Self-ownership
Essentially, a right to life does not include use of another person's body. Every person has a moral right to control their own body. Every person has a moral right to defend their body. This is the basis of rights. Without self-ownership, all rights fall. After all, you cannot have a right to life if you do not own yourself.
...a great deal turns for women on whether abortion is or is not available.If abortion rights are denied, then a constraint is imposed on women's freedom to act in a way that is of great importance to them, both for its own sake and for the sake of their achievement of equality;and if the constraint is imposed on the ground that the foetus has a right to life from the moment of conception, then it is imposed on a ground that neither reason nor the rest of morality requires women to accept, or even to give any weight at all." - Judith Jarvis Thomson
To better illustrate the self-ownership position, I will draw from Judith Jarvis-Thomson (JJT):
---People seeds
Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. [13]
In this, ‘people-seeds’ flying through the window represent conception and mesh screens represent contraception. While attempting to protect oneself from unwanted consequences, a person still finds they have people sprouting in their home. JJT asks would it be impermissible to rid a home of unwanted consequences from reasonable actions – especially given the precautions taken to avoid this outcome and the burdens they represent?
This scenario is analogous to the occurrence of a pregnancy in spite of contraceptives being employed. The pill has a failure rate of 7% - which means 7 out of every 100 women using only the pill will become pregnant every year. Condoms have an even higher rate of failure at 13% [14]. This is a very real concern - contraceptives are no guarantee against pregnancy. Pregnancy disrupts body, education, employment, and family. Abortion allows a woman to maintain control of her life when countermeasures fail and ensures her an equal place within the moral community.
Guttmacher released a study that show 51% of women seeking abortions used birth control in the month they became pregnant. Relatively small contraceptive failure rates can account for a majority of abortions [15] since those using birth control would presumably not want a pregnancy and be more likely to seek abortion. Add to this the percentage of women getting necessary abortions to preserve their health (8-12%), rape (1%), incest (~.5%) problems affecting the health of the fetus (13-14%) [21] and we have a large majority of abortions for significant morally justifiable reasons regardless of the personhood of the unborn. For those keeping track, that's 73.5%-77.5% of all abortions occurring for undeniable morally justifiable reasons.
---The Violinist
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. [13]
In this scenario, a person’s biology has been co-opted against their will to bring someone else to full health. JJT argues the kidnapped individual has no obligation to the violinist. Yes, the world may be without a world-class violinist, but there is no duty to his life at the expense of another’s biology. There is no right to life that includes the use of another person’s body. For the same reason, abortion does not deny a fetus’ right to life – it deprives it of the non-consensual use of another’s body while ensuring the continued health of that same body.
2. Are the unborn persons?
Up to this point, we've considered arguments entertaining the possible personhood of the unborn, but what if that isn't the case? What is a definition of personhood that doesn't allow things we know aren't persons to be inappropriately labeled as such? I mean, if we endow personhood on everything with human DNA, we're going to have some issues. For instance, human cancer cells, teratomas, biopsies, blood samples, and human corpses(!) would suddenly be deserving of full human rights. This is a bit absurd. If we're going to be serious about it, we would probably need to consider things like capacity for consciousness and a metabolism. This overly simplistic definition might cause problems for involuntary euthanasia folks, but it would weed out many obvious absurdities. This minimum bar for personhood would include all human beings from about 24 weeks in-utero up to death. This would be my provisional criterion for personhood. My opponent suggested harm as his criterion. I'm not quite sure I understand what he means, but I wonder if he meant sentience which would also occur as early the 24th week of development.
[...]the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. [99]
The mental substrate for consciousness (and the capacity for it) does not develop until nearly the third trimester. Using the criterion above, a vast majority of abortions are morally neutral. They would carry no moral weight and would be as morally controversial as getting a haircut. In fact, morally questionable abortions would not occur until nearly double the timeframe the typical procedure occurs. Not only does this avoid overlapping moral grey areas but there is a significant buffer between moral and immoral abortions. According to the CDC, only 6.9% of all abortion happen after 13 weeks of pregnancy [213]. Under my criterion, 93.1% of all abortions occur in a morally benign timeframe.
The vast majority of abortions occur during the first trimester of a pregnancy. In 2020, 93% of abortions occurred during the first trimester [45]
Summary
Just to recap, I've entertained the notion of the unborn being endowed with personhood from the moment of conception and shown how a majority of abortions are still moral. A right to life does not include the unfettered access to the body of another. It would be wrong to say anyone should have the use of another's body without consent, and it is wrong to suggest that this is the case with the body of a woman. I've also pointed out how a common unexamined definition of personhood cheapens the concept and makes us equivalent to things that are obviously not comparable. A slightly more robust and reasonable criterion is needed. Under the proposed criterion, a typical abortion is a morally neutral personal matter.
Round 2
Pro
#3
Quick correction: I made a typo for the modus ponens about the forest in R1. P2 should read: "Abortion involves making someone dependent on oneself and then removing bodily support."
Thanks to SkepticalOne for an interesting and thought-provoking opening round. I shall do my best to reaffirm my case as presented in R1 and to respond to the objections raised by my opponent.
Framework:
Definitions
Since capacity for consciousness is simply “the ability to be conscious,” I think that Con’s definition is flawed. A corpse may have all the brain structures Con is referring to, but they still cannot be said to have the capacity for consciousness, since these features are nonfunctional.
If a brain that can become functional in the future has “capacity for consciousness,” then any organism that can develop the features necessary for consciousness is also capable of consciousness in the same way. Nonfunctional brain cells and an embryo both lack (a) the capacity for consciousness in the current moment but have (b) the potential for consciousness. So (a) is a bad standard for personhood, since it would exclude people in comas.
Burdens
Con does not dispute the framework I provided. I will do my best to respond in depth to both camps of thought that Con referenced, though my opening did address some parts of each of them. Again, my aim here is to show that abortion is both a direct harm and neglect of a moral duty (either of which is immoral on its own). I will defend the claim I made in R1, which is that humans have a natural right not to have their lifespan reduced.
Arguments 1-6:
Extend. It may be the case that Con intends to address these in R2, but I will leave these as-is for now, except where they are necessary in responding to Con’s points.
1.CON “Self-ownership”:
Con gives several analogies from Prof. Thomson to argue that an individual is not obligated to use their body to support another. I will respond to each of these, but recall my position from R1. I did not argue that individuals are always obligated to use their body to support another in all cases, but I did argue that that (a) abortion is a direct harm, not simply refusing to save and (b) parents have responsibilities to address needs caused by the creation of their children (such as hunger, need for shelter, etc.) So even if Con is correct in his moral conclusions about people seeds and the violinist, neither of these would negate the arguments I have made.
