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Topic
#6267
THBT: On balance, abortion is immoral [for @Bones]
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Description
RESOLUTION:
THBT: On balance, abortion is immoral.
BURDEN OF PROOF:
BoP is shared equally. Pro argues that abortion is morally wrong. Con argues that abortion is morally permissible.
DEFINITIONS:
Abortion is “the willful and direct termination of a human pregnancy and of the developing offspring.”
Immoral means “morally wrong.”
On balance means “under usual circumstances.”
RULES:
1. All specifications presented in the description are binding to both participants.
2. Only Bones 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 borrow a book from a library. 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 (or, as I will argue, risks doing either of these), then abortion is immoral prima facie. Further, I will argue that avoiding the burden of pregnancy is not a sufficient justification for abortion, making it wrong all things considered.
I will make frequent use of analogies. 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.
Uncertainty Principle
I argue that an unborn child is a person with rights, but suppose there’s only a 2% chance that is the case. This would be akin to drunk driving, where the risk of killing a person is low but not negligible.
To determine the significance of this risk, I will use risk exposure, which calculates the expected harm from a particular risk. To give an example, we should be equally wary of killing 1 person and running a 10% chance of killing 10 people, all things being equal, as the expected (i.e. average) harm from each of these is equal.
With regard to abortion, the average lifespan is 73 years, and 2% of that is 1.46 years. Hence, even if there’s only a 2% chance that the unborn child has a right not to be aborted, the average expected rights violation from abortion would be depriving a person of over a year of their life. The ends (avoiding the burden of pregnancy) cannot justify the means, since the expected burden of pregnancy lasts less than a year.
Hence, for abortion to be morally permissible, Con must either establish that the risk of abortion violating someone’s rights is entirely negligible or provide a method superior to risk exposure for evaluating the morality of risking a person’s life.
My Case
Arguments 1-3 will deal with establishing the personhood of the unborn. Arguments 4-5 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. The burden of a disease, for example, is often measured in “life years,” which includes both the reduction in quality of life and the reduction in the amount of life lived. Per this metric, unborn children can be harmed significantly by abortion. 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) impeding bodily functions and (2) not adding bodily functions. I hold that the first is a harm, while the latter is not. A bodily function is something an organism is in the process of doing via internal processes like mitosis that could potentially be impeded through nutritional imbalances or outside intervention.
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 by a hostile third party or some other threat, we should try to protect them. 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, suffocation, and hormone deficiency 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, as can hormonal deficiency. If your child is starving, for example, that is a direct harm which you ought to prevent. Furthermore, if a child is suffering from hormonal deficiencies, this causes direct bodily harms such as elevated blood sugar levels; hence, their parents ought to treat them with medicine in order to mitigate this harm.
These examples are not exhaustive, but per Occam’s razor, we should accept the simplest definition of harm (i.e. the one I provided) that can explain these examples, unless Con can provide a competing definition of harm that explains them better.
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. (And even if unconscious people don’t literally express desires, we know that most humans wouldn’t want to be killed, which means that killing is harmful.) 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 keep growing and develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed (if their bodily functions are impeded through starvation or losing oxygen or hormonal deficiency). The zygote is already growing and will become a newborn unless this process of growth is impeded, much like a newborn is in the process of growing into later stages of development.
But sperm will not develop into a person unless combined with an egg (if bodily functions are added). Growth into a later stage of human development requires it to become an entirely new organism with entirely new bodily functions. Conception is categorically different from pregnancy in that an entire gamete is being added to merge with, rather than nutrients which prevent nutritional deficiency, or direct harm, in an existing organism. Again, this is not a comprehensive description of pregnancy, but this should establish that abortion causes direct harm that contraception does not cause.
My position here is actually a very modest one. As the examples above show, we already distinguish between (1) and (2) when it comes to born humans; hence, granting that abortion is immoral does not imply that contraception is immoral. Contrapositively, granting that contraception is not immoral does not imply that abortion is not immoral.
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. An unborn child is its own individual organism with unique DNA. As one source puts it, “A Chinese zygote implanted in a Swedish woman will always be Chinese, not Swedish, because his identity is based on his genetic code, not that of the body in which he resides.”
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). We extend similar rights to teengers, adults, and infants not based on their stage of development (which vary between them) but because they can be harmed in similar ways. It hardly makes a difference to someone whether they are aborted as an embryo or killed painlessly in their sleep minutes after their birth. Hence, per Occam’s razor, the most straightforward conclusion is that both killings are immoral.
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 few 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.
- 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 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 (reduction in life years): The comatose individual could have lived a long life
- Lack of choice: No choice was given to the comatose individual
- 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
These harms also occur when an unborn child is killed. Hence, unless Con can provide some harms that occur to the comatose individual but not to the unborn child, we should naturally conclude that killing the unborn child is as harmful as killing the person in the coma. And even if Con can provide harms that occur solely to the person in the coma, the harms listed above establish that killing an unborn child is still significantly harmful.
Operation Thought Experiment
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.
Modus Ponens
- P1: Removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences is harmful.
- P2: Abortion is removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences.
- C1: Therefore, abortion is harmful.
4. Killing vs. Letting Die:
Direct harms vs. Indirect harms
It is sometimes argued that abortion is simply “letting someone die” in early stages of pregnancy when the unborn child depends on the mother. However, refusal of bodily support can still equate to direct killing in some circumstances. To understand why, consider the following scenario:
A woman carries a child deep into a forest on a camping trip. For whatever reason, she leaves the child there, where it is eaten by wild beasts. Clearly, this is immoral.
I argue that abortion is morally comparable to this. Despite the fact that carrying the child into the forest puts the child in a state of physical dependency, carrying the child into the forest alone is not a direct harm. Parents bring their children to all sorts of places, but harm does not occur until the child is abandoned. Similarly, when a woman aborts a child she conceived, removing bodily support is a direct harm to the child.
Modus Ponens
- P1: Removing bodily support after making someone dependent on oneself is a direct harm.
- P2: Abortion is removing bodily support after making someone dependent on oneself.
- C1: Abortion is a direct harm
The forest analogy establishes P1, and P2 is true under usual circumstances, as the vast majority of abortions 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
Hence, the question that matters is whether a justification exists in the case of abortion for directly killing one’s child. 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. Therefore, the former is a greater harm, and the ends cannot justify the means.
5. 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.
Obligation from Responsibility
I argue that parents have specific responsibilities to children, based on their familial relationship and the responsibility to help those whom one has directly put in a dangerous situation.
