Instigator / Pro
25
1740
rating
23
debates
100.0%
won
Topic
#5381
THBT: Personhood begins at conception [for @Benjamin]
Status
Finished
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
Winner & statistics
Better arguments
9
6
Better sources
8
8
Better legibility
4
4
Better conduct
4
3
After 4 votes and with 4 points ahead, the winner is...
Savant
Tags
Parameters
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Rated
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- One week
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- Two weeks
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
- Minimal rating
- 1,750
Contender / Con
21
1760
rating
94
debates
77.13%
won
Description
RESOLUTION:
THBT: Personhood begins at conception.
BURDEN OF PROOF:
BoP is shared equally. Pro argues that in human development, personhood begins at conception in the majority of cases. Con argues that personhood begins at some other point in the majority of cases.
DEFINITIONS:
Conception is “the fusion of gametes to give rise to a human zygote”
Moral consideration is “consideration with regards to actions that may affect an individual.”
Personhood is “the point at which a human being should be given moral consideration.”
RULES:
1. All specifications presented in the description are binding to both participants.
2. Only Benjamin may accept.
Round 1
Pro
#1
Framework:
Definitions
Harm: To adversely affect
Person: A human being who should be given moral consideration
Human being: An individual human
Burdens
Per the description, a person is a human individual who deserves moral consideration. Hence, if human beings deserve any level of moral consideration from the point of conception, the resolution is affirmed.
As BoP is shared, to negate the resolution, Con must show that unborn children should be given no moral consideration in early stages of pregnancy.
Uncertainty Principle
For the sake of argument, suppose we are uncertain about the moral status of an unborn child. In this case, their status would be similar to someone who has been injured and appears unresponsive. If we are not sure whether said individual is alive or dead, we should still give them some moral consideration (for example, we should not stab them in the throat.) Similarly, if we are uncertain whether killing an unborn child will be very harmful, they still deserve some level of moral consideration and are persons, per the resolution.
1. Harm Principle:
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. Prima facie, we ought to follow the non-aggression principle—if a human can be harmed, we should avoid harming them without a sufficient justification. Hence, my criteria for personhood follows.
Harm
I will distinguish here between (1) removal of bodily functions and (2) not adding bodily functions. The first is a harm, while the latter is not.
For example, (1) removing one of someone’s limbs is harming them. And if someone is in danger of harm, 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 that 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. Even though starvation results from a lack of resources, it causes direct adverse effects on the body. If your child is starving, that is a direct harm you ought to prevent.
Support for this Definition
Moral statutes must work in practice. Immoral actions are undesirable; hence, the existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable effects. Murder prevents someone from living a human life—a life experienced by the human mind. If removing someone’s ability to live part of a human life is evil, then removing someone’s capacity to live an entire human life must be immoral as well. If reducing a human lifespan is immoral, then all humans with prospective lifespans deserve moral consideration.
Unborn Children can be Harmed
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). Since unborn children can be directly harmed, it follows that they deserve moral consideration.
2. Humans as Persons:
The overwhelming scientific consensus holds that a human being is formed at conception. Since gametes only have half the genetic information necessary to create a human, they cannot be classified as individual humans; hence personhood cannot begin before conception since it is defined as “the point at which a human being should be given moral consideration.”
Human Rights
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 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 achieve a similar immoral effect.
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 several 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 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, but level of development is not.
3. Future Like Ours:
Coma Analogy
Suppose there is someone in a deep coma who will awaken in nine months without their memories. Killing them is still murder. (We’d save on social security by killing dementia patients in their sleep, but doing so would clearly be evil.) Note that any argument that the comatose individual has personhood can also be used to show that unborn children are persons.
Per the harm principle, 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: The individual could have lived a long life
- Lack of choice: No choice was given to the individual
These harms also occur when an unborn child is killed. If they make killing the comatose individual wrong, then they certainly make killing an unborn child wrong. Hence, unborn children deserve moral consideration.
Operation Analogy
Suppose there is an operation that can be performed on an unborn child that will hinder their eyesight in the future with no medical benefit. This operation would clearly be harmful, 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. Since unborn children can be wronged by having potential conscious experiences removed, they deserve moral consideration.
4. Comparison to Newborns:
I argue that if newborns are persons (which I assume my opponent will agree with), then unborn children must also be persons.
Immoral Actions
When determining the morality of an action, there are essentially three things that must be factored into account:
- Total harm/gain from said action
- How said action is performed
- Context surrounding said action
Given this information, you would know everything about the action and hence everything concerning the morality of said action. This may seem obvious, but I bring it up to compare harm committed against unborn children to harm committed against newborns.
Total harm/gain
The loss to a newborn from being killed painlessly is effectively the same as the loss to an unborn child from being killed. Both individuals would benefit from a higher lifespan if they were not killed.
It’s generally intuitive that individuals are generally better off existing for longer periods of time—people pay large sums of money to avoid dying. If being sentient for 20 years grants more utility than being sentient for 10 years, it follows that living for some amount of time should generally lead to more utility than never having conscious experiences.
Antinatalists may object to this by arguing that the happiness in the world should be measured by average quality of life and not total utility. But philosophers have shown this view to be flawed since marginal utility does not diminish with the addition of more people. If greater average utility is always better, it would follow that happy people whose happiness is below average would be better off dying in some accident to improve average quality of life.
Suppose a philanthropist gives money to an effective charity. The more people they give money to, the more happiness they have created. Since being alive enables someone to achieve utility (even more so than having money), it follows that if more people are given life, more happiness can be achieved. Hence, people are better off existing than not existing. Most people value their existence at millions of dollars.
Some might argue that the positive experiences of the unborn child are hypothetical since they are not yet sentient, but this is no different than arguing that the future of the newborn is hypothetical since they have not experienced it yet. Since the newborn and unborn child have effectively the same future, they both stand to lose from being killed and both deserve moral consideration.
How said action is performed
Unborn children can be killed in the same ways as newborns. For example, both newborns and unborn children can be torn apart or crushed, causing them to die. Hence, the same harm can be committed against a newborn and an unborn child, causing the same adverse effect to both.
This also distinguishes abortion from contraception, since these actions are not performed in the same way. Killing an unborn child or newborn stops a human organism from growing, whereas contraception prevents gametes from joining to create an organism in the first place.
Context
Since the resolution deals with personhood, all that must be established is that there is some context in which an unborn child can be killed that is not morally different from the context in which an infant can be killed. For example, an active shooter could kill a mother and her infant in the same context that they kill a pregnant woman and her unborn child. If an injustice can be committed against an individual in any context, it follows that said individual deserves moral consideration.
Since similar injustices can be committed against newborns and unborn children, it follows that unborn children are also persons.
Con
#2
Thank you, Savant.
Framework
Meaning of “at conception”:
For me to win this debate it does not matter at what point exactly personhood develops. Even if we could know for sure that a fetus is a person, that would not affirm the resolution, since the fetus comes 10 weeks and numerous developmental milestones after conception. Personhood starting at conception is true if and only if the immediate byproduct, the zygote, is a person.