“People seeds”
This is not analogous to pregnancy arising from consensual sex. Sex is a direct cause of pregnancy (even if it is not an intended result of pregnancy), while in this analogy, people seeds float into a house on their own. Pregnancy begins with fertilization, which occurs as a result of sex. Sex does not always result in pregnancy, but pregnancy is almost always caused by sex. If I push one domino in a long line of dominos, it is true that I caused the last domino to fall by pushing the first one—this fact remains true even if I wasn’t sure about how many dominos stood between the first and last domino. If I take some action X unsure of whether it will lead to result Y, it is still possible for X to cause Y. Playing Russian Roulette can still cause one’s death, even if it does not always cause one’s death.
To illustrate the difference, suppose that toddlers from around the neighborhood sometimes find their way into a woman’s house. Obviously, she does not have to let them stay there. But if the woman had a child, she would have the obligation to provide shelter and food (at the very least, through child support) to her offspring—to do otherwise is child abandonment. This would be true even if having the child was not the primary intent of sex. So there is a difference between (i) directly causing something (even when it is not the primary intent) and (ii) not preventing something.
To further illustrate the difference between (i) and (ii), consider the following:
i) Bob is a careful driver, and he always does his best to obey the rules of the road. However, one day he misses a stop sign and hits a pedestrian. Bob is still at fault, even though he tries very hard not to be at fault most of the time. This is analogous to pregnancy from consensual sex.
ii) Bob is again a careful driver. However, one day a pedestrian runs directly in front of his car. Bob tries to stop but still hits the pedestrian. In this case, Bob is not the direct cause of the accident and is not at fault. This is analogous to people seeds taking root.
“The Violinist”
This analogy was only meant to defend abortion in cases of rape, since the individual here is not responsible for the violinist’s condition. While I’ve got problems with that comparison, I won’t address them here, because the majority of abortions arise from consensual sex. So even if someone doesn’t have responsibilities to a random violinist, they do have responsibilities to their own children, specifically to address needs caused by the creation of their children (such as hunger, need for shelter, etc.)
Note that like the “people seed” analogy, unplugging oneself from the violinist is not direct harm, but abortion (making someone dependent on oneself and then removing bodily support) is a direct harm. Judith Jarvis Thomson herself argues for “minimally decent samaritanism”, arguing that people do have some threshold of moral duty. If moral duties can exist regardless of our actions, then surely we have even stronger moral duties to individuals whom we directly put in harm’s way.
The Dopamine Room
Credit to Bones for this analogy, which I think is a more accurate comparison to abortion:
Suppose there exists a room which gives all those in it a natural spike in dopamine for a period of 20 minutes. The entrance is free, however, there is one condition - if you enter, there is a 2 percent chance that a human being, somewhere, will suddenly become attached to you for a duration of just under a year, their life contingent on your body. Now suppose that you enter this room multiple times with no repercussions, however, after a number of trips, you find a human being attached to you. Are you morally allowed to kill this human being?
I think it’s clear that killing this human being (whether by detaching them and exposing them to a hostile environment, or by some other means) is immoral. Since you are responsible for this person depending on you, it would be ethically untenable to declare that you have no responsibility toward them.
Since this analogy involves directly causing the person’s dependency, it is a more accurate comparison than the two provided by Con. Extend the forest analogy from R1 and the comparison to infanticide in Ancient Rome.
Forest Analogy Elaborated and Comparison to Violinist
Suppose that a woman, Mary, goes on camping trips with her children, taking them into the woods and teaching them about nature. It is clear that Mary has not harmed these children simply by taking them on camping trips.
However, a second woman, Martha, takes her children into the woods and leaves them there to die. I think it’s clear that Martha has directly harmed her children, while Mary has not. Yet the only difference is that Martha abandoned her children when they were dependent on her. This comparison allows us to conclude that abandoning a child whom one has made dependent on themselves is morally wrong.
In contrast, the violinist has already been harmed (whether by natural means or by someone malicious third party), and we are simply refusing to aid the violinist in unplugging ourselves. The violinist dies of kidney failure, which was not caused by us. In contrast, a parent is responsible for making their children dependent on them, since conception is caused by sex.
2.CON “Are the unborn persons?”:
I agree that we should avoid defining persons in a way that leads to absurdities; but even if Con’s definition does weed out some absurdities, it leads to others. For example, people in comas are not currently capable of consciousness and may require treatment to help resolve their condition. Nevertheless, they are still a person. I think that sentience and consciousness are important, but not just in the way that Con believes they are. Someone who is unconscious right now may still live a long life in the future, and that fact is morally relevant.
This is why I proposed a similar (but not identical) definition to Con’s. I think that we should generally avoid harming humans, and that someone can be harmed even if they are not sentient right now. If someone is in a coma, and I steal all of their property, this will affect their quality of life when they wake up. If I stab them, this steals a future that they would have otherwise had. If I cut off their arm such that they will awaken without it, that’s crippling an ability that they would have otherwise had. Reducing someone’s lifespan is a harm regardless of whether they are currently conscious, and it’s one that we should avoid causing.
“My opponent suggested harm as his criterion. I'm not quite sure I understand what he means”
I hold that any human being who can be harmed is a person (an embryo is an organism of the homo sapien species, while blood samples are not; even if that difference did not exist, blood samples cannot be harmed). Even if corpses are human beings, corpses cannot be harmed or adversely affected, so they are not persons. (You can’t reduce someone’s lifespan when they are already dead.)
When I talk about harm in the case of abortion, I’m referring to reducing a human being’s lifespan or removing potential conscious experiences via removal of bodily functions, regardless of whether they are sentient at that moment. Killing someone who cannot feel pain is still harming them because it reduces their lifespan. If a human can be harmed in this way, we ought to consider them a person, as they deserve moral consideration.
“capacity for consciousness”
Con attributes personhood, or moral value, to a human individual’s capacity for consciousness. This can be measured either as (a) the human’s capacity for consciousness at that moment or (b) the capacity to develop consciousness in the future. Both a comatose person and a fetus lack (a) but have (b). Consider someone in a coma who cannot be awakened at that moment, but who will awaken in nine months. This person’s brain does not afford them the capacity for sentience at that moment, but it affords them the capacity to develop sentience in the future. If someone’s brain is damaged, time is required for the brain to be repaired such that it can then exhibit consciousness in the future. The brain cells in their current state are not capable of generating consciousness in a coma patient. We should also focus on interactions between the cells, not just the cells themselves, since a conscious brain is not simply the sum of its parts. Essentially, a coma patient cannot be conscious until synaptic reorganization occurs. The current formulation of cells and interactions between them have the same capacity for consciousness in the fetus and in the coma patient, even if they are structured differently. So we should avoid reducing someone’s lifespan, even if they are not capable of consciousness in the current moment.
Con might adjust his standard for personhood to include certain parts of the brain (regardless of whether they currently generate consciousness), but this would no longer be using capacity for consciousness as a criterion. Furthermore, it would run into the same problem as using DNA to define personhood—a random body part has no rights on its own, so it cannot be used to distinguish between persons and nonpersons. If we stick to the standard of not reducing human lifespans, we can avoid the problem with Con’s definition.