Infanticide through abandonment was common in ancient times. 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 infanticide in Ancient Rome was still immoral. Recall that rights of equal importance merit equal weighting in equal situations. By similar logic, 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
I. Permissibility of abortion
- The argument I will be defending takes the following form.
p1. An action is morally impermissible if it violates the moral entitlements of a person or it has morally unacceptable consequences.
p2. Abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of a person.
p3. Abortion does not have morally unacceptable consequences.
c1. Abortion is not morally impermissible.
When is Something Moral? (p1)
- I suspect there won’t be much debate here as it is trivial that something is wrong if it violates a moral entitlement or it has morally unacceptable consequences, and that if abortion is wrong, it would be for one of these two reasons.
The Fetus’ Personhood (p2)
p2.1 An entity E has moral entitlements (is a person) if and only if either (i) E has a non trivial interest N at t or (ii) N is in E’s interest at t and E is capable of having a non trivial interest in N at t.
p2.2 The fetus is not E
p2.3 If the fetus is not E, abortion does not violate its moral entitlements
c2.1 Abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of E (a person).
Criteria for personhood (p2.1)
- There are several reasons to believe that entities are persons if and only if they have (i) actualizable interests (ii) or their interests can be indexed to some prior mental state. Minimally, an entity is a person if at one point they have experienced non-trivial sentience. Here, I use non-trivial to convey the primitive difference between a fly’s sentience and a human being's sentience, only the latter of which can be said to be non-trivial. Formally,
- (∀xPx ↔ Nx ∨ Cx) For all x, x is a person if and only if they have interests N at time t or N is in E’s interest at t and B is capable of having an interest in N at t
- Px: x is a person
- Nx: x has an interest N at t
- Cx: x N is in E’s interest at t and B is capable of having an interest in N at t
- Here, I take Korz's (2002) notion of capable, where for E to be capable of having an interest in object O requires that at time t - n (prior to t) through t, E has certain beliefs and desires, and were certain logically possible events to have occurred after t - n but prior to t, E would have desired O at t.
- Because the above can be cumbersome to repeat, it can be simplified for future reference as
- P↔Q
- P: a person
- Q: Nx ∨ Cx (refer to above)
- There is immense explanatory power in favour of this theory of personhood.
- General abductive motivations
- Abduction refers to a type of inference which looks at our domain of knowledge and defers to the best available explanation. It can be said that this theory is abductively virtuous.
- Just look around and you will see that any entity who you think is a person (your parents, yourself, people from five thousand years ago) are people who meet the proposed disjunct. If the person you picked is a person, then they are non-trivially sentient.
- Thus P→Q
- Indeed, you can even think about purely hypothetical individuals (let’s say they’re aliens), stipulate that they meet the disjunct and be comfortable in saying that they are persons.
- For instance, suppose you see an entity which shares absolutely no physical similarity to human beings. At this point, with the given information, it would be pretty difficult to make a moral evaluation about this thing (it could just be a rock). However, let’s stipulate that this being possesses non-trivial sentience (has a non-trivial interest N at t where t is the present). Basically, it has mental contents like you and I. With just this one fact, it seems that we are licensed to make claims about this individual's moral status. Thus, knowing that an entity is non-trivially sentient means that it is a person.
- Thus = Q→P
- Because P→Q and Q→P are equivalent to, P↔Q, we can say that P↔Q has been proven.
- Proof by Contraposition
- In logic, the contrapositive of a statement has its antecedent and consequent negated and swapped. The resulting formula is logically equivalent to the original. Given their equivalence, the reason this is useful is because contrapositives can be (trivially) used as proofs for conditionals.
- Suppose you have what seems to be a human person in front of you. They appear and act as though they are a normal human being. Yet, you find out that this being is merely a highly sophisticated robot with someone controlling it, which itself has never nor is having any sentient experiences.
- Notice here that every physical fact true of a human is true of the robot, yet, upon learning the one fact about this being’s lack of sentience, we are willing to say the entity is not a person.
- Thus ¬Q→¬P
- Think about anything which isn’t a person (chairs, tables, silverware) and upon reflection, none of these things are non-trivially sentient.
- Thus ¬P→¬Q
- Combined with my last argument, we have extremely strong reasons to favour the proposed theory. We know that when the proposed criteria is instantiated, an entity is a person, and when the proposed criteria isn’t instantiated, the entity is not a person.
- Accounting for auxiliary interests
- The second part of the disjunct (N is in E’s interest at t and B is capable of having an interest in N at t) is necessary for preserving the rights of individuals who may not presently cognise them. For instance, suppose that an individual is in a coma, and hence not processing any desires. Clearly, we want to say that this person still has rights. Hence, this theory states that given they have once had interests, it is rational to afford them a full set of human rights.
- Notice how this is not just an ad hoc maneuver. For a right to be, for example, violated, it must first exist ,which means that whatever gives one a right must exist prior to the time it is violated.
- Potential rebuke
- Pre sentient rights violations - I have argued for a biconditional between persons (and their moral entitlements) and sentience. A critic may attempt to point at specific entities which we deem to be persons, but does not have sentience. Suppose that we have a baby who has never been sentient, but will be in five minutes. Since such an entity has never been sentient, it is not protected under the proposed rights theory, and hence killing it is perfectly fine, yet, it is argued that such a killing seems to be highly immoral.
- I argue that this hypothetical is not problematic. Imagine one takes this pre sentient baby and replicates it (including the fact that it will be sentient in 5 minutes). However, they have replicated it in such a way that its biological constitution has been entirely replaced with synthetic materials and fabric. It is, in essence, a doll which is about to be sentient. In this case, is there a person being harmed when the doll is being destroyed? It seems that there is not. We can clearly understand that the doll is not a person, and will only become one after sentience. Given this, it's also recognisable that there is no obligation to bring what could be a person into existence (otherwise we would be obligated into impregnating people all day).
- If we understand that killing a pre sentient doll does not violate a being's moral entitlement, and all the moral predicates true of the doll are also true of the baby, it follows that killing a pre sentient baby also doesn’t involve any rights violations.
- Note how per p1, killing the doll can still be wrong even if the doll is not sentient. For instance, even though my neighbour's doll is not a person (or have moral entitlements), that does not mean I can snatch it out of their hand and rip its head off. Trivially, things can be wrong even if they do not involve rights violations.
The Fetus’ Ontology (p2.2)
- The medical consensus on when a fetus first gains sentience is 22 weeks, with some postulating it to be as late as 30 weeks.
- In addition, a fetal electroencephalogram shows alternation between signs of being asleep and being awake only at or after thirty weeks of gestation.
- Thus, it seems unlikely that the fetus is sentient until at least after twenty weeks of gestation. The fetus satisfies neither disjunct of the proposed theory and is hence not a person.