- PRO has to prove that the single-celled zygote is already a person.
- CON has to dprove that the single-celled zygote is not yet a person.
Meaning of “person”:
PRO attempts to significantly move the goalpost by saying that ANY level of consideration would be sufficient for personhood. Academic sources unilaterally have the exact opposite view:
- Medicine: “The moral sense of personhood denotes individual beings who are moral agents. A moral patient is a being who can suffer at the hands of wrong actions by moral agents. But being a moral patient is distinct from being a moral actor, and nonhuman animals are held to be moral patients. Moral patience is clearly not sufficient for moral personhood”
- Oxfordreference: “Personhood is a philosophical concept designed to determine which individuals have human rights and responsibilities. Personhood may be distinguished by possession of defining characteristics, such as consciousness and rationality, or in terms of relationships with others.”
- Encyclopedia: “Most attempts to define personhood recognize that the human person must extend beyond a merely biological basis to include some form of consciousness or rationality.”
- Conclusion: the word person referrs to the special moral and legal status of sapient humans.
By saying that killing a person is worse than killing a pig PRO himself conceedes that personhood is a special moral tier far above just regular moral patience that all animals can have.
Meaning of “should be given moral consideration”:
Even if moral considerations were possible to make about zygotes, it would not automatically mean we should be making them. We need an in-depth analysis of the overall impact that would have. PRO conceedes that “Moral statutes must work in practice. Rights are predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable effects.” We should not treat zygotes as persons if it leads to overwhelmingly negative consequences for society.
Affirmative case
1. Zygotes have no moral value
Killing a zygote is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. This is because the single-celled organism has none of the morally relevant traits:
- It is not conscious
- It cannot feel pain
- It has no sense of self-preservation
- It has no emotions
All of these are developed weeks later, so are not present right after conception. Meaning the zygote is not even a moral patient.
2. Zygotes don’t have personhood
This flows naturally from the previous argument. The threshold of traits required for personhood is obviously stricter than what is needed for a living organism to be a moral patient. Including:
- Rationality or logical reasoning ability
- Consciousness
- Self-consciousness
- Use of language
- Ability to initiate action
- Moral agency and the ability to engage in moral judgements
Being treated as a person does not necessarily require every single item on this list. Society makes a few exceptions for people with CIPA, brain damage or some other disabilities. But a human with no heart, no body, no pain receptors, no emotions, no brain and no nothing – would not qualify for personhood. The zygote cannot be a person yet because it lacks all the relevant traits.
3. Treating zygotes as persons is not something we should do regardless
A. Impractical.
Giving zygotes personhood means we must give them legal protection and identification papers, but that would be nearly impossible because conception does not occur in a hospital. Mourning the death of family is the primary sign of moral consideration being given, so we must also have hundreds of millions of funerals for the 70% of zygotes that die naturally before birth.
B. Harms women.
Pro-lifers are harassing vulnerable women [1]. Banning abortions causes 24% more maternal deaths overall, and the unquantifiable human toll is great as well [2]. It also leads to substantially higher rates of depression and anxiety among women [3]. Abortion bans are also correlated with and reinforce higher gender and racial inequality [4].
C. Harms Society.
Women are half of society, harming them harms society. Abortion bans massively harm the economy and are correlated with “the worst economic and health outcomes for women and families across the country” [5]. Spikes in child poverty alone outweighs any benefit PRO could purport. If we are serious about zygotes being not just moral patients, but persons, then we must treat abortions as murder and start a mass incarceration of millions of women. This is going to have immense political and economic costs, and ruin the social fabric beyond repair.
D. Most people don’t want it.
Even those that want abortions to be illegal don’t advocate for throwing women in prison. That shows nobody actuallys wants zygotes to be considered persons, just moral patients.
E. Makes no sense
A society constituted solely of living persons, should not prioritize hypothetical rights of future people over the well-being of the ones currently living in society. That would be nonsensical.
Rebuttals
Uncertainty principle
The comparison PRO uses is completely moronic. The uncertainty is about whether the unresponsive body is a corpse or a person. The zygote is completely different. We know that it is alive, but we have no evidence that killing it would be immoral. PRO argues that he does not need certainty of personhood based on conclusive evidence. This is wrong and also incredibly bad faith.
Non Aggression Principle and Harm Principle
- PRO’s own source disproves his claim of NAP having prima facie validity: “the NAP clearly does not prove itself. Reasonable people can and do deny it”.
- PRO’s other source disproves his interpretation of the HP: “The harm principle is not designed to guide the actions of individuals but to restrict the scope of criminal law"
Neither principle is capable of establishing anybody's personhood, because they apply exclusively to persons, and personhood of zygotes is the point of contestation. PRO essentially argues that: If something can be harmed, it ought not be harmed. But this statement is invalid. David Hume already proved you cannot jump directly from how the world is to how it ought to be [6]. What PRO needs is a moral framework to establish why anything deserves not to be harmed, and then prove that these reasons also apply in sufficient degrees to zygotes.
Harm
Imagine a stranger that while you were sleeping connected his body to your bloodstream in order to survive at your expense. Saying he now has a long lifespan that you ought not reduce is fallacious. You cannot calculate lifespan by assuming violations of the rights of others. He was supposed to die immediately, and will as soon as you sever the connection. Since immidiate death is his actual lifespan, it would be impossible for you to reduce it, you can only choose if you want to extend it by adding bodily functions.
"An unborn child will develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed"
Stop lying, Savant. The zygote cannot even exist, much less continue developing, without protection and constant nourishment from the mother. Before week 20, even a fairly developed fetus would die instantly outside of the womb [7]. The mother could kill the zygote by simply refusing to constantly add bodily functions - which you have conceded would not be a harm.
Coma analogy
A sharp sword stuck in its holster is not the same as a block of metal lying on an anvil.
- Both are unusable for cutting for the time being, but one is a sharp sword, while the other is not a sharp sword.
- Destroying the sword instead of trying to get it unstuck entails the loss of a sword.
- But throwing away the random piece of metal does not entail the destruction of a sword, even though it had the potential to become a sword.
Similarly, ending a person with their fully sapient brain currently on pause is not the same as ending a single cell with only the potential to become a person. The comatosed will wake up after 9 months as a person without having changed one bit. But the newborn will have undergone such extensive changes as to not even be recognizable as the original zygote.
The lack of choice is an excellent argument here… for my side. The comatosed person has made active choices their entire life to stay on living. Our reluctance to end that life is predicated on this knowledge about what he would have wanted. The same applies to killing a sleeping baby. If you attacked it while it was awake it would have screamed and crawled away. Knowledge of self-preservation desires deters us from killing persons while they sleep. But a zygote cannot feel pain and has no desire or ability to choose life over death. Killing a zygote is not going to bother it at all. A zygote ghost would never come back to haunt its killer like a person would.