Also extend the following points:
- Removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences (such as sight, taste, etc.) is wrong, and this is what abortion does.
- Being killed at an earlier stage of one’s life is worse than being killed at a later stage. Thus, it is clear that the potential to live a long life is morally significant.
- The harm principle holds that actions should generally be considered moral unless they cause some kind of harm to someone else. The harms that occur when someone is killed painlessly or in a coma also occur when an unborn child is killed.
Con
#4
Thank you for the thought-provoking discussion, Savant. In the interest of fairness, I mirrored your first round and refrained from rebutting your arguments. Now our debate well and truly has begun!
Additional definitions:
Metabolism: the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life.
unalienable: not transferable to another or not capable of being taken away or denied; inalienable
Clarification of Criterion
This is meant to address the opening of Savant's round 2. I realize this is taking things out of order a bit, but I think this clarification will apply to much of round 1 argumentation as well.
My opponent has conflated potential with capacity. I believe this to be a mistake. A rock rolling down hill has the potential to reach water, but not every rock will. Hills aren’t always situated above water. This is true of pregnancy as well. There is potential, sure, but less than half of all fertilized human eggs reach birth. “Under natural conditions, embryo loss is approximately 10-40% before implantation, and total loss from fertilization to birth is 40-60% (Jarvis, 2016)” [86]. I do not subscribe to my opponent’s equivocation of potential with capacity because what might be labeled potential isn't always probable. That is certainly the case here.
My position rests firmly upon capacity. Plastic pellets have the potential to be made into a container capable of volume, but only the actual container has the capacity for volume. The capacity for consciousness is not about potential, but about what’s actual. Consciousness requires certain brain structures, and the absence of those structures strictly disallows the possibility of consciousness. The pile of wood is not a boat; the pile of bricks is not a house; The flour, eggs, and sugar are not a cake. Potential is about possibilities while capacity is about actualities. Potential is about imagined realities while capacity is reality. My position is the latter.
Additionally, the suggestion that a person asleep or in a coma loses personhood under my criterion is built on my opponent's misapprehensions. The capacity for consciousness doesn’t disappear with sleep. That's just silly. For one, the sleeping person doesn't lose consciousness - sleep is a state of reduced consciousness, not the absence of of it. Secondly, capacity remains unchanged - a container has the same total capacity whether it is full or empty. Even if sleep were a state of zero consciousness, the fundamental structure of the brain does not change during sleep. My definition of capacity for consciousness makes this clear.
Finally, Savant failed to notice my criterion contained two qualifications: capacity for consciousness AND metabolism. His suggestion that my criterion includes corpses is mistaken. Living organisms have metabolisms. Dead organisms do not (at least, not for long). In an effort to accommodate and compromise, my criterion is very simple. However, it is not as simplistic as suggested. As stated before, my criterion accounts for individuals between 24 weeks in-utero through to death. It would include those sleeping, those in a coma (providing all brains structures remained), and even individuals not yet born.
Clarification of harm as the basis of morality:
My opponent has advocated harm as something that 'adversely affects'. He has also suggested this is wrong or immoral. A successful self-defense which causes death certainly has adversely affected the dead person. Would Pro deem this immoral? Does a needle in the arm of an infant cause an adverse effect? What if it is part of a vaccination? The infant surely thinks so regardless. A nuanced understanding of these situations keeps us from deeming them immoral. We could name probably dozens of scenarios where positive consequences are yielded from events which start out adversely affecting. Sometimes adversity is sought by purpose (chemo/radiation to treat cancer) because it leads to a potentially desirable outcome. The point being, harm, as my opponent defines it is an insufficient basis for morality.
The Harm Principle comes from John Stewart Mills who was a utilitarian. “Utilitarianism holds that an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to promote sadness – not just the happiness of the actor but of everyone affected by it” [1234]. If I were in a coma with no end in sight, I hope my family would pull the plug so I did not become a burden dragging the family into a financial abyss – that would be the most moral thing to do.
The harm principle isn't simply 'do no harm' in some sort of absolute sense as my opponent seems to advocate. Sometimes injury is necessary to gain a greater benefit for the individual(s) affected, but injury isn't necessarily harm...at least, not in the grand moral scheme.
With these clarifications out of the way, let us move on to address argumentation:
Round 1
Mr. Savant provides us with his definition of personhood. Essentially, Pro believes any human being which can be harmed is a person. Unfortunately, he provides no meaningful definition of harm or human being which leaves both open to interpretation and equivocation. Judging by his arguments, human being is inappropriately conflated with person. As such his criterion can be restated as 'a person that can be damaged is a person'. This is circular in that the conclusion is built into the premise. To avoid the charge of straw manning my opponent's argument, I point to his 2nd argument in round 1. He talks of the scientific consensus regarding the beginning of life at conception. Immediately after, we see a discussion of rights. Rights belong to persons. The scientific consensus is not about personhood, but about when an individual human life begins. Clearly, there is equivocation here and, as such, my opponent has not provided a reasonable criterion of personhood but rather a fallacious one.
As far as the rest of A2, I certainly hope my opponent doesn't think I'm for eating babies (said with tongue firmly in cheek). Just to be clear to him and the voters, my criterion of personhood includes the elderly, adults, teenagers, toddler, infants and some unborn. A3 It also includes individuals in comas or sleeping.
[A4] p1. removing an unborn child's potential conscious experiences is wrong.
Even under the most charitable reading of Pro's criterion of personhood, this statement isn't necessarily true as experience can be harmful. Thus, it could be that preventing conscious experience is the most moral thing to do and Pro's conclusion [abortion is wrong] does not stand.
A5 p1 Making someone dependent on oneself and then removing bodily support is a direct harm.
I'm going to have to challenge this premise as well since there can be reasonable justification for removing bodily support. For instance: self-defense - the mother's life is in danger; or fetal death/unviability - the child is dying. As such, the premise is not necessarily true, and the conclusion has an inadequate foundation. Additionally, even if the conclusion were true [abortion is a direct harm], it doesn't necessarily disallow abortion. It could be that abortion is the route with less harm. Finally, this syllogism doesn't entertain the possibility that abortion may only involve one person which, with a reasonable criterion of personhood like my own, is a possibility.
A6 p1 A child’s right to live outweighed their parent’s right not to raise them in ancient times.
Given Pro's language throughout, I assume he considers the unborn and 'child' to be the same. That being said, I'll stick with the subject of this debate (abortion) rather than infanticide which, presumably, neither of us endorse (I know, I certainly do not). Abortion was encouraged and condoned by the Roman and Greeks. It was morally benign. [12.5] Thus, this premise is false, and the conclusion built on it falls with it.