Abortions and entitlements (p2.3)
- Because 93% of abortions happen before 13 weeks gestation, almost every abortion falls clearly outside of the parameter within which the fetus gains sentience. Thus, abortion does not violate the rights of any moral entity.
Conclusion (c2.1)
- Because the argument takes the form of modus ponens and the premises are true, the argument is sound and the conclusion that abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of a person is upheld.
The Effects of Abortion (p3)
- We now know that the fetus is not a person (where most abortions are concerned) so abortion does not violate the fetus’ rights. But this fact alone doesn’t justify abortions permissibility. Indeed, just because a child’s doll doesn’t have rights does not mean that I can rip it up or steal it (this would violate someone else’s rights, namely the child) These would be morally unacceptable consequences.
- However, I argue that no such consequences exist in the case of abortion.
Does it violate other people’s rights?
- The mother is the clearest stakeholder in abortions. Given abortions are only pursued because the mother has sought to undergo such treatment, it cannot be said that her rights are being violated.
- That this decision is free and informed is corroborated by the fact that most people who get abortions do not regret it.
Does it harm society at large?
- Countries where abortions are legal tend to have higher GDP than countries with restrictive legislation.
- Furthermore, countries with access to legal abortions is correlated with higher average economic freedom.
Harm of abolition
- It is widely recognised that the abolition of abortion has deleterious consequences. As Tyrer (1985) found, “if abortions were again made illegal, the number of illegal abortions in the US would probably increase from fewer than 20,000 at present to more than 1,000,000 per year. Because illegal abortion may carry a risk of death as much as 30 times that of legal abortion, deaths to women of reproductive age in the US would be expected to increase”.
- If abortion is banned, the mortality rates would increase by 7% within a year and 21% over subsequent years post-abortion ban.
Safety of legally induced abortions
- Psychological research indicates that abortions are not linked to mental health problems.
- Contrary to common pro-life belief, abortion is not linked to infertility or breast cancer.
- Thus abortion carries neither psychological or physical problems.
- Thus, abortion does not have any morally unacceptable non-rights violation outcomes.
Conclusion (c1)
- As abortion neither violates the fetus’ rights nor has unacceptable consequences, abortion is permissible.
II. Rebuttals
1. “Persons Should Not be Harmed
- Savant’s criteria for personhood can be inferred as stating “an entity E is a person if and only if they can be harmed”, where harm is defined as “impeding bodily functions”. There are several reasons why this is uncompelling.
- Philosophical zombies
- A P zombie is an entity who is physically identical to human beings but lacks the ability to deploy sentience.
- Under Savants definition, P zombies are persons who can be harmed. They are organisms which go through mitosis and will grow unless impeded, have limbs which can be removed and stomachs that can be starved. Yet, this is clearly absurd. P zombies lack attributability, accountability and answerability and hence neither demand now fulfil moral obligations. To cut the arm off a p zombie is equivalent to cutting the arm off a doll.
- What’s the answer?
- It seems that mere impediment to biological bodies does not unequivocally imply harm. What’s missing is a subject of rights violations. My proposed theory of personhood accounts for this - p zombies aren’t persons because they’ve never been sentient.
2. “Humans as Persons”
- Savant claims that killing is wrong regardless of the stage of development of an entity, therefore, killing the fetus is wrong despite its early stage of development. This argument clearly targets only those who believe that killing can be justified by the stage of development of a person (probably no one intelligent). Under my proposed view, killing the fetus isn’t wrong because of the fetus’ age, rather, it is wrong because the fetus lacks sentience.
- Savant further provides the pre sentient rights violations counterexample. As this has already been addressed, I will only provide two recapitulating remarks. The example demands answers to the following two questions:
- 1. Does killing the baby violate its rights?
- 2. Does killing the baby plausibly entail morally unacceptable outcomes?
- The answer to 1 is clearly no, and the answer to 2 is ambiguous. Given the evidence that killing pre sentient beings in the womb doesn’t have deleterious effects on society (p3) there’s no reason to think that killing pre sentient beings which are a bit older will have any drastically different effect. In any case, this case fails to establish what Savant desires, which is that the baby’s rights are being violated by its killing.
3. “Future like Ours”
- The FLO account of harm is overly permissive in what it deems to be immoral.
- Robot rights
- Suppose that an engineer assembles a highly complex robot which is capable of having human experiences. However they must charge the robot and let it reach 100% battery before it can deploy its first ever conscious experience. When the robot is 75% charged, the scientists begin having doubts as to the ramifications of their project, so they shut it down and abandon the robot. Is what the scientist did wrong?
- Under the FLO account of harm, it is. There is a being who is already “growing” (or charging), it doesn’t require adding any bodily functions, and it will become a person if it is not impeded. Yet, we would be reluctant to say that the robot has been harmed. Notice how my proposed theory does account for this. The robot has never been sentient, so killing it isn't wrong. Notice further how if we stipulate the robot has gone through the stage of sentience and has developed interests and desires, we would suddenly be weary as to permitting its killing. Whereas FLO ignores this nuance and categorises both these examples as equivalent, the pro-sentience position is furnished with the tools to adjudicate these scenarios.
4. “Killing v Letting Die” & 5. “Duty to Save”
- Nothing here is important to my argument. Given I deny you can harm non persons, the direct vs indirect harm distinction is meaningless. Furthermore, since I deny that the fetus is a person, I deny that it has any obligations let alone a special one.
Round 2
Pro
#3
Framework:
Burdens
I argued that direct harm and failing a moral duty are both immoral prima facie. Con uses a similar framework, arguing that violating moral entitlements (i.e. failing a moral duty) and causing morally unacceptable consequences are both wrong. I argue that causing harm to a human being violates their moral entitlement to live.
However, Con does not address my argument that risking violating a moral entitlement is also immoral.
Uncertainty Principle
Extend my argument that if there is even a 2% chance that an unborn child has entitlements (i.e. as long as it’s even a remotely reasonable possibility), abortion is immoral. Con does not contest my analogy to drunk driving, nor does he contest my calculations comparing the risk exposure from a 2% chance of violating someone’s right to live against the burden of pregnancy. Drunk driving might not violate anyone’s rights if the drunk driver gets lucky, but Con does not dispute that it’s still immoral to take that risk.
1. Persons Should Not be Harmed:
Extend that impeding bodily functions is a morally significant harm when it leads to some loss in future utility. (Starvation, cutting off someone’s arm, etc.)
“Philosophical zombies”
I stated in R1 that an unborn child will “develop the capacity for consciousness unless directly harmed,” similarly to a coma patient. This is not true of a philosophical zombie. I made it clear that harm must cause a “loss in utility” such as a “reduction in life years.”