Future Like Ours
Since simply not helping the zygote means it dies, the mother harming it is not possible. Most zygotes don't even have a FLO. "Most human embryos die due to random genetic errors. Around 60% of embryos disintegrate before people may even be aware that they are pregnant. Another 10% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, after the person knows they’re pregnant." [8]. PRO has not even established that potential future personhood proves current personhood, so the vast minority of zygotes that could receive a FLO from their mother would not automatically become persons.
Even in PRO's framework of harm, there is no difference between denying the egg access to sperm, and denying the zygote access to a constant supply of oxygen and nutrients. In both cases the FLO remains unactualized only because bodily functions are not being added. This is supported by the same line of logic PRO uses. For a hypothetical future person, there is no functional difference between contraception and abortion, since both prevent them from getting to exist as sapient humans. But the infinite number of non-existent people are not all suffering just because they remain nonexistant. So saying that a person never getting to exist is a harm is frankly ridiculous, whether applied to abortion or contraception.
Rights of humans vs pigs
First up, “problematic” is a terrible moral standard. Killing and eating cute animals like dogs is way more problematic than eating pigs, despite no obvious moral difference [9]. Secondly, PRO’s own moral standard contradicts this argument. Pigs have way greater capacity for harm than babies. Their intellect, complex emotions, self-preservation instincts and pain receptors allows them to experience extreme suffering of various types [10] [11], plus they have many more bodily and mental functions you could remove from them.
- PRO does not grant pigs personhood despite their incredbibly vast capacity for harm,
- but gives zygotes personhood despite their total lack of capacity for harm,
- but then also denies gametes personhood despite identical species, FLO and harm-potential as zygotes.
This array of insane contradictions are the final nails in the coffin of PRO's argument.
Conclusion:
The zygote is not even developed enough morally relevant traits to be a moral patient. And personhood requires more complex traits like sapience. The zygote is not a person.
Giving zygotes personhood would be irrational, impractical and dangerous.
Round 2
Pro
#3
Thank you, Benjamin, for an intriguing opening round.
Framework:
“PRO attempts to significantly move the goalpost by saying that ANY level of consideration would be sufficient for personhood.”
The description defines personhood as “the point at which a human being should be given moral consideration” and these specifications are “binding to both participants.” Alternative definitions are irrelevant, but also note that Con is cherry picking. One Oxford site defines a person as any individual human, which would include zygotes.
“The uncertainty is about whether the unresponsive body is a corpse or a person. The zygote is completely different.”
Con doesn’t actually dispute that if we are uncertain whether killing an individual will be very harmful, that individual still deserves some level of moral consideration. Con agrees that we do not know if killing the unconscious person will harm them and we should still err on the side of caution. Similarly, if the zygote could be capable of being harmed, we should err on the side of caution. Con seems to agree that if killing an individual might be very bad, we should try to avoid this potential consequence (i.e. moral consideration).
1. Harm Principle:
“PRO’s own source…the NAP does not prove itself”
The article indeed says that the NAP does not prove itself, but it then goes on to discuss foundations for the NAP based on Locke’s and Hume’s respective justifications for private property. The point of the source is to explain what the NAP is and explain that most people oppose aggression prima facie (without sufficient justification).
My arguments for the avoiding harm prima facie were examples that Con does not dispute:
- Removing someone’s limbs is immoral
- If a serial killer threatens to cut off my neighbor’s arm, I should call the police
- Murder is wrong
“PRO’s other source…The harm principle is not designed to guide the actions of individuals but to restrict the scope of criminal law.”
Criminal law definitely involves moral consideration, and the harm principle is an ethical framework designed to guide it. That does not conflict with what I have said. If harm is bad enough to warrant government intervention, then on an individual level it must be a severe moral violation. And Con agrees that harming individuals is wrong prima facie (they argue that harming women is bad).
“Imagine a stranger…connected his body to your bloodstream in order to survive.”
Interestingly enough, Con does not dispute that the individual is still a person. Even if I don’t have moral obligations to him, I should refrain from slitting his throat. Even if I had moral consideration for myself than I did for the stranger and decided to unplug myself, he would still deserve some moral consideration. I’m not reducing the stranger’s lifespan, but the starvation is reducing his lifespan. As I said in R1, even though starvation results from a lack of resources, it causes direct adverse effects on the body. I should call the hospital at the very least to help someone who is malnourished, not decide that they are “supposed to die immediately.”
“The mother could kill the zygote by simply refusing to constantly add bodily functions.”
I said in R1 that “An unborn child will develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed.” Since starvation is a harm (Con does not dispute this), the zygote dies because it is harmed by starvation or being introduced to a hostile environment. Starvation kills individuals and removes bodily functions. So even if the mother isn’t harming the zygote, the zygote is still harmed when it dies from lack of nutrients.
But suppose that Con is right, and the zygote is only a person if the mother decides to support them and give them nutrients. In that case, zygotes are persons in the majority of cases, since the majority of pregnancies do not end in abortion. The zygote still deserves moral consideration. Just as it would be wrong for some third party to come along and stab the stranger connected to my bloodstream, an individual who kills a pregnant woman is committing a double homicide, infringing on the rights of both the mother and the child. So even if Con is right on this point, most zygotes deserve moral consideration.
2. Humans as Persons:
I am arguing that stage of development does not affect personhood. If a toddler, a teenager, and an adult can all be harmed in the same way, causing that harm to humans is wrong regardless of age differences.
“PRO’s own moral standard contradicts this argument.”
My standard is that any human being who can be harmed is a person. Not granting pigs personhood is perfectly consistent with this. In addition, the resolution defines persons as “humans who deserve moral consideration,” which clearly excludes pigs, regardless of whether they deserve moral consideration. If we considered pigs more valuable than human newborns, this would lead to absurd conclusions. For example, it would imply that eating newborns as described in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is less bad than eating bacon. Clearly, the social contract between humans must carry significant weight, enough to outweigh the difference in intellect between pigs and newborns. Further, this means we should likely give more weight to the experiences one is deprived of when being killed. Even if a toddler isn’t very smart right now, killing them would deprive them of an entire human life. Intellect and complex emotions are therefore not a good threshold for personhood.
3. Future Like Ours:
“A sharp sword stuck in its holster is not the same as a block of metal lying on an anvil.”
Neither of these would be an accurate comparison to a comatose individual or a zygote. They would both be more comparable to a plant or animal that is moving through stages of development.
Transformation Analogy
Suppose object A will transform into object B. 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) unless they die. The zygote, too, will develop into an organism with consciousness. Both organisms will be conscious at a later stage of development.
“Ending a person with their fully sapient brain currently on pause is not the same as ending a single cell with only the potential to become a person.”
Someone in a coma doesn’t have a sapient brain at all. Their cells are incapable of consciousness in the same way that a zygote is incapable of 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. 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.
“The comatosed will wake up after 9 months as a person without having changed one bit”
Note all the changes that happen to their brain as described above.