Defense:
I did argue that that (a) abortion is a direct harm, not simply refusing to save and (b) parents have responsibilities to address needs caused by the creation of their children (such as hunger, need for shelter, etc.) So even if Con is correct in his moral conclusions about people seeds and the violinist, neither of these would negate the arguments I have made.
Pro reiterates direct harm is inherently immoral, but this is obviously not the case as pointed out above - abortion could be the less harmful alternative. Plus, (temporarily assuming a fertilized egg creates parents) biological parents can have responsibility to their children. However, it is not an absolute requirement. Biological parents can opt out of their parental roles. Individuals with no genetic tie can take up those parental duties. Pro assertions carry no weight and negation is not necessary. Utilizing my definition of personhood, individuals can opt not to become parents through abortion.
People seeds
The thought experiment isn't meant to analogize consensual sex, per se. The house is a person's body, and the screens are (failed) contraceptives. The question the analogy asks is 'if every reasonable effort was taken to avoid pregnancy, and it still occurs, does self-ownership go out the window the way the people seeds came in? The obvious answer is 'no' because rights cannot be taken or given away. If and when that changes, we are all in trouble.
Savant offers a few analogies of his own attempting to make direct cause and indirect cause relevant. I submit neither are important to this discussion. Let's say Richard is a good driver and he always follows the rules of the road. Unfortunately, one day he blows through a stop sign and hits a pedestrian. The pedestrian is immediately rushed to the hospital, and it is found he needs a kidney. By amazing coincidence, Richard is a match. By the reasoning my opponent has applied to abortion, Richard should have no choice but to provide a kidney. In the real world, it's not that simple. Richard has ultimate authority over his own body thanks to self-ownership. The fact that Richard caused direct harm to another does not cancel out his rights. Direct cause/indirect cause is completely meaningless in this discussion. Pro is seemingly pushing for double standards.
I also find it very interesting in these types of discussion when women are held responsible for 'knocking down the first domino' and responsible for all that comes after. However, women don't get pregnant on their own. When was the last time a father was deemed immoral for not sharing his flesh and blood with his infant? There is a double standard at play here.
Violinist
Pro recognizes this analogizes a non-consensual situation but, notice, he did not say whether he thought abortion in the case of rape was acceptable. He said unplugging from the violinist is acceptable, but 'they [the woman] have responsibilities to their own children'. It seems my opponent would have a woman raise the children of her rapist. I hope this is not the case because that would be grossly immoral.
Dopamine room
Are you morally allowed to kill this human being?
The question is 'does this person have a right to my body'. I would say "no". That's the only question that matters. Rights are meant to ensure humans can have the best possible lives. This scenario represents a world where rights are not inalienable and human flourishing is not a goal. That is not the world we live in.
Forest analogy elaborated.
My refutation to A5 and response to the Violinist above stand.
We've reached the end of Savant's argument and rebuttals. Pro wants to draw attention some points within his arguments. I'm happy to oblige.
1. Removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences (such as sight, taste, etc.) is wrong
Again, this not necessarily true. As stated previously, it might be the most moral thing to not bring a child into a world of misery.
2. Being killed at an earlier stage of one’s life is worse than being killed at a later stage.
By this reasoning, the elderly have less value than the young. That's not a position I would want to endorse. Besides, how do we compare potential life to the experience and wisdom of a long life? I don't know the answer to that. Regardless, depending on how we define personhood, it could be that abortion involves only a woman in which case it would inarguably be amoral like cutting hair.
.
3. The harm principle holds that actions should generally be considered moral unless they cause some kind of harm to someone else. The harms that occur when someone is killed painlessly or in a coma also occur when an unborn child is killed.
My opponent assumes taking a life is always immoral. Allow me to introduce war, self-defense, and death with dignity as counters to this mistaken assumption. Additionally, I draw attention back to the clarifications at the beginning of the round. Utilitarianism doesn't necessarily seek to prevent all injury or damage. An action which tends to promote happiness is right. Doctors regularly recommend removing life support from individuals in comas because high medical bills, false hope, and lack of closure tend to promote sadness. ie. trusting the advice of professionals and allowing those in comas to die isn't immoral by default, and neither is abortion.
Extend:
1. Guttmacher released a study that show 51% of women seeking abortions used birth control in the month they became pregnant. Relatively small contraceptive failure rates can account for a majority of abortions [15] since those using birth control would presumably not want a pregnancy and be more likely to seek abortion. Add to this the percentage of women getting necessary abortions to preserve their health (8-12%), rape (1%), incest (~.5%) problems affecting the health of the fetus (13-14%) [21] and we have a large majority of abortions for significant morally justifiable reasons regardless of the personhood of the unborn. For those keeping track, that's 73.5%-77.5% of all abortions occurring for undeniable morally justifiable reasons.
2. The mental substrate for consciousness (and the capacity for it) does not develop until nearly the third trimester. Using the criterion above, a vast majority of abortions are morally neutral. They would carry no moral weight and would be as morally controversial as getting a haircut. In fact, morally questionable abortions would not occur until nearly double the timeframe the typical procedure occurs. Not only does this avoid overlapping moral grey areas but there is a significant buffer between moral and immoral abortions. According to the CDC, only 6.9% of all abortion happen after 13 weeks of pregnancy [213]. Under my criterion, 93.1% of all abortions occur in a morally benign timeframe.
Round 3
Pro
#5
Some of my arguments deal with personhood; others show that if the unborn are persons, abortion is unjust. These arguments defend separate premises. So it makes little sense for Con to challenge my personhood arguments by saying the ends justify the means, or for Con to criticize the dopamine room for not dealing with personhood. I’d like to avoid this (img linked).
Framework:
Burdens
There are two ways to act immorally: direct harm or neglecting a moral duty. They might be justified in extreme cases, but they are wrong without sufficient justification. Con doesn’t dispute this but disagrees about what constitutes moral duty or justification.
Uncertainty Principle
Extend. If the moral status of the unborn is uncertain, abortion is akin to drunk driving or child endangerment and is thus immoral.
Are the Unborn Persons?
I hold that any human being who can be harmed is a person. We agree that preventing harm is a good thing, whereas Con doesn’t give a reason to prefer his criteria. Con responds to the operation analogy and harm principle by giving extreme situations but drops the point that removing future experiences and causing harm are immoral prima facie. Regarding potential justifications (self-defense, etc.), I stated that some extreme cases justify causing harm but that pregnancy isn’t one of them. I’m not arguing that potential=personhood in all cases (“potential” is a vague term anyway); rather, harming bodily functions that would otherwise lead to utility or consciousness is wrong prima facie (which Con doesn’t dispute). I’m not saying that eggs are cake or that toddlers are adults, I’m saying that humans are persons regardless of stage of development and that their lifespan shouldn’t be reduced. A toddler isn’t an adult, but both are persons.
“harm…insufficient basis for morality.”