2. Humans as Persons:
“Does killing the baby violate its rights?”/“Does killing the baby plausibly entail morally unacceptable outcomes?”
Yes, I argued it’s an unjustified killing. Abortion also has negative effects on society as a whole, as I will argue later.
Past vs Future Sentience
Extend my earlier argument that “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.” (i.e. much more morally significant than past experiences)
Suppose that a child is in a coma, but they had non-trivial sentience for a single minute in the past. Their death would be a tragedy, and Con would rightfully condemn someone who killed them. Suppose the murderer asked why killing the child was wrong. Presumably we would say that they deprived the child of a long life and that many opportunities were stolen from them. Would we even bother to mention the one minute in the past that the child had non-trivial sentience?
Now suppose the murderer revealed that the comatose child was actually not sentient in the past, although they would have awoken all the same. Con’s view holds that this information alone should absolve the killer of any moral culpability, that the absence of this minute of past sentience completely justifies what would otherwise have been murder. In fact, if the child wasn’t considered useful by those around them, Con might even argue that killing them was a moral good.
My view is much more modest. Even if you attribute some moral significance to past sentience, I argue that a reduction in life years is still a morally significant harm, as evidenced by the fact that people place great value on the ability to continue living.
Con’s view demands that you place no intrinsic value on potential sentience. In fact, his view holds that a single minute of past consciousness (even a minute the child likely wouldn’t remember) is enough to outweigh the wrongness of depriving a child of the entire rest of their life (possibly even a hundred years).
Con asks that we defer to the “best available explanation,” based on our domain of knowledge. However, his framework demands that we accept a very illogical weighting of past and present experiences when evaluating moral experience. Therefore, my criteria for personhood is a much better explanation.
3. Future Like Ours:
Coma Analogy
Extend that missed opportunities are a significant harm (as is a reduction in life years, which is consistently used to measure the burden of a given affliction).
Con ignores my argument that rights and entitlements are “predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable (i.e. harmful) effects” (as I said in R1). Even if Con denies this, he must admit that moral entitlements (e.g. not being shot or stabbed) generally involve preventing harm. Hence, avoiding harm is most likely a moral entitlement. And Con does not contest that abortion causes a significant harm (reduction in life years) that is considered undesirable and morally significant in almost every other context, even applied to unconscious people. Per Occam’s razor, the most straightforward conclusion is that unborn children also have moral entitlements.
Operation Thought Experiment
Extend. Con does not dispute that mutilating an unborn child to harm their eyesight in the future is wrong, nor does he dispute that abortion similarly removes an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences. Hence, the conclusion follows that abortion is immoral.
“Suppose that an engineer assembles a highly complex robot which is capable of having human experiences.”
A highly complex robot would be more akin to the “philosophical zombie” Con describes later. We have plenty of computer programs that simulate human behavior, but an LLM predicting the next word does not mean it is actually conscious (whereas an unborn child will develop actual consciousness). But for the sake of argument, I will envision a scenario where a magic robot will somehow develop actual consciousness.
“However they must charge the robot and let it reach 100% battery before it can deploy its first ever conscious experience”/“there is a being who is already “growing” (or charging)”
This is a misunderstanding of my standard for “bodily functions.” As I said in R1, “a bodily function is something an organism is in the process of doing via internal processes like mitosis.” Con implies the charging is entirely done by the charger and the process of deployment can’t start until the battery is at 100%. The robot isn’t growing or doing anything with the energy yet to push itself toward a form capable of having conscious experiences. However, an unborn child has an internal growth process that pushes it toward sentience even though said process must be aided by external nutrients. Unplugging the charger doesn’t disrupt any internal processes in the robot, but starvation has direct adverse effects on the body, even for unborn children.
“it doesn’t require adding any bodily functions”
No, but charging isn’t a bodily function at all.
4-5. Killing vs. Letting Die/Duty to Save:
Con does not dispute either of my arguments that if an unborn child has personhood, abortion is immoral. Hence, voters should accept this premise as given; if a fetus has personhood, the resolution is affirmed.
1.CON “An action is morally impermissible if it violates the moral entitlements of a person or it has morally unacceptable consequences”:
Addressed in the framework section.
2.CON “The Fetus’ Personhood”:
Con stakes his entire case here, since he disputes both of my arguments that if an unborn child has personhood, abortion is immoral. If Con is wrong about personhood (in fact, if there’s even a 2% chance that he’s wrong), the resolution is affirmed.
“There are several reasons to believe that entities are persons if and only if they have (i) actualizable interests (ii) or [had] interests [at] some prior mental state”
Disembodied heads and corpses are entities that were once conscious (when the human was alive) and hence had interests at some prior mental state, but they are not persons any more than a severed limb is a person. These counterexamples immediately show Con’s framework to be flawed.
“your parents…highly sophisticated robot…chairs, tables, silverware”
Note that all of these examples from Con are also consistent with my criteria for personhood, not having bodily functions that will lead to consciousness unless impeded. A robot with no potential for consciousness, chairs, tables, etc. fail my criteria for personhood, while you and your parents would pass.
“specific entities which we deem to be persons, but does not have sentience…Suppose that we have a baby who has never been sentient, but will be in five minutes…it is not protected under the proposed rights theory”
Con agrees here with my categorization of a presentient newborn as a “specific entity which we deem to be a person.” Even though Con argues that the newborn is not a person, he seems to agree that his position is very counterintuitive.
However, Con earlier advocated for abduction, in his words, “looking at our domain of knowledge and deferring to the best available explanation.” Con advocates looking around at “any entity who you think is a person.” In the case of a presentient baby, where our views differ, the intuitive solution supports my framework for personhood over Con’s, since an unborn child is an “entity which we deem to be a person.” Hence, abduction supports my view on personhood, not Con’s view.
“Imagine one takes this pre sentient baby and replicates it (including the fact that it will be sentient in 5 minutes)...its biological constitution has been entirely replaced with synthetic materials and fabric.”
If you turned a baby into a doll, it would no longer be a pre-sentient being and couldn’t be sentient in five minutes, nor would it have bodily functions that could be impeded. Because, you know, it’s a doll.
“It is, in essence, a doll which is about to be sentient. In this case, is there a person being harmed when the doll is being destroyed? It seems that there is not.”
In Con’s hypothetical, somehow this doll is about to become sentient. Con doesn’t say how, but I will reaffirm my view and say that a baby (made of fabric or otherwise) with bodily functions that will develop consciousness unless impeded is a person. Babies with artificial limbs are still persons despite those limbs being made of synthetic materials.