“the newborn…not even be recognizable”
Recognizability isn’t a great threshold for personhood (and Con doesn’t even argue that it is). Someone who receives skin grafts for burn injuries might look very different than before the treatment. Yet they are still a person when they are sedated. Similarly, the same person can look very different at different ages.
“The comatosed person has made active choices their entire life to stay on living.”
Con doesn’t dispute that an infant in a coma is still a person, even though they haven’t made active choices at all and would not scream or run away. Furthermore, an individual not making an active choices is not consent for someone else to kill them. Maybe the comatose individual has never made active choices specifically to avoid being killed by a clown with a hacksaw, but this is not implicit consent for a clown with a hacksaw to kill them.
“Since simply not helping the zygote means it dies, the mother harming it is not possible.”
Again, Con doesn’t dispute that starvation is a harm, even if the harm isn’t coming from another person. And those who are starving are definitely persons who deserve moral consideration, even if we give more consideration to our own interests.
“Most zygotes don't even have a FLO.”
Since zygotes have a significant chance of having a future like ours, the rules of moral consideration still apply. If someone in a coma has even a small chance of waking up, they are still a person and deserve moral consideration. Stabbing them is still harming them.
Operation Analogy
Extend.
4. Comparison to Newborns:
Extend.
1-2.CON “Zygotes have no moral value/personhood”:
“morally relevant traits”
Individuals in comas have none of these traits, yet Con agrees they are still persons. Newborns and mentally handicapped people only have a few of them. Clearly this list is an untenable standard for personhood.
3.CON “Treating zygotes as persons is not something we should do regardless”:
“Impractical”
Con conflates personhood with policy changes, such as giving zygotes identification papers. But granting moral consideration to zygotes does not automatically imply the policy changes Con is bringing up. Persons includes noncitizens. And no one is forced to hold funerals.
“Banning abortion”
This is also outside the scope of the resolution. Giving moral consideration to zygotes does not imply that we stop giving moral consideration to anyone else, nor does it imply how we would weigh the moral rights of zygotes against the moral rights of others.
“Harms Society”
Con seems to agree here that we should follow the harm principle prima facie, which helps corroborate points I made above.
Con
#4
Thank you, Savant.
I will try as best I can to respond to your gish gallop with my limited characters.
Framework:
PRO accepts my BoP interpretation. He has to prove that the single-celled zygote is already a person. I only have to prove that the zygote is not yet a person.
PRO accepts that the statement "zygotes should be given moral consideration" must be judged on practicality, rationality and overall effect on society.
One Oxford site defines a person as any individual human
PRO is the one guilty of cherry picking. Oxford Learners Dictionary is not an academic source trying to rigorously define the concept of personhood. And this definition is totally useless.
PRO invokes a supposedly “binding” and completely made up definition of personhood from the description. But I only need to reject his absurd interpretation of it:
- The description does not specify that "any" moral consideration is enough. That was an attempted addition by PRO in R1.
- If his intention was to be intellectually honest then he should have specified that crucial detail in the description instead of leaving it open for debate.
- If on the other hand he wanted to fight extremely dirty by committing a bait and switch and trapping me in a truism debate, then this is a case of cheating with absurd special rules.
- In which case voters are not only allowed but encouraged by the Code of conduct and DART culture to punish PRO and accept my framework instead.
The overwhelming academic consensus is that personhood entails a very high degree of moral consideration based on an array of morally significant traits.
Affirmative case
1. Zygotes have no moral value.
Academics have a consensus that being a moral patient requires certain morally relevant traits. The zygote has none of these.
2. Zygotes don’t have personhood
The zygote is not a moral patient or a moral agent, or anything really. It cannot be a person.
1 + 2
PRO says I agree that you can be a moral patient and a person without any relevant traits. He lied, I never said that.
3. Treating zygotes as persons is not something we should do regardless
PRO accepts that the consequences of abortion banns are overwhelmingly negative, and that banning abortions is not something we should do. This alone is enough to destroy his case. In a futile effort to avoid this decimating impact, PRO claims that considering zygotes persons does not entail actually treating them like persons. That is cowardly and flat out absurd.
Murder: the crime of intentionally killing a person.
Abortion is the intentional killing of a zygote.
All pro-lifers claim that abortion is murder and should be illegal.
PRO himself claimed that killing a pregnant woman is double homicide and that killing a zygote is equivalent to killing an adult human.
Zygotes being considered persons would make abortion murder, and thus illegal by default. This would result in all the harms I outlined in R1.
4. Giving zygotes moral consideration is impossible
PRO wants semantics and dirty play by abusing supposedly “binding” definitions. I will now give him exactly that. Even accepting all of PRO’s arguments, there is still one problem. The point at which we should give a human being moral consideration is as soon as we know it exists. But detecting pregnancy right after conception is flat out impossible. It takes at least a week before one can test positive [12]. At that point the zygote has already turned into a multicellular blastocyst [13]. So in 100% of cases, “at conception” is not the point we could or should start giving moral consideration.
Uncertainty principle.
PRO does not deny that claiming not to need conclusive evidence for zygote personhood is wrong and incredibly bad faith. Instead he lies and says I don’t dispute this point when I clearly do.
Unconscious body
- We know that:
- Stabbing a living person would be murder
- Stabbing a corpse would not be murder.
- We don't know:
- Whether the body is a person or a corpse.
The uncertainty here matters because there is a possibility that stabbing the unresponsive body is murder.
Zygote
- We know that:
- Stabbing a dead zygote is not murder.
- Stabbing a living zygote is also not murder.
- We don't know:
- Whether the zygote is dead or alive
The uncertainty here doesn't matter since there is no possibility that stabbing a zygote is murder.
There is no uncertainty about the zygotes moral value. We know for sure that it is not a moral patient, and that killing it is not even a little bit immoral, but just amoral.
Harm principle
The insufficient sourcing
All of PRO’s sources on this front specifically limit their analysis to those we already know are persons. None of them try to establish that what makes you a person is potential for harm.
The absurdity
A zygote, being a single celled organism with no complex traits, cannot be harmed to the degrees pigs can:
- Because a pig has pain receptors, you can torture it in various ways.
- Because a pig has complex emotions, you can make it depressed, anxious and scared.
- Because a pig is a social animal, you can isolate it which will make it suffer even more.
PRO's own moral standard, that potential for harm is the source of moral value, makes pigs more valuable than zygotes. PRO claims this is absurd, so he must abandon that moral standard.
The solution
These absurd conclusions come because PRO's moral standard is exactly backwards. You cannot put moral conclusions before moral values.
PRO falsely claims:
- Harming me is immoral => Therefore I deserve moral consideration.
But the correct order is:
- I deserve moral consideration => Therefore harming me is immoral.
Personhood is the reason why harm is immoral, not the other way around.
The impact
PRO argues that zygotes are persons because harming them is immoral. But harming zygotes is only immoral if they are persons. This is nothing more than a big fat circular argument.