Con’s examples show that harm is sometimes justified to prevent greater harm, which is still using harm as a basis for morality. Jabbing a needle into a child’s arm without health benefits would be wrong—causing harm is immoral prima facie (without a sufficient justification). I’m focusing on personhood and whether the unborn should be granted personhood or moral consideration similarly to newborns. When parents allow medical treatments on children, they balance risks and rewards if there is a chance of harming the child. That is what I mean by moral consideration.
Vaccination and self-defense cases show bodily autonomy isn’t absolute or inalienable in all cases, which is why I weighed bodily autonomy against the right to life in the forest analogy.
“utilitarianism”
If we measure utility, or promoting happiness, then unplugging an orphan in a coma with a chance of waking up (even <50%) is still wrong even if they don’t have a family who will miss them. Decreasing their lifespan prevents them from experiencing happiness in the future. This kind of direct harm is immoral, and it occurs from abortion.
“no definition of harm or human being”
I defined harm as “to adversely affect” and described human beings as “organisms of the homo sapien species.” I gave examples of harm, such as removal of bodily functions (hindering the embryo’s development via starvation, exposure, etc.)
“scientific consensus…not about personhood”
I explained why humans are persons regardless of stage of development. (Con seems to agree, stating that old people are people as much as children.) Toddlers and adults are both persons, despite the age difference, so being at an earlier stage of development doesn’t negate personhood. With no moral difference between the unborn and newborns (who are persons), the unborn must be persons.
potential experiences
As I said in R1, performing an operation on an unborn child that will hinder their eyesight in the future with no medical benefit is wrong. Removing the ability to see/hear/smell is wrong prima facie; abortion removes all these experiences. Con argues that removing negative experiences might outweigh the good, but we agree that suicide and infanticide are bad, even if the child is poor, so stealing all of someone else’s future experiences is almost always a net negative.
Being killed at an earlier stage of one’s life is worse than being killed at a later stage.
I agree that the elderly have the same personhood as infants. But the death of a child causes more harm than the death of an elderly person, generally speaking, as the child has more to lose. Even if the old person has wisdom, the death of a child robs them of more utility, or experiences, hence the action is more harmful. The point is that preventing someone from having future experiences is a harm which ought not be inflicted. Con agrees that “potential life” carries moral weight.
“Capacity”
Con defines capacity (I believe) as “having all features necessary for X.” But this is an untenable standard for personhood.
“capacity for consciousness doesn’t disappear with sleep or comas”
I’m referring to comas, which are a state of complete unconsciousness. Some coma patients never regain consciousness. A coma patient has potential for consciousness, not capacity for consciousness.
Transformation Analogy
Suppose object A will transform into object B unless something is done to prevent this. Object B can change color, but object A can’t. Thus, object A doesn’t have capacity to change color but has potential to do so. Similarly, the brain of someone in a coma can’t generate consciousness, but it will develop into an organ with capacity for consciousness (including features and syntactic structures it doesn’t currently possess). Often, this requires treatment. The zygote, too, will develop into an organism with consciousness. Both organisms will be conscious at a later stage of development.
A coma patient can’t simply decide to wake up, as they’re unconscious—they won’t wake up unless the brain wakes them up. Hence, they lack capacity for consciousness. Coma patients lack features necessary for consciousness, often from damage to the RAS, in which case the brain doesn’t have the capacity to think. It would be as if the “container,” to use Con’s analogy, was poked full of holes or twisted out of shape and no longer had capacity for volume. Perhaps the brain (or container) will repair over time and then have capacity for consciousness, but it does not right now. Some components necessary for consciousness are missing from the embryo, but the same is true of the coma patient. Even if “all brain structures remain” for someone in a coma, these structures are incapable of consciousness in their current state and missing neurons necessary for it. An adult organism’s neurons begin natural regeneration by reverting to an embryonic state. These findings are consistent with other research on human neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, which would be even more prevalent in a comatose child. On capacity for consciousness, the unborn and coma patients are morally equivalent. A coma patient with a chance of waking up is a person, so the unborn child is as well.
“metabolism”
Fresh corpses have metabolism, so my objection to Con’s criteria stands. Regardless, metabolism as a criterion wouldn’t exclude the unborn, who are alive.
And my main point was that a corpse can have all the brain structures that Con is referring to but doesn’t have capacity for consciousness; they are not capable of consciousness. So these brain structures aren’t a good measure of capacity for consciousness. (Hence, a comatose person has the same capacity for consciousness as an unborn child.)
Is Abortion Direct Harm?
Making someone dependent and then removing bodily support is a direct harm.
Con argues for exceptions but doesn’t dispute that removing bodily support via abortion is direct harm. Martha harms her children by abandoning them. My point in classifying it as direct harm is that abortion is immoral prima facie. To justify direct harm against an innocent person, such as stabbing them, the ends must justify the means (the good must outweigh the bad, at the very least). But this isn’t the case with abortion. Pregnancy lasts for nine months, but killing removes an entire human life. Yes, 10% of abortions are performed for the mother’s health. But only 0.06% are done to save the mother’s life.
“abortion may only involve one person”
I argued for personhood elsewhere—the point is that if the unborn are persons, then abortion is immoral since two people are involved.
“Violinist”
I was referring to parental responsibility to children caused by consensual sex. Parents bear direct responsibility to minimize harm from their actions and to avoid direct killing. (Parents also have a more broad parental responsibility which I will elaborate on further down.)
“Dopamine room”
I agree that rights are meant to ensure humans can have good lives. From a utilitarian standpoint then, my position is supported, as losing an entire life is a greater loss than a nine-month pregnancy.
If I enter the dopamine room, attaching a person to me, and then intentionally kill them, I did something that caused the person’s death. It was intentionally killing the person after emerging from the dopamine room that caused their death. Being intentionally fully responsible for killing an innocent person is immoral—it’s unjust for me to execute someone else for a problem I caused. Similarly, if I lose money from investing and then steal from someone else, it would be immoral. Again, it is unjust for me to punish someone else for a problem that I inflicted on myself, even if I did so unintentionally. In most cases of abortion, the parent bears responsibility for the pregnancy.
What Obligations do Parents Have?
Infanticide in Rome
Con calls this a false equivalency between a newborn and fetus, but I have shown that they are morally equivalent in earlier arguments (operation analogy, etc). This argument does not deal with personhood, but I have presented other arguments that do.
Yes, abortion was condoned in Rome. So was infanticide. Con and I agree that infanticide is wrong (despite adoption not always being available for common people). Neither infanticide nor abortion become justified simply because a lot of people support them. That would be an ad populum fallacy. (Killing was immoral prima facie even before laws existed.) The point is that infanticide in Rome was morally wrong (and comparable to abortion).
Hence:
- P1: A child’s right to live outweighed their parent’s right not to raise them in ancient times (morally speaking).