Con’s argument is that we can imagine a hypothetical where the baby is a doll, therefore the baby isn’t a person, but this argument fails when you remember Con’s proposed criteria. If a conscious person temporarily turns into a doll but will regain their consciousness in a few minutes, Con considers them a person. Con’s framework also accepts people with neural prosthetics as persons, even though neural prosthetics are made of synthetic materials. For any entity that we consider a person, we can imagine a hypothetical where they are a magic doll made of synthetic materials. Hence, this is insufficient to negate personhood.
“suppose that an individual is in a coma…Clearly, we want to say that this person still has rights.”
This also applies to the baby in the coma. Con agrees that the baby is an “entity which we deem to be a person,” hence his view relies on rejecting our intuition. However, if largely agreed-on intuition is sufficient to grant other coma patients rights, then surely it must also be sufficient to grant rights to a preconscious infant, and hence, to reject Con’s view of personhood.
“whatever gives one a right must exist prior to the time it is violated.”
An unborn child’s bodily functions (which will lead to consciousness unless harmed and give them rights) exist already. However, the expected benefit of a right need not have occurred yet for the right to exist.
Someone in a coma has a right not to be killed if they will awaken in five minutes. But if they are brain dead, we can unplug them. Hence, potential conscious experiences are what give the coma patient the right to live, even though those experiences have not occurred yet.
To give another example, if someone mails me $100 as a surprise, and you steal the money before I ever find it, you have still significantly wronged me, even though the benefit (potentially finding and using the money) that made the gift valuable did not occur at the time my right was violated.
3.CON “Effects of Abortion”:
Con argues that negative effects on society at large make an action immoral. By this standard, abortion is immoral even if an unborn child is not a person.
“We now know that the fetus is not a person”
Again, Con bets his entire case on a fetus not being a person. But even if a fetus has no moral entitlements, abortion has negative effects on society.
Since society is made up of people, society at large is better off when more people enjoy economic surplus and the benefits of being alive (people place a significant economic value on the ability to live longer) and when the labor force is larger. The loss of 630,000 unborn lives a year would equate to 32% of GDP. This is assigning a human life a value of $10.9 million, a figure arrived at by studying the amount people will pay to avoid some risk of mortality. Furthermore, since abortion directly shrinks the labor force, it weakens the solvency of programs like Social Security and Medicare that rely on workers to care for the elderly.
“Countries where abortions are legal tend to have higher GDP”
Correlation does not imply causation. (Ice cream sales correlate with homicides, but that doesn’t imply ice cream causes homicides.) The article Con links to seems to make the opposite assumption, that people in countries with lower GDP are more likely to be religious and have restrictive views on abortion. Religion is just one potential confounding variable, and Con doesn’t establish that abortions cause an increase in GDP.
“countries with access to legal abortions is correlated with higher average economic freedom.”
Again, the article Con links to makes the opposite assumption, that economic freedom increases legal access to abortion. And legal access isn't even the subject of this debate, abortions themselves are. Adultery, for example, is immoral regardless of the effects of passing laws against adultery. Con makes no argument for how getting an abortion somehow increases economic freedom.
“If abortion is banned…It is widely recognised that the abolition of abortion has deleterious consequences…illegal abortion may carry a risk of death as much as 30 times that of legal abortion…mortality rates [in the US] would increase by 21%”
Again, this debate isn’t about the legality of abortion, just about whether it’s immoral. Bringing up harm from illegal abortions simply aids my case that abortion causes harm, since illegal abortions are abortions. Also note that abortions to save the mother’s life are not a “under usual circumstances” and hence fall outside the scope of this debate. (Even if Con’s argument here were relevant to the resolution, maternal mortality rates in the US are already very low, around a 0.0104% risk of death per live birth. Even if this rate were increased by 21%, the chance of maternal death per live birth would remain around a hundredth of a percent. Abortion has a 100% risk of mortality for the unborn child.)
Con
#4
I. Permissibility of abortion
- To recall, the argument being defended takes the following form
p1. An action is morally impermissible if it violates the moral entitlements of a person or it has morally unacceptable consequences.
p2. Abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of a person.
p3. Abortion does not have morally unacceptable consequences.
c1. Abortion is not morally impermissible.
When is Something Moral? (p1)
Savant doesn’t offer too much disagreement. Note however that drunk driving is covered under the proposed conjunct - even though it doesn’t violate someone's right, it has morally unacceptable consequences (it would fail via p3).
The Fetus’ Personhood (p2)
- The sub argument presented was as follows
p2.1 An entity E has moral entitlements (is a person) if and only if either (i) E has a non trivial interest N at t or (ii) N is in E’s interest at t and E is capable of having a non trivial interest in N at t.
p2.2 The fetus is not E p2.3 If the fetus is not E, abortion does not violate its moral entitlements
c2.1 Abortion does not violate the moral entitlements of E (a person).
Criteria for personhood (p2.1)
- “Disembodied heads and corpses fit the conjunct”
- Two points can be raised here.
- First, the criticism is not true. Given the conjunct, explicated in full in p2.1, corpses are not capable of having interests given death is, by definition, the cessation of bodily functions and sentience. In particular, the qualification that B must have desires from t - n through t excludes dying during this time (because when you’re dead any desire you have is terminated).
- Note that this cannot be said of coma patients because they do retain their beliefs, desires, etc., as evidence by the fact that they have not forgotten them when they wake up.
- Second, even if the criticism were true, the resolution would not hold, for CON could easily explicate that the being will be sentient in the future (note that I’m not making this move, but just demonstrating that nothing is really at stake). In any case, the criticism does not threaten CON's position.
- “Killing a presentient baby is not abductively virtuous”
- Savant mistakes abduction with prima facie justification. Whilst one may “intuitively” think that killing such an entity is wrong, such an evaluation has nothing to do with abduction. E.g., we may intuitively think the Earth is flat, but our cumulative abductive reasons (given to us by science) to believe otherwise prevail.
- As I have extensively discussed in r1, there is nothing one can point to about killing a pre-sentient fetus which is actually wrong. All moral predicates true of the baby are true of a hypothetical pre-sentient plastic doll, which intuitively, we acknowledge is not a person. Given this, we have no basis for treating the entity differently.
- “Babies with artificial limbs are persons”
- Savant offers this verbally loaded biting of the bullet (I say it is loaded because "baby" usually refers to pre-sentient) that we should care about plastic dolls which have never been sentient and yet will in a couple minutes.
- This position is highly unintuitive. To really illustrate it, imagine you have some old barbie doll, and God comes down to tell you that in an hour's time, he will endow this doll with the sentience of a normal human baby. It seems clear that, in this hour, the doll is not a person yet nor has any moral entitlements. In the same way that we have no obligation to have sex to create a person, we have an obligation to protect this barbie to create a person.