The nonsense rebuttals
PRO says pigs cannot be persons because they are not humans. He completely misses the point. In his moral framework pigs are more valuable than many persons, we just discriminate against them because of speciesism. Invoking the social contract solves nothing. Zygotes are not included in the “agreement between the ruled and their rulers” [14]. Plus, the only reason we could have the social contract to begin with is because we are persons, as in sapient moral agents who have to relate to a complex society in ways no other animals need to. Non-persons like zygotes and pigs equally fall outside not only the social contract, but the HP and the NAP too. The moral contradictions in PRO’s argument remain unsolved.
Human beings
Science does not establish that zygotes are human beings in a moral sense. Meaning it does not prove when harming human becomes immoral. "Here, modern science offers no clarity"
Comparison to newborns
I never actually said that newborns are persons. But even if I did, I would not base that on an absurd belief that any and all physical and mental traits are irrelevant for personhood. Newborns are not even comparable to zygotes. They have most of the morally relevant traits, like a brain, pain receptors and emotions - which make them moral patients. While newborns are not persons yet, since they are not moral agents, treating them like persons is rational, practical and beneficial for society.
Child in coma
I dispute the blanket statement that infants in coma are persons. I demand to see a robust and non-ridiculous definition of personhood from PRO before accepting any of his claims about who or what have personhood. Furthermore I reject the notion that infants in general are at all comparable to zygotes.
Zygotes cannot be harmed
Stranger using your organs
My thought experiment was a steel man. Not even a person has any right to a lifespan based on violating others’ bodily autonomy. The zygote, which is not a person, even less so.
Starvation
PRO concedes that the mother cannot starve the zygote. He then goes on to claim that "starvation is a harm, even if the harm isn’t coming from another person”. That is a horrible argument. Morally relevant harm requires a moral agent, an active perpetrator. The laws of physics are not obligated to give you moral consideration. Being killed by them is not an injustice.
FLO
Only 30% of zygotes are genetically viable, 70% die from natural causes early on. Then, 60% of unwanted pregnancies and 30% of all pregnancies end in abortions [15]. And these numbers would be even higher if we include those we don’t have statistics for: illegal abortions, abortion pills and abortions that were only prevented by bans, lack of sex education and general unavailability. So only 10-15% of zygotes survive till childbirth, and then infant mortality is the world's most effective serial killer. For all intents and purposes, FLO begins on your first birthday.
I still have not read any convincing argument that potential for becoming a person in the future automatically proves you are already a person.
Operation analogy
PRO likens giving birth to philanthropy. I accept that analogy. Suppose Mr. Beast gives someone a house. Not a perfect house, but one where he had the windows removed. While he could have given a better gift, nobody would argue that Mr. Beast has somehow harmed the recipient. The same applies here. All bodily functions the fetus gets, and its shot at life after being born, were a direct gift from its mother. This hypothetical operation is not akin to cutting away bodily functions with a knife after you already have them. But instead allows the mother to choose which specific bodily functions to not add to the zygote. PRO already conceded that refusing to add bodily functions is not a harm.
There are only two possible counters to this:
- Maybe lowering the world's average quality of life is immoral?
- Maybe being born disabled is worse than not being born?
PRO has already categorically rejected both of these views. So he must concede that this hypothetical operation is neither harmful nor immoral, just amoral and pointless.
Third party.
Nobody has x-ray vision to detect zygotes in others, so third parties literally cannot give moral consideration to zygotes, only to fetuses in big tummies. Plus, killing a woman during pregnancy is not functionally or morally different from killing a woman before pregnancy in PRO's framework, since both options violate her rights and prevent her potential children from being born.
Comparison to eggs
The egg will also develop consciousness unless directly harmed. Starving it by denying it access to sperm will kill it and rob it of FLO. Conception is an arbitrary cutoff for PRO’s line of logic.
Coma analogy
The changes that happened to the brain during coma obviously happen, I am not claiming that anybody is sapient WHILE in coma. But the person AFTER coma = the person BEFORE coma. The process of neural repair to a previous state of sapience is not the same as the transformation of a non-sapient zygote to a sapient person that had never existed before. "The comatosed have been conscious before and, when they awake, there will be a psychological connection to that past consciousness: there will be memories to the past, and the beliefs, knowledge and relations from the past will extend into that present and future." [16]. The qualities of a person lingers even as the brain has to repair itself. There is no reason to retract personhood from someone just because they fell into a coma and temporarily became nonsapient, since they will wake up later as the same person. But there is good reason to not grant personhood to a single-celled zygote that has never had any of the relevant traits.
Conclusion
Giving zygotes personhood at conception would be irrational, impractical and dangerous, if not literally impossible.
Round 3
Pro
#5
Framework:
Burdens
I’m using the obvious interpretation of the burdens in the description. A small amount of moral consideration is still moral consideration.
Definitions are agreed on by accepting the debate. Con accuses me of using absurd rules to debate a truism. If Con thinks the resolution is obviously true, that helps my case. But there is still room for him to argue against it. Many pro-choice activists would say zygotes deserve no moral consideration.
Uncertainty Principle
Con says “we know stabbing a living zygote is not murder.” Current legal definitions aren’t the same as moral consideration, so I will steelman Con’s argument as “we know stabbing a living zygote isn’t wrong.” We don’t know this (it’s the subject of the debate), and this misses the point of the uncertainty principle. If we are uncertain about the moral status of the zygote, then we don’t know that stabbing it is justified. In that case, stabbing the zygote might be as bad as stabbing a living adult or it might be like stabbing a corpse (a similar dilemma as with the unresponsive person). So, similarly to with the unresponsive person, if we are uncertain about the moral status of the unborn child, they deserve moral consideration (we shouldn’t mutilate them for no reason).
Does Risk of Harm Warrant Moral Consideration?
Con’s definition of “moral patient” (someone deserving moral consideration) includes anyone who can be wronged. Hence, moral consideration and thus personhood is based on capacity to be harmed.
“Zygotes being considered persons would make abortion…illegal”
As I said in R2, giving zygotes moral consideration does not imply how we weigh the rights of zygotes against the rights of the mother. Con compared abortion to removing non-obligatory life support. It follows then that granting the zygote moral consideration would not automatically imply abortion is banned.
“we should give…moral consideration…when we know it exists”
Moral consideration deals with whether actions affecting someone should be given consideration (i.e. if I know an action will affect a zygote, should I consider the moral implications?) A lone vagrant deserves moral consideration. If I know my actions will somehow harm him, I should avoid those actions prima facie. Arguing I will never meet him misses the point of what moral consideration is. (“You shouldn’t strangle your wife” is true as a general rule, even if you’re single.) I argue zygotes should be given moral consideration. A drowning person ought to be saved even if they can’t be.