- P2: Pregnancy today is less inconvenient than raising a child in ancient times.
- C1: A child’s right to live outweighs their mother’s right to avoid pregnancy in modern times (morally speaking).
Con, I believe, agrees with P1 and doesn’t dispute P2. So if the unborn are persons, the conclusion follows.
“People seeds”
Con agrees this isn’t analogous to consensual sex. Almost all abortions occur on pregnancies from consensual sex. So “people seeds” cannot be used to draw conclusions about abortion—the two situations aren’t analogous. My analogy about the driver was to show that someone can be responsible for event Y if they do action X that leads to Y, even if Y was not the intended result (i.e. birth control). It’s the difference between accidentally being at fault for the accident and some other person being at fault for it. Even if the woman gets lost in the forest longer than she expects, it is immoral to abandon her child—she is responsible for bringing them there.
Con doesn’t challenge that point but shifts to a bodily autonomy argument about Richard. Having blown through the stop sign, Richard is at fault for the accident—this was the point of my analogy. But I will address the additional point that Con brings up. I agree that people have a moral obligation to solve problems they cause others. If I push someone into a river, and they can’t swim, I have a moral responsibility to save them. If I break someone’s window, I should pay for the damage. So I agree that it would be immoral for Richard (who caused the problem) not to give his kidney if there are no other options. Compared to me paying for a broken window so the owner doesn’t have to, by giving a kidney Richard would actually be sacrificing much less in proportion to the consequences if he doesn’t and the person dies. Richard doesn’t consciously intend to harm the pedestrian, but it isn’t moral to prioritize his bodily autonomy over minimizing the harm his actions cause to others. (If a sleepwalking person X tries to kill me, I can still restrain them or even harm them if necessary in self defense, despite the fact that they do not consciously intend to harm me. Minimizing harm caused by person X outweighs their right to bodily autonomy, morally speaking.)
But while that analogy is similar to abortion, infanticide in Rome is more directly comparable. I talked specifically about the responsibilities of parents to provide for the needs of a child they created through consensual sex. When parents create children, they are directly responsible for their children needing them to survive, but they also have a more broad and enduring parental responsibility, including things like providing education for their children. So we should be asking what responsibilities parents have to children given both (a) responsibilities as a parent and (b) causing the child to be dependent. Hence, the Roman empire analogy is the most comparable to abortion.
If a parent ran a red light and hit their child, they would certainly have a moral obligation to give a kidney if it was the only way to save the child, even stronger than Richard’s obligation—not doing so would be wrong. (Just as it was immoral to abandon a child in the Roman empire rather than raising them, despite the burden of raising a child.)
Also, refusing to give a kidney isn’t direct harm, but abortion is. The direct harm occurs when the person is hit with the car, while refusing to give the kidney is neglecting a moral duty. Becoming pregnant doesn’t harm the child—the child isn’t harmed until abortion (or abandonment in the forest) occurs, so abortion is direct harm. So even if Con was right about parental responsibility, direct harm against one’s child isn’t justified to avoid a nine-month burden.
“father deemed immoral”
Men are often forced to pay child support whether or not they consider themselves parents; they’re recognized as having moral responsibility to their children. I’m also against men getting abortions.
Conclusion:
“Reasons”
Ignoring abortions to save the mother’s life (0.06%) and rape (1%), most abortions are immoral. If incest is consensual (not rape), it wouldn’t justify abortion since the parents are responsible for creating the child. Killing a disabled person is immoral, so if the unborn are people, as I argued, a fetus having health issues doesn’t justify abortion. (But even including minor health issues, that’s only around 14%).
“timeframe”
The unborn are human beings who can be harmed from conception, so they are persons from conception.
Con
#6
Once again, I would like to thank Savant for an interesting debate!
Uncertainty principle:
At best, Pro could argue abortion is morally debatable because the moral status of the unborn is uncertain. It does not follow logically to say X is absolutely immoral because the moral status of Y is uncertain which, incidentally, is what my opponent is arguing.
Are the Unborn Persons:
Pro claims he is not equating potential and personhood while suggesting harm to bodily functions (that don't yet exist) is wrong because...personhood. Suffice to say, Pro is trying to make a case for potential being synonymous with personhood while denying doing so. He is assuming his conclusion when it comes to personhood. There has been no substantiation for his criterion other than assertion. He asserts persons that can be 'adversely affected' are people. I pointed out this circularity, but no defense was offered. It would seem my opponent has no qualms with his criterion being logically circular and unreasonable.
“harm…insufficient basis for morality.”“no definition of harm or human being”Con’s examples show that harm is sometimes justified to prevent greater harm, which is still using harm as a basis for morality
Yes, exactly. My objection isn't to harm, but (and I stated this explicitly) "harm as my opponent defines it". Pro equates harm as that which 'adversely affects'. This means anything which adversely affects should be considered immoral. I provided examples showing this isn't the case (self-defense can leave a lasting mark on the dead aggressor) thus nullifying his basis for morality. I also provided a better alternative a la John Stewart Mills and Utilitarianism: An action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to promote sadness.
[...]self-defense cases show bodily autonomy isn’t absolute or inalienable in all cases.
This is not an accurate statement. Self-defense does not negate an absolute or inalienable rights. Bodily autonomy isn't the right to use the body of another person, and self-defense is an affirmation of this.
Utilitarianism
Pro suggests 'unplugging an orphan in a coma with a chance(even less than 50%) of waking up is wrong. First, allow me to point out the emotional appeal: "orphan", 'no family to miss them', 'preventing them from happiness'. My opponent is trying to manipulate rather than provide a rational argument. While doing so he fails to take into account the financial and emotional resources to sustain the care as well as how 'decreasing a lifespan' can prevent any further experience of pain and misery. How many people are made to have worse lives off the chance this particular orphan might wake-up? Is it in vain? Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for the death of anyone, even those in comas, I'm just saying a logical evaluation (rather than an emotional one) would consider both sides of the coin before deeming one immoral.
“scientific consensus…not about personhood”
I explained why humans are persons regardless of stage of development. (Con seems to agree, stating that old people are people as much as children.)
This is misleading - I agree the elderly and children are both persons because both meet my criterion of personhood. Con's suggestion that I agree there is no moral difference between the unborn in any stage of development and newborns can't be taken seriously. I've argued for a minimum criterion which various stages of human development do not meet by default.
As pointed out in the first and second round, potentiality is not the same thing as actuality. This is simply a statement of fact. As such, the potential of a zygote is not morally equivalent to an individual with the capacity for consciousness and metabolism (a.k.a. a person). If faced with the moral conundrum of a saving 1000 zygotes or one child from a burning building, I would save the child and I think my opponent would too. If my opponent's assertions were correct, the child should be abandoned.
potential experiences
Con argues that removing negative experiences might outweigh the good, but we agree that suicide and infanticide are bad, even if the child is poor, so stealing all of someone else’s future experiences is almost always a net negative.