- You can think about this reductio in reference to any arbitrary object. Take a grain of sand. If Savant were informed that a grain of sand would in an hour become a sentient human being if it is not crushed (let’s say God ensures this conditional), they would be committed to saying that crushing this grain of sand is as morally bad as killing a grown human being. In fact, under the FLO account, if the grain of sand were to transform into a sentient being with 80 years of valuable experiences, and the grown human in being is an 80 year old man, Savant would think that cracking this grain of sand is worse than killing such a man.
- Contrast this CON’s proposed theory where harm is indexed to sentient entities, where killing the man would be trivially far worse.
- “The reductio also applies to your position”
- Attempting to apply the reductio to the proposed theory fails, given all that is yielded is a fully sentient doll which we would trivially say is a person. We are comfortable saying that if a doll were sentient like you or I, it is a person with moral entitlements. What we are not comfortable with saying is that if a doll were just some normal plastic toy, it has rights if it could become something we care about in the future.
- “Why is it wrong to kill a comatose patient but not a brain dead person ”
- As explicated above, comatose patients are capable of sentience whereas brain dead people are by definition, not able to, hence the moral distinction. Note further that the proposed theory is a substance theoretic view on personhood. It is supposed to articulate who is a person and who is not, and not strictly for assessing who is more valuable and who is not. Certainly, a potential sentence is an important characteristic, but only when it is indexed to a person.
- A really important thing to note here is that I don’t have any objection to worrying about potential harm. The issue comes when Savant tries to index harm to someone who is not a person.
- “Mailing $100 dollars example”
- Clearly, this action would be wrong because it has “morally unacceptable consequences”, a consideration accounted for by p2 (non rights violative immoralities).
The Effects of Abortion (p3)
Does it violate other people’s rights?
- I extend that abortion does not violate any stakeholders rights, and that women do not regret having abortions.
Does it harm society at large?
- I claimed that countries with legal abortion tend to have a higher GDP. Savant claims that CON has failed to establish that abortions cause an increase in GDP. This is not my claim. Per the subtitle, I am providing inductive reasons to think that abortion does not harm society at large. Given it is extraordinarily difficult to prove a negative claim of this kind, we have to be complacent with correlative works. The strongest evidence in favour of the is that Savant cannot provide evidence that abortion harms society at large, and this is evidenced by the fact that more often than not, first world, prosperous and free countries seem to have legal access.
- Savant claims that permitting abortions would be deleterious for society, since it kills 630, 000 unborn lives (hence the workforce is reduced, etc). This claim presupposes that the fetus is a person (which is not the subject of p3). Since these lives are not persons, this is completely irrelevant. This would be akin to saying that “the government not mandating adults have sex twice a week means that X number of potential babies are not being born, which correlates to $X loss in GDP and X number of potential workers”.
Harm of abolition
- I claimed that society would face huge demonstrable risks if abortion is banned. Savant refutes this by claiming that this debate is not about legality. However, this misinterprets the specific argument CON is proposing. The claim being made is that if we assess abortion to be immoral and see it (as Savant proposes) as akin to murder, the entailment of this position is abolition, which itself must be considered when assessing whether abortion has morally unacceptable consequences (per p3).
- Savant also claims that the harm of illegal abortions count in favour of the proposition that abortions are immoral. This claim is akin to saying that being black in the 60’s is bad, because you have a higher chance of getting lynched. Obviously, the wrong maker in both cases lies outside of the intrinsic moral calculation of the individual/action. An abortion wouldn't harmful if not for restrictive laws, and being black wouldn't be bad if it weren't for lynchers.
- Recall that this section pertains to “morally unacceptable consequences”, not whether the fetus is a person. Given there are no deleterious social consequences that have been demonstrated, the premise holds.
II. Rebuttals
1. “Persons Should Not be Harmed”
- Savant claims that P zombies are not harmed because they will not develop consciousness. Note that consciousness is not mentioned in Savants “Criteria for Personhood”, “Definition of Harm” or “Support for this Definition”. Given this, it cannot be reasonably inferred that developing consciousness is the key determining factor for harm.
- Under this revised interpretation (where a person is that who will develop consciousness), this just seems to be another FLO argument, which has been addressed in the FLO section.
2. “Humans as Persons”
- “Alleged dropped argument”
- A lot (almost every one) of the things Savant alleges CON to have dropped can be responded to in the same way. In this particular case, killing a child is plausibly worse than killing an adult. But the proposed view on personhood is only supposed to get you so far as to say that they are both persons (it is after all just a personhood criterion). There’s no issue with saying that killing the child is worse because they could have potential sentience, because the child is already a person and hence can be subjects of harm
- “Revised Coma Analogy”
- (I recommend reading Savant's analogy before reading my response as I will not pasting it in its entirety here)
- “Presumably we would say that they deprived the child of a long life and that many opportunities were stolen from them”
- In particular, we would say that a person has been deprived of a long life. Indeed, claiming a child has been harmed only makes sense if the child is a person. Thus, CON’s framework still undergirds any claim that such a murderer is wrong.
- “Suppose the murderer revealed that the comatose child was actually not sentient in the past… Con’s view holds that this information alone should absolve the killer of any moral culpability”.
- Per the argument presented in I. Permissibility of abortion actions are wrong if they violate moral entitlements or have morally unacceptable consequences. Just because in this case the child is revealed to not have moral entitlements does not mean the action is morally acceptable.
- For example, suppose there is a sting operation where a man hires a hitman (who is actually a government agent) to kill his wife. Because it is a set up, no one is ever close to being assassinated. Even though there is no rights violation in this situation, the action still has morally unacceptable consequences.
- In the same way, telling the parents of comatose children that their child has been murdered is not a rights violation (because the child isn’t a person by definition), but that does not in any way make it any more permissible. The action is wrong in the same way that hiring a sting hitman is wrong (which is to say, very wrong).
3.” Future Like Ours”
- “Alleged dropped argument”
- Same as above. Missed opportunities are harmful insofar as they are indexed to a person.
- Engineer example
- I recommend voters reread my engineer counterexamples to the FLO before reading Savant's rebuttal and my reply.
- “The robot isn’t growing or doing anything with the energy yet to push itself toward a form capable of having conscious experiences. However, an unborn child has an internal growth process that pushes it toward sentience even though said process must be aided by external nutrients”
- This is a difference without substance. Given this is an analogy, CON can just stipulate into the hypothetical that all these facts are true. Just as how the unborns internal growth is “pushing” itself towards an eventual sentient experience through the aid of external nutrients (the mother umbilical cord) it can be stipulated that the robot is also “pushing” and “developing” itself and using external nutrients (the charger) to fulfil this end.