“Personhood is why harm is immoral, not the other way around”
I contest this. Con agrees that “rights are predicated on…preventing undesirable effects.” Rights, and hence moral consideration, are based on whether an individual can be affected in an undesirable way. If an effect is bad, and a zygote can be affected by the same harm, then said zygote can be affected in an undesirable way and deserves moral consideration. As I argued in R1, “If removing someone’s ability to live part of a human life is evil, then removing someone’s capacity to live an entire human life must be immoral as well.” Even Con’s definition of personhood is aimed at preventing undesirable effects (i.e. pain and unhappy emotions). My threshold is more nuanced and accounts for other ways in which individuals can be harmed, such as removal of bodily functions.
As I said in R1, despite multiple stages of human development (infant, teenager, adult), harm against humans at any stage is still undesirable. It hardly makes a difference to someone whether they are aborted as a zygote or killed painlessly minutes after their birth.
What Constitutes Harm?
“pigs are more valuable than many persons…the social contract solves nothing.”
I’m not disputing that animals warrant some moral consideration. Torturing them for no reason is bad. This is more evidence that harm inherently warrants moral consideration.
But Con assumes sentience is the only factor relevant to the morality of an action. This is not true. First, harm can take the form of lost experiences (killing someone steals their future). A newborn will live an entire human life with unique opportunities a pig won’t have. Second, humans have additional duties to each other via the social contract, which Con misrepresents. The social contract isn’t based on explicit agreement of all people (not everyone will agree on who the leaders are) but the necessity of ensuring a civil society for present and future generations. It therefore pushes humans to respect each other’s rights. The social contract includes children who don’t currently contribute to society. People are closer to family members than they are to other citizens, implying even stronger moral duties to family.
Con again doesn’t dispute that basing personhood on intelligence/emotions would lead to absurd conclusions, such as implying that eating newborns is less bad than eating bacon
Comparison to newborns
Con agrees newborns should be given moral consideration. Con doesn’t contest that total harm/gain from an action, how said action is performed, and context surrounding said action would tell us whether it is justified. I argued these factors are morally equivalent when killing newborns and unborn children.
Con doesn’t directly dispute my premises, but he implies pain receptors, emotions, and a brain are morally relevant distinctions. I hold that this difference is not morally relevant if the newborn is killed painlessly. Killing the newborn is still wrong if they don’t feel pain or negative emotions when being killed.
The wrongness of killing the newborn comes from depriving them of the chance to have a future (if you weren’t depriving them of a future, you wouldn’t be killing them) and use their brain in the future. The unborn child is similarly deprived of the chance to use their brain in the future. Whether the newborn used their brain in the past doesn’t change the harm being committed against them and the future they are losing.
“I dispute…that infants in coma are persons.”
Since Con agrees killing coma patients is wrong, and stage of development (teenager, young adult, elderly) doesn’t affect the right not to be harmed, infants in comas must also deserve moral consideration. Since killing a human without consciousness, memories, or Con’s other criteria is still immoral, zygotes deserve moral consideration.
“Harm requires…an active perpetrator.”
I used harm to mean “adversely affect” in R1 (first line I wrote). Natural disasters and fires can harm people. If my neighbor’s house is on fire, they might die. That’s definitely a morally relevant consideration, and it means I should probably call the fire department. Widespread starvation also deserves ethical consideration, and we shouldn’t kill starving people or starving zygotes.
Plus, the majority of pregnancies are intended, so the mother is planning to stay pregnant (this debate deals with the majority). Hence, the unborn child isn’t starving and still deserves moral consideration from third parties even if Con’s claim is right (which is why killing a pregnant woman is a double homicide).
“FLO…[infants] die from natural causes”
As I said in R2, “If someone in a coma has even a small chance of waking up, they still deserve moral consideration.” Extend that point. We would also say that killing newborns is robbing them of their future despite the fact they could die anyway.
“this operation is not immoral”
Con tries to justify mutilating children in utero so they grow up disabled. He says this operation determines which features “to not add to the zygote”. But the zygote has already been given bodily functions that are now being impeded. Chopping off part of the zygote to cause a disability is removing functionality, a direct harm. Life is given by parents, but that is obviously not a justification for parents to kill their children. This would be like Mr. Beast embezzling money from a charity he donated to or blinding someone after curing their eyesight.
“The egg will develop consciousness…starving it by denying it access to sperm will…rob it of FLO”
Lacking a bodily function is not the same as running out of nutrients and starving to death. Not having an immortality potion is not the same as dying because you don’t have food.
Denying an egg access to sperm is akin to refusing to give someone a third arm or superpowers. The sperm does not have any internal process that would lead to experiencing a human life. Conception is creating a new organism with new bodily functions.
A zygote has bodily functions of growth and development that will create consciousness unless halted by starvation. This is comparable to someone in a coma whose brain is beginning to repair itself but stops because they suffocate or starve. Those would be direct harms to the person in the coma.
“The comatosed have been conscious before…there will be memories to the past…beliefs, knowledge and relations”
I said in R1, “Suppose there is someone in a deep coma who will awaken…without their memories.” Since killing unconscious dementia patients is wrong, memories aren’t required for personhood. Nor are consistent beliefs or relationships—dementia patients can go through drastic personality changes and might not have friends, but killing them is wrong. The undesirable effect from removing bodily functions is still the same (stealing someone’s future) irrespective of past experiences. The zygote will also have consciousness that extends into the future, plus beliefs and knowledge. Those potential experiences have the same value/utility irrespective of past experiences.
“The qualities of a person lingers as the brain has to repair itself”
Not according to Con’s list of morally relevant traits, which all require consciousness. To consider coma patients as persons and advocate against killing them painlessly, one must use my standard of “a human being who can be harmed.”
Conclusion:
Unborn children can be harmed and thus deserve moral consideration, making them persons.
Con
#6
Thank you, Savant.
Attempt at truism debate
I think the resolution is obviously false since "Moral consideration is not sufficient for personhood. The moral sense of personhood denotes individual beings who are moral agents." [1].
But...
IF the description says that:
- Personhood just means ANY moral consideration. [contradicting academic definitions of personhood]
- Moral consideration just means ANY harm is possible, regardless of morally relevant traits. [contradicting academic definitions of moral patience]
- These definitions are binding
THEN PRO is guilty of trying to define the resolution into a truism.
Fortunately both moderation and CoC doesn't enforce description rules, and actually encourage voters to punish absurd special rules like this.
Harm
Moral principle
PRO stated numerous times in this debate that only undesirable actions are immoral, and if you can affect something in an undesirable way, only then does the thing deserve moral consideration. So he has conceeded that the ability to desire is a valid and morally relevant distinction. Any traits that are necesary to have desires are therefore also a valid moral distinction.
- Consciousness
- Pain receptors
- Self-preservation instincts
- Emotions
- Rationality
These are actually just the traits relevant for desires. For example, pain receptors and self-preservation insticts are what makes burning to death undesirable. And emotions are what makes being mocked by others undesirable. To be capable of desire requires having at least one of these traits. Such beings are called moral patients and only they deserve moral consideration.