Once again, my opponent seeks to mislead - I've never agreed suicide is intrinsically bad. Secondly, I don't see how this reasoning follows. A life of neglect, abuse, and misery is not superior to non-existence.
But the death of a child causes more harm than the death of an elderly person, generally speaking, as the child has more to lose.
Again, I don't know how we can place a greater value on wisdom or youth. Human civilization is built on a mixture of both. A society made completely of newborns and a society made up completely of octogenarians both have a low chance of survival. I think Pro is arguing from a place of "I want this to be true" rather than a place of reason.
Capacity
My opponent wants us to accept a comatose brain is like an empty container and empty containers have no capacity. This is nonsensical. A milk jug is capable of holding the same amount of volume regardless of being full or empty. Likewise, a live brain with all the structures known to be necessary for consciousness has capacity. Granted, we may not know what that capacity is, but it is capacity, nonetheless.
Transformation analogy
In this analogy, Mr. Savant proposes the comatose brain will 'transform' into a brain with a capacity for consciousness. He then argues that this is comparable to a zygote which will also develop this same capacity for consciousness. The problem is that a comatose brain does not need to develop structures for consciousness - that benchmark has already been passed. This is not true of the zygote. Furthermore, let us not forget, a significant percentage of zygotes never develop structures necessary for consciousness while 100% of comatose brains have done so and have an established capacity. Pro is comparing apples and oranges here.
Is Abortion direct harm?
Pro is advocating for direct harm being is immoral by default. However, my opponent makes no attempt to rebut my earlier refutation of this argument. Self-defense causes direct harm to the aggressor. Self-defense is not immoral.
Violinist
Pro propounds parental responsibility is caused by consensual sex. Unprotected consensual sex results in pregnancy only 20% of the time. Is Pro really suggesting that all consensual sex (unprotected and otherwise) yields a parental responsibility? My opponent would have every person who has ever had sex with a parental duty whether children are involved or not. That is an absurd position.
Dopamine room
losing an entire life is a greater loss than a nine-month pregnancy.
That could be true in some scenarios, but not in every case and that is the problem with this statement: It is an absolute position that can be absolutely false. Pregnancy carries it own sets of risks including death. Losing the life of the mother and her unborn child is more harmful than losing just the child.
As for the analogy, I maintain the immoral part would be attaching random people in such a way to cause one to become contingent on another. Additionally, self-ownership disallows slavery which is what this analogy advocates.
Infanticide in Rome
P1: A child’s right to live outweighed their parent’s right not to raise them in ancient timesCon, I believe, agrees with P1
As I stated in the last round, this premise is false. Pro uses the term child to include the unborn, and abortion (which affects the unborn) was moral in ancient Rome. Thus, this syllogism is broken.
People Seeds
In spite of what my opponent claims, the type of sex isn't important to this analogy. It can represent a consensual relationship where contraceptives failed or ...otherwise. Yet again, I adamantly reject my opponent's characterization of agreement between us. I can't help but wonder if he read my previous response under this title. He fails to realize the analogy is a bodily autonomy argument which he doesn't really address.
That being said, Pro advances Richard (our stop-sign runner) should be forced to give up his kidney. I have to say, I certainly hadn't expected Pro to advocate against self-ownership. Self-ownership is the basis of all rights. There is a line which morality should not cross, but this is where Pro is pushing it. If I caused bodily harm (my definition of harm) to another person, we could agree I've done something immoral. Where Pro and I part ways is where he advocates more harm as the solution to harm. If harm is immoral, then causing more harm as a 'fix' is also immoral. Pro's position is logically inconsistent and contradictory.
“father deemed immoral”
I wonder if Pro is 'for' men paying child support from the moment of conception. After all, his definition of personhood starts at conception and conception requires the joining of 2 gametes. Is my opponent being fair and consistent?
Conclusion
I made 2 arguments that both needed to be defeated for Pro to claim victory.
Self-Ownership
The first was self-ownership. Essentially, each and every person is sovereign over their body. This means no one has the right to use the body of another without consent. Pro wants self-ownership to only apply some of the time. This undermines the very notion of rights. This is not a stable position. I provided a multitude of morally justifiable reasons beyond mere 'personal choice' including the life of the mother being endangered, fetal health issues, rape, incest, and failed contraceptives. This accounts for a majority of all abortions. My opponent failed to adequately address this argument.
Personhood
In the second I argued for a valid (non-circular) criterion of personhood using only two factors: capacity for consciousness and metabolism. My opponent has mistakenly conflated volume with capacity. Alternatively, he attempted to link potential with capacity. Both of these are mistaken notions. A container has volume no matter if empty or full, and a pile of plastic pellets does not have the volume of the plastic jug it can be made into. My opponent's criticism fails to knock down my criterion of personhood. As such, the early timeframe in which most abortions occur disallow the possibility of unborn personhood thereby making them morally acceptable.
Criterion
Pro
Tie
Con
Points
Better arguments
3 point(s)
Better sources
2 point(s)
Better legibility
1 point(s)
Better conduct
1 point(s)
Reason:
Savant gives six main arguments defending his position. From the first three, he comes in focusing on a clear point of agreement, that persons should not be harmed (along with a criteria for harm), a criteria for personhood where Humans are persons, and Don Marquis's account for the wrongness of killing. Frankly speaking, the 4th is basically the same thing as his 3rd argument. The rest include an argument from the wrongness of creating dependency and killing (which is intuitively the strongest when coupled with the personhood outline) and a parental obligations argument. The response from the con is far simpler focusing on self-ownership using two thought experiments from Thompson (the violinist and people seeds) and denying the personhood of the unborn with a clever cancer cell reduction on pro's account, and criteria based on the capacity for consciousness and metabolism.
(I) Personhood
While both accounts of personhood have weaknesses, pro never technically affirmed that human DNA alone was sufficient for personhood, so the initial charge con levied goes through. Clearly, human and cancer cells are not members of the homo-sapien species, however, pro does not contain a clear definition of what it would mean to be a member of the species. Nevertheless, appealing to standard biology sides with the affirmative. Con calling pro's account of personhood circular was a clear misunderstanding of the view because a human was never stated to be analytically identical to a person. This is made clear as Savant has added an "able to be harmed condition" from round one.