- “Unplugging the charger doesn’t disrupt any internal processes in the robot”
- This is completely wrong. It can be stipulated in the hypothetical that the robot is using the energy to sustain its internal processes of eventually gaining sentience, and that absent the charging, the robot will not have the “nutrients” to sustain itself, and will eventually become unserviceable.
- Ultimately, Savant tries to circumvent the analogy with odd naturalistic fallacies (like saying that charging isn’t a bodily function, the robot isn’t growing etc). This makes no sense given FLO doesn’t place any restrictions on substrate, and cares about pure potentiality (so the vehicle of the FLO should never matter).
- To challenge Savant on this point, I ask them specifically - what needs to be true of the robot such that killing it becomes immoral? CON has already stipulated that the robot has internal processes (some wires and electricity), is developing (using the energy from the charger to grow) and that it will experience sentience in the near future (like a fetus). Simply, there is no trait left that can be equalised, besides some unconvincing appeal to the moral primacy of biological flesh (which frankly is the only distinction left).
- Voters can recognise that the engineer's robot is, in all philosophically relevant respects, identical to a pre-sentient baby. Because it is clearly absurd to say that such a robot is a person, the FLO account of rights fails.
4-5. “Killing vs. Letting Die/Duty to Save”
- “ Hence, voters should accept this premise as given; if a fetus has personhood, the resolution is affirmed”
- This is clearly incorrect, per p1 of the original argument. Things can be wrong even if there is no person who is being violated (recall the hitman example).
Conclusion
Savant's main issue is that they make intuitive claims and attempt to extend it to an unintuitive conclusion. Notice how almost every instance of Savants intuition pumps (cutting someone's arm off, starvation, killing a child is bad if not worse than killing an adult, killing a comatose patient is wrong because they have a life ahead of them) invoke some harm inflicted upon a pre-sentient person (someone considered a moral entity under my framework). And the one that does involve a presentient being (the pre-sentient baby which has been equalised to a mere doll) is highly unintuitive. Savant's use of post sentient rights violations categorically fails in establishing the immorality of pre sentient rights violations.
Round 3
Pro
#5
Thanks, Bones, for an intriguing debate. I’ll focus on a few questions that I think capture the most important parts of this debate.
Is Abortion Immoral in the Case of Uncertainty?
“drunk driving...has morally unacceptable consequences”
Con agrees that risking harm to someone else is a morally unacceptable consequence. Con does not dispute my argument that if there is even a 2% chance that an unborn child has entitlements, abortion is morally wrong. I’ve brought this point up repeatedly with no challenge, so voters should view it as conceded by Con.
Con’s case largely does not even attempt to establish certainty, it simply argues that unborn children are unlikely to be persons due to lacking certain similarities with some entities who are persons. Even if Con’s abduction were solid, for Con to negate the resolution, we would need to be certain well beyond a reasonable doubt that unborn children lack moral entitlements.
Which Analogies Are the Best for Unborn Children?
Changing a presentient human to be a doll or robot needlessly complicates things, since people may feel a certain way intuitively about dolls and robots in general that does not apply to humans. There are an infinite number of ways we could complicate the analogy further (e.g. What if the pre sentient being was going to save the world? What if they looked like Bruce Willis?) But adding these details makes the hypothetical entity less analogous to an unborn child and thus less useful. For the same reason, Con’s analogies should be seen as less useful than just imagining a hypothetical preconscious human.
“Robot/doll”
The unintuitiveness of considering robots and dolls to be persons is due to the fact that they are robots and dolls, entities that do not develop consciousness and are neither sentient nor presentient. If a doll is developing consciousness like a child, it’s not really a doll anymore. If a robot is developing consciousness like a child and not just mindlessly following code, it’s not really a robot anymore. If you change what a doll or a robot is to make it an entity meeting my criteria for personhood, then I will grant this new entity personhood. But it no longer makes sense to apply the intuition we would hold for ordinary dolls and robots.
“God comes down to tell you that in an hour's time, he will endow this doll/grain of sand with the sentience of a normal human baby”/“no obligation to have sex to create a person”
I already distinguished not adding bodily functions (i.e. not having sex) vs impeding existing bodily functions. The doll in Con’s analogy has no bodily functions and won’t until God adds them, so it’s not comparable to an unborn child.
“It can be stipulated in the hypothetical that the robot is using the energy to sustain its internal processes of eventually gaining sentience”
If we stipulate that it changes the analogy (i.e. the process of deployment has already started). And again, we’re stretching the definition of robot if the entity is going to have actual consciousness and not just mindlessly follow commands. But with this stipulation, I would hold that a non sentient “robot” in the process of gaining sentience is no less a person than a currently-sentient robot or a robot that used to be sentient and will regain sentience (Con holds the latter two beings to be persons as well).
“all that is yielded is a fully sentient doll which we would trivially say is a person”
Con also holds that (a) a person who has temporarily transformed into a non sentient doll, and (b) a doll that was sentient in the past and will be in the future, are persons. Again, people opposed to considering magic presentient dolls as persons are likely going to have some issues with Con’s position as well.
Comatose Infant…“Whilst one may “intuitively” think that killing such an entity is wrong, such an evaluation has nothing to do with abduction”
Con concedes that a preconscious infant would intuitively seem to be a person. Con advocated looking at “any entity who you think is a person,” and entities you are “comfortable saying are persons.” Con’s abductive approach relies entirely upon intuition.
“we may intuitively think the Earth is flat, but our cumulative abductive reasons (given to us by science) to believe otherwise prevail”
Con doesn’t defend his view of personhood with science, he defends it with analogies to a doll and a robot (which I’ve already shown aren’t analogous).
Operation Thought Experiment
Con does not dispute that mutilating an unborn child to harm their eyesight in the future is wrong. His only response is that “Missed opportunities are harmful insofar as they are indexed to a person.” When the child is born, they will be unable to see, and Con concedes they were harmed. Con seems to agree that the child was at one point entitled to see and that this entitlement was violated (even though the child never actually had the ability to see). From where did this entitlement arise? Con’s view is not sufficient to explain this entitlement, but if you accept my view that removing an unborn child’s potential conscious experiences is harmful, this explains the entitlement of the child not to have their eyesight (or their life) preemptively impaired.
What Traits Make Killing Someone Morally Wrong?
In R1, I stated that “the importance and existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable (i.e. harmful) effects” and reiterated this in R2. When determining which entities deserve rights, we should look at the morally significant traits of persons (ways they can suffer harm), not just any similarities between persons. For example, the persons we observe are made of cells (a clear similarity), yet Con places no inherent moral value on this attribute. I hold that past sentience is similarly unnecessary for personhood, since it is irrelevant to how humans can be harmed.