Desires can be passive
You don't need constant consciousness to retain desires. "Long term dispositional desires only go away when you die or when your brain is irrevocably destroyed. But for you or any other entity to have dispositional desires, you must first have some initial first person conscious experience. A being that has never experienced desire of any kind can’t have long term desires." [16].
Human vs Animals
Humans being more valueable than animals can be explained as humans giving human desires more significance. However, this significance wouldn't apply to the zygote which has no desires.
Operation
PRO changes the argument from "prevent development off bodily function" to "cutting it off after the fact". But this harms his case:
- You cannot chop off a part of the single-celled zygote. If you cut the cell-membrane it will just die a painless death. Which is no different than the amoral choice of not feeding it.
- So the mother literally cannot make the zygote worse off. She still cannot wrong the zygote in any way, and has no duty to morally consider it.
- But you can chop off a part of the multicellular fetus. Cutting off its limbs will not painlessly kill it, but painfully mutilate it. Which is actually bad and undesirable.
- So the mother can make the developed fetus worse off. She CAN wrong the fetus, but only because of the morally relevant traits it has developed AFTER conception.
PRO accepts that (1) not being carried to term is not immoral, (2) the mother killing the zygote to get it out of her body is not immoral, and (3) mutilating fetus is an immoral harm. Their inevitably conclusion is that the need for moral consideration starts at zero and grows over time, because development increases the severity, variety and undesirability of potential harm.
Comparison groups
Unborn children
The capacity to have desires is a symetry breaker that develops many months after conception at the earliest. Moral patience of fetuses with desires does not translate logically to zygotes.
Newborns
Unlike zygotes, a newborn baby has
- An obvious existence and Present Like Ours on top of FLO.
- Capacity for suffering (pain receptors, fear response)
- Mental functions (memory, decision-making, consciousness, emotions)
- They are finally individual humans bioloigcally, socially and legally.
These are the traits that warrant giving babies personhood. Especially since treating babies like persons is rational, practical, and beneficial for society.
Newborns in coma
All of the above points apply here as well. But even if they didn't have personhood on their own, the relationship with mother is on its own a sufficient justification for awarding personhood.
Adults in coma
All the above points apply here even more so. Adults in coma have social relationships and a Past Like Ours that gives the chance at FLO that much more weight. Temporary loss of consciousness and sapience doesn't counter this, because they retain their implicit desires not to be killed just as a sleeping person does, and it makes sense that personhood cannot be retracted.
dementia patients can go through drastic personality changes and might not have friends,
This argument needs them to lose everything: ALL mental traits, memories, skills and hobbies, personality, relations, possesions and body. Basically, they must become like a zygote.
Gametes
A zygote has bodily functions of growth and development that will create consciousness unless halted by starvation.
Gametes have bodily functions of meeting and fusing together that will create consciousness unless halted by contraception.
the zygote still deserves moral consideration from third parties even if Con’s claim is right (which is why killing a pregnant woman is a double homicide).
the unfertilized egg still deserves moral consideration from third parties even if Pro's claim is right (which is why killing a fertile man is a genocide)
Even if a zygote isn’t very smart right now, killing them would deprive them of an entire human life.
Even if a gamete isn't very smart right now, killing them would deprive them of an entire human life.
You get the point. The same rhetoric PRO uses can be applied to gametes as well.
Gametes have:
- Human DNA
- Future like ours
- Capacity for harm.
All the requirements for personhood under PRO's framework.
Farm animals
Pigs have an insanely high capacity for harm, way more than babies. If it is true that we ought to avoid harm prima facie, then it is not true that killing babies is more evil than killing pigs.
harm can take the form of lost experiences
PRO is saying that potential future experiences outweight the current experiences, enough to make a pigs worth far less than zygotes despite having orders of magnitude more of all the morally relevant traits. This of course has the insane implication that eating terminal cancer patients is less wrong by virtue of them having less FLO to lose, which sounds far more absurd.
Impact
As I have repeated countless times, the concept of morally relevant harm and loss requires you to have something to begin with, and a prior desire to keep what you have. Since zygotes don't yet have anything they stand to lose, and also are phyiscally incapable of viewing the concept of loss as undesirable, they are not eligible to be called moral patients. The only thing they have in common with persons is their human DNA, which is not a morally relevant trait, and PRO has not even tried to argue that it is. So to say that it is possible for newborns, coma patients and dementia patients to have a trait that the zygote doesn't have, personhood, is simply fallacious reasoning.
FLO
PRO claims that using your body and brain in the future is what gives you moral value, and the capacity to lose your body and brain is what constitutes harm, which is a concession that physical and mental properties are the source of moral value. His only argument then, is that potential body and brain are equivalent to actualized body and brain, which is unsuported and nonsensical.
But let us assume, wihtout sufficient evidence, that FLO is actually valid.
The description said something that PRO comfirmed in both R2 and R3, namely that to win he needs to demonstrate that at least 51% of zygotes are persons right after conception. When I show that his own standard judges only a minority of zygotes to be persons, then he must admit BoP defeat. That brings us to his last argument, zygote FLO, which he defends thusly in his R3:
zygotes are persons in the majority of cases since the majority of pregnancies do not end in abortion
The problem with this statement is that it is wrong. 70% of zygotes have genetic defects that make their spontaneus abortion a certainty [8]. The majority of 30% is still less than 51%.
Affirmative case final summary and defense
1. Zygotes are not moral patients
The zygote has none of the traits that scholarly sources unanimously agree define a moral patient. Without any desires to respect, we should give the zygotes no moral consideration.
2. Zygotes are not persons
The zygote has none of the traits that scholarly sources unanimously agree define a person. Zygotes are neither moral patients nor moral agents, and the vast majority lack any FLO.
PRO's definition is incredibly favourable to his side, which makes sense it was made-up by him and presented with no academic source or any justification really:
Personhood: the point at which a human being should be given [even just a small ammount of] moral consideration.
In reality, as opposed to PRO's made up world, personhood entails:
- A very high degree of moral consideration.
- A degree of moral agency
- A non-zero ammount of biological and social independence.
- Legal rights and protections.
This is intuitively trueand perfectly logical. Savant does not even try to dispute that it is universally accepted academically. And not a single zygote is a person according to this defintion.
3. We should not treat zygotes as persons
PRO accepts that giving legal rights and registration to zygotes, holding funerals for them and banning abortion is extremely harmfull, impractical and irrational. Essentially, PRO agrees that treating zygotes like persons are treated is not something we should do. This should count as my win since for all intents and purposes the zygote is still not fully a person even in PRO's world.
4. Giving zygotes moral consideration is impossible
Drowning children are a bad analogy since detecting them and helping them is not only possible but relatively easy. We ought to consider them because intentionally affecting them in our everyday is plausible, given that detecting them is a real possibility that doesn't require superpowers. But even if giving zygotes moral consideration is good in theory, their personhood fails PRO's standard of practicality: "the existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable effects". No double homicide is ever going to be prevented by morally considering zygotes impossible to detect.