The transformation analogy is pro's best attack on con's notion of capacity showing that coma patients don't in fact have all the structures necessary to generate consciousness, they (at least sometimes) need some form of treatment. This captures con's account, which commits his view to the permissibility of stabbing comatose people to death apparently. Because pro actually cited a source to defend this and con appeals to the "benchmark having been passed" which misses the point, pro strongly wins this point. Con had some interesting objects to pro's account of harm, however, pro was able to take care of them by appealing to prime-facie clauses and harm/reward trade-off analysis for ultima-facie considerations
(II) Autonomy/Self-Ownership
The people seeds and violinist experiments are dealt with for being disanalogous, none of them applying to consensual sex. He then forwards the dopamine room to push the intuition that even when there is a low chance of an event occurring, we still bear responsibility for making people dependent on us when done consensually. Con just bites the bullet on the dopamine room. Con also comments that pro had not clarified his view on rape cases which is just irrelevant to the debate proposition as the consensual cases already capture the majority. He also doesn't track pro's point confusing the percentage of sex that results in pregnancy with the relevant disanalogy. Because of relevant dis-analogies presented for both cases where con fails to respond to one, and just accepts the entitlement of the other pro wins on this point as well.
I won't focus on the rest of the arguments pro gave and keep concentrating on the major ones that evolved throughout the debate. First, the capacity criteria for personhood has obvious flaws (reduction on lack of rights for comatose people). Con already seems to implicitly acknowledge that this would be a bad entailment by resisting the conclusion, but fails to demonstrate that this doesn't follow from his view. Con missed a lot of opportunities to attack pro on personhood, but pro did well in giving himself a strong groundwork with several of his other arguments. Marquis's reasoning for instance does not even require one to take the view that the unborn are persons. Either way, both major points were mostly one-sided towards the affirmative.
It's good to note that having these sorts of debates will never stop being just as important as they are interesting but pro was "never in trouble" here to use chess.com language. It's good to see people like this coming up although both sides could have made many improvements.
Criterion
Pro
Tie
Con
Points
Better arguments
3 point(s)
Better sources
2 point(s)
Better legibility
1 point(s)
Better conduct
1 point(s)
Reason:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OeG7sXs7flNcpz10YpyANIzX8v0W8CHuK5rhVlcD95k/edit?usp=sharing
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
Criterion
Pro
Tie
Con
Points
Better arguments
3 point(s)
Better sources
2 point(s)
Better legibility
1 point(s)
Better conduct
1 point(s)
Reason:
Both sides had a very clear, concise structure and addressed each other's points well. The analogies used were also helpful for understanding the arguments, but pro's were more on-point and resembling of the topics than con's.
Pro's arguments were much more morally centered, while con's were very much from a utilitarian view and focused on the solution that causes the greatest happiness. Causing happiness, however, does not necessarily mean doing what is morally right, and the topic of this debate is "The majority of abortions are immoral".
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>Reported Vote: the_quiet_poet9 // Mod action: Not Removed (borderline)
>Voting Policy: info.debateart.com/terms-of-service/voting-policy
>Points Awarded:
>Reason for Decision: See Votes Tab.
>Reason for Mod Action:
The vote was borderline (in part due to the newness of the member). By default, borderline votes are ruled to be sufficient.
In future for a complex debate like this, please have more specific detail rather than just the gist (even if that's what it ultimately boils down to). The side being voted against, should be left with a clear sense that you at least read their main contention to be able to say what either defeated it or outweighed it. A vote need not become long, but a little less short would go a long way.
Arguments must always be reviewed even if left a tie (in which case less detail is required, but some reason for said tie based on the debate content must still be comprehensible within the vote).
Arguments go to the side that, within the context of the debate rounds, successfully affirms (vote pro) or negates (vote con) the resolution. Ties are possible, particularly with pre-agreed competing claims, but in most cases failing to affirm the resolution means pro loses by default.
Weighing entails analyzing the relative strength of one argument or set of arguments and their impacts against another argument or set of arguments. Weighing requires analyzing and situating arguments and counterarguments within the context of the debate as a whole.
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Thanks for the debate, Savant, and thanks to everyone who voted!
Thanks for the vote!
Forgot to say this earlier: welcome back!
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SAVANT QUOTE: "Con argues for exceptions but doesn’t dispute that removing bodily support via abortion is direct harm. Martha harms her children by abandoning them. My point in classifying it as direct harm is that abortion is immoral prima facie."
As any TRUE Christian should realize, if they state that abortion is wrong, THEN THEY HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT JESUS, AS GOD, (2 PETER 1:1), WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR DIRECT ABORTIONS and the murdering of a baby if they were born, because Jesus as God was pissed at the population of Ephraim in the book of Hosea as shown herewith:
“ Ephraim’s glory will fly away like a bird — no birth, no pregnancy, no conception, FOR THEIR CHILDREN WILL DIE AT BIRTH OR PERISH IN THE WOMB or never even be conceived. Even if your children survive to grow up, I WILL TAKE THEM FROM YOU. It will be a terrible day when I turn away and leave you alone. I have watched Israel become as beautiful and pleasant as Tyre. But now Israel will bring out her children to be slaughtered oh Lord. what should I request for your people? I will ask for the wombs that don’t give birth and breast that give no milk. The LORD says, "All their wickedness began at Gilgal; there I began to hate them. I will drive them from my land because of their evil actions. I will love them no more because all their leaders are rebels. The people of Israel are stricken. THEIR ROOTS ARE DRIED UP, THEY WILL BEAR NO MORE FRUIT. And if they give birth, I WILL SLAUGHTER THEIR BELOVED CHILDREN. (Hosea 9:11-16)
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Furthermore, in the contradicting creation narratives, Jesus as god (John 14:9) is quoted as saying that life begins at the first breath and NOT at conception, therefore, what is this erroneous deal of saying that abortion is wrong going back to conception when Jesus as God concludes that life begins at the first breath?
"Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." (Genesis 2:7)
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Thanks for voting!
Thanks for voting!
Nice vote.
My own arguments touch on the immorality of abortion bans; yet such does not make abortion moral, even if the morality of forbidding it is worse.
Thanks! I know it's a long one.
I’ve been reading. Will get a vote up before the deadline, might be close.
Plz vote! Only a few days left.
5 days left to vote!
Thank you!
Reading now and hopefully voting by tomorrow.
In the process of voting.
Plz vote if you get the chance!
Its been a while since I've debated. Thanks for asking me to participate!
Thanks whiteflame! Also thanks to SkepticalOne for the debate.
It's my debate too! 😁
Thank you!
Once you unfriend and make crystal clear your stance on what Lancelot has done to me with alt accounts votebombing, I will consider giving a fuck about voting on your debate.
I'll start working on it.
Plz vote if you get the chance!
Bumpedy bump
The Finals are approaching.
Would you like to do a Bonus Debate?
If you win, you get the minimum amount of points qualified to participate in last stage of The Tournament.
If you agree, type the subjects you prefer. You will have complete control over everything else.: The Side You Take, Definitions, & The Rules.
Tag me and remind me to vote when this is over
Typo for the modus ponens about the forest. P2 should read: "Abortion involves making someone dependent on oneself and then removing bodily support."
Well, true
Thank you
Changed to 1 week
Can you give longer argument times? I work 2 jobs and may not be able to generate a 15000 character argument in 3 days.
You cannot do Rated direct challenges.
No crime in just sending a private invitation.
Ping