“consciousness is not mentioned in Savants “Criteria for Personhood”, “Definition of Harm” or “Support for this Definition”.”
The potential for consciousness specifically is addressed in “harm from abortion,” and quality-adjusted life years obviously measure conscious life, not being a zombie. And losing potential conscious experiences falls under undesirable effects.
“the child is already a person and hence can be subject of harm”
This is putting the cart before the horse. If an undesirable effect can be inflicted upon a preconscious human, that should be sufficient to grant them personhood, since again, as Con does not dispute, the importance and existence of rights is predicated on the objective of preventing undesirable (i.e. harmful) effects. The justification for granting adults personhood and entitlements is that they can be harmed, and the same justification exists in the case of unborn children.
Con concedes that “killing a child is plausibly worse than killing an adult,” in which case, potential sentience should hold more weight than past sentience. This example shows that a change in just future sentience holds moral weight on its own. If the amount of future sentience is more significant that the amount of past sentience, then how can the moral significance of future sentience depend on past sentience? For this reason, a standard for personhood that requires past consciousness is illogical.
Context: Suppose that a child is in a coma, but they had non-trivial sentience for a single minute in the past…Con states: “we would say that a person has been deprived of a long life”
When discussing the death of the newborn, it is unlikely we would bring up the concept of personhood explicitly at all. Noting that the child lost a full life would make it clear enough that something morally significant has happened, the minute of past sentience would be irrelevant. So it makes little sense to condition personhood on past sentience.
“telling the parents of comatose children that their child has been murdered is not a rights violation (because the child isn’t a person by definition)”
Con’s concern is based on the feelings of the parents. If the parents didn’t care about their child, then Con would likely consider killing the child a heroic act. In this case, Con has no concern for the hundred life years the child has lost but attributes significant moral value to the single minute of past sentience, which is illogical.
“comatose patients are capable of sentience whereas brain dead people are by definition, not able to, hence the moral distinction”
This capability is based on the possibility that the coma patient will wake up (i.e. develop consciousness in the future), which is true of the unborn child as well. As admitted by Con here, there is clear significance to this capability. Yet Con illogically attributes no inherent value to it—he would deny rights to a comatose child who has this similar capability based on whether they were sentient for a single minute in the past.
“if someone mails me $100 as a surprise, and you steal the money before I ever find it, you have still significantly wronged me…Clearly, this action would be wrong because it has “morally unacceptable consequences”
Well, it also violates a moral entitlement (my entitlement to the money). But my point stands that depriving someone of a desirable thing is wrong even if they never desired it. So depriving a preconscious being of a life would still have a morally unacceptable consequence.
What Effects Does Abortion Have on Society?
Violating the moral entitlements of 630,000 people to a full life each year obviously outweighs economic impacts on society, but I will argue that even if those entitlements did not exist, abortion would still make society worse off, which Con states is a morally unacceptable consequence (here and here).
“if we assess abortion to be immoral…the entailment of this position is abolition”
As I stated in R2, “adultery…is immoral regardless of the effects of passing laws against adultery.” The effects of banning abortion are irrelevant to the morality of abortion itself.
“Given it is extraordinarily difficult to prove a negative claim of this kind, we have to be complacent with correlative works.”
Just because Con’s position is hard to prove doesn’t make correlation imply causation. In other words, the absence of good evidence for Con’s position does not suddenly turn non-evidence into good evidence. Again, ice cream sales correlate with homicides, but that doesn’t imply ice cream causes homicides. Con’s sources don’t attempt to control for other factors and even assume conclusions opposite from the ones he’s making (e.g. the article Con links to concludes that people in countries with lower GDP are more likely to be religious and have restrictive views on abortion, while Con assumes that the cause and effect is the other way around).
“Savant cannot provide evidence that abortion harms society at large”
Except that abortion directly reduces GDP by reducing total consumption, shrinks the labor force, and weakens the solvency of programs like Social Security and Medicare that rely on workers to care for the elderly. Con proposed using GDP and economic prosperity as metrics for societal good, so it makes no sense for him to declare these metrics irrelevant.
“abortions…kills 630, 000 unborn lives (hence the workforce is reduced, etc). This claim presupposes that the fetus is a person (which is not the subject of p3).This would be akin to saying that “the government not mandating adults have sex twice a week…correlates to $X loss in GDP and X number of potential workers”.”
Again, this debate isn’t about a law mandating anything but about the morality of abortion. You could indeed say that choosing not to have kids generally leads to a less prosperous society based on Con’s proposed measure of GDP, which has nothing to do with forcing people to have sex. Con has already argued that decisions leading to a less prosperous society are immoral given his appeal to GDP and economic freedom. And whether or not someone has an entitlement to be born, as I argued in R2, “society at large is better off when more people enjoy economic surplus and the benefits of being alive.” So even if Con were right about an unborn child not having moral entitlements, abortion leads to a less prosperous society and hence has morally unacceptable consequences (by the standard of economic prosperity Con has proposed).
“claims that the harm of illegal abortions count in favour of the proposition that abortions are immoral. This claim is akin to saying that being black in the 60’s is bad, because you have a higher chance of getting lynched”
Being black isn’t a choice, so it’s not possible for it to be an immoral choice. Getting an illegal abortion is a choice, though, and Con argues they carry a significant risk of death, which supports my case that abortions are harmful.
Conclusion:
Voters should prefer my case for three main reasons:
First, my analogies are closer to unborn children and abortion, with fewer confounding factors. The wrongness of abortion doesn’t depend on how you feel about dolls or robots as long as you are willing to grant rights to humans. A preconscious human infant is more comparable to an unborn child (since both are human) than a magic doll. Con concedes that intuitively, a preconscious infant seems to deserve rights, and preconscious infants are the best analogy for unborn children in this debate.
Second, I look at abduction more thoroughly than Con, looking not just at similarities between persons but also which traits make killing them wrong—logically, the traits that make killing someone wrong are the traits most likely to make them a person. In response to the operation thought experiment, Con agrees that missed opportunities (from harm to unborn children) are generally harmful, yet when an unborn child is robbed of all opportunities, suddenly Con holds that they deserve no moral consideration. Con’s view illogically withholds moral consideration and entitlements when the greatest amount of loss is at stake; my view is much more intuitive in granting greater moral consideration when a greater amount of loss (i.e reduced utility) is at stake. And given the mailing $100 example, entities can have entitlements to something (i.e. ought not to be deprived of it) even if they never explicitly desired that thing.
Third, I account for uncertainty to determine the wrongness of abortion, whereas Con only argues that unborn children likely don’t have moral entitlements—even if Con’s abduction were solid (and I argued it’s not), his case leaves enough uncertainty at best that abortion