Summary
PRO's standard for personhood makes no sense. Even animals and gametes have enough moral value to be persons, and are excluded for no reason other than "they fall outside the social contract" which is there is no reason for, since PRO thinks they have enough moral consideration to be a person and intelligence and sapience is not a requirement or even a relevant metric in his view. He ignores the scholarly definitions to even have a chance. He has provided not a single benefit of morally considering zygotes, nor an harm that would realistically be prevented, despite agreeing that to be necesary. PRO lost on most points. He even conceedes the pro-choice position. I achieved everything I came her for.
Conclusion
The majority of zygotes are not persons even by PRO's standard, and especially not by academically sound ones, so personhood does not begin at conception in most cases.
Vote CON!
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/1ppTaynxNwq_BgyoFDJ-iHLcwvzdSUVggXmUFp-2nRiE/edit?usp=sharing
I'll admit, my thoughts on this one got a bit jumbled, took a while to disentangle them. Hope the RFD makes more sense than it initially did in my head.
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 debaters aren't arguing the resolution. When I read or skim the debate, it is clear they are arguing over whether abortion is murder and therefore wrong or not wrong. That is not the subject of the debate, the subject of the debate is whether personhood begins at conception or not.
We are not here to argue whether abortion is wrong or not wrong. Therefore, whoever stays on topic and argues the resolution the best will get the point for arguments.
Pro starts off appealing to examples of moral consistency and semantics. Personhood begins at conception because the lifeform is already human and will eventually develop to have consciousness, sentience, and emotions. If an action interferes with this potential by stopping it, then this action is defined as a harm. Pro argues that a fetus deserves the same moral consideration as an adult because their value and worth are not different. If killing an adult human or an infant is wrong, then the same is true for fetuses. Pro contends with the idea that abortion is acceptable, but euthanizing coma patients is murder by pointing out that any justification or argument someone applies to not killing a coma patient can also be used to save the life of a fetus. That intelligence and sentience do not determine whether a person is worthy of moral consideration.
(Pro doesn't give a strong justification for why murder is wrong and why humans fall into the category of personhoods, even if I buy that fetuses are human. We could also use a judging criteria for what to consider moral consideration. Proportional harm/benefit, context, and the method is too vaguely defined.)
Con begins very strongly. Con cleverly points out that Pro's own concept he gives for personhood is self-refuting. Specifically, the example where murdering a human is worse than murdering a pig. Con's point here is that pro's version of personhood contains qualities of exceptionalism that give it unfair privilege over other species. Con defines the qualities that constitute personhood.: Sentience, autonomy, and critical thinking. Con reasons that a zygote possesses none of these qualities and therefore has no moral value. Con's arguments also begin to go off-topic and are irrelevant, such as when he mentions that banning abortion harms women. This is outside the scope of the debate because this does nothing to tell me why or why zygotes aren't persons. Con's rebuttal against Pro's Uncertainty Principle does not refute the example. While Pro didn't define what he considers personhood, he did clearly describe an example of harm as something that ends life.) Con also breaks the conduct rule by describing Pro's example as moronic and name-dropping him directly to accuse him of lying.
Pro argues that all humans are persons, regardless of their stage of development. And that according to the social contract, a human killing another human is more immoral than a human killing another pig and that the consensus for moral value is not defined by an intelligence gap. Pro defends that fetuses are worthy of moral consideration by mentioning their potentiality. Con argues there is no reason to give moral consideration to imaginary future people, but Pro has refuted this by explaining that fetuses are already living people.
Given the debate, the victory does seem to be slightly in Pro's favor but only slightly, as this debate could have went any way. Pro didn't need to define killing as wrong, he needed to establish a criteria regarding what makes someone worthy of moral consideration and what doesn't. Con is the only one to do this, and if Pro didn't pushback with counter-examples and inconsistencies in society's morals, Con would have won this.
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:
Explained in comments.
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:
There is a clear pattern in PRO's argumentation: bad abductive reasoning. In the case of the "harm principle," what constitutes harm, coma analogy and so on. Each of these share a similarity: they all do not offer other explanations of the principle or reason for a given phenomena. For example, PRO tries to establish what constitutes as harm (explanation) from one example - in which - there could be other explanations. The coma analogy, PRO states only two reasons why killing a person who is in a coma is wrong when there can be other explanations for it being wrong - then - tries to analogize it to a zygote even though the similarities has been essentially forced. The harm principle wasn't even established well; the establishment of the principle was framed as an analogy when truly it was an abductive argument: from a few examples (unborn and questionably dead person) there was a conclusion that in cases where there it is unclear if someone has person-hood they have moral consideration. Which, justifiably, prompted CON to argue against it as if it was an argument in of itself rather than an establishment of a principle. For an abductive argument to be effective it needs to consider other explanations from a few facts and then an demonstration why those some other explanations are not as good, but in this case, it seemed like PRO gave the best explanation that was first thought of or seen and ran with it. Which becomes obvious when CON gives a valid alternative explanation for why someone in a coma has moral consideration while the analogized does not: they would want to live. Essentially, every step to arrive at a conclusion is poisoned by how ill-formed the arguments were.
CON's only sin, when arguing the affirmative case, was using a dictionaries to establish what makes a person have person-hood. The establishment of person-hood, or when a human becomes a person, is a matter of debate that needs to be established - not - something that should be deferred to a dictionary. Which PRO, at the very least, admittedly poorly, attempted to do. However, the only reason why CON's argument is slightly better is due to it being the entire argument being not ill formed. CON essentially "established" the standards of person-hood, zygotes did not fit that criteria, which CON argued that means zygotes do not have moral weight.
The difference here is that PRO's affirmative argument is essentially entirely faulty, while CON's affirmative argument is somewhat faulty.
In terms of rebuttals, no one really does better than another. Firstly, the harm principle was merely a principle - not - an argument in of itself that establishes zygots with person-hood. Which CON seemed to be under the impression of, which is not entirely their fault considering how PRO framed their establishment of the principle. That is to say, CON did not actually dispute the principle and really couldn't due to not knowing that it was a principle that was suppose to support a future argument: the coma argument. In that case, CON did actually attack what was wrong with that argument: another explanation for why it is wrong. PRO, albeit not directly pointed out the flaw of CON's argument, was hinting at the right direction by questioning the definitions in which CON gave for person-hood. The difference here is that CON sometimes aced a rebuttal and at other times completely missed, while PRO was close to giving a valid rebuttal but not quite there.
In terms of reliable sources, both parties seem to give acceptable sources to demonstrate concepts. While PRO's arguments were ill-formed, they are not so ill-formed that is significantly less legible than CON. In terms of conduct, neither side was significantly worse. The only time CON has actually attacked PRO's character is when they have accused them of lying. Every other time has been a characterization of PRO's argument or how PRO has argued. At most, CON is very aggressive with expressing how bad they think PRO's arguments are or how they are arguing, which is not bad conduct as long as they engage with the arguments at those points. The conduct criterion I would tentatively argue for.
Here you go. Lmk if this works for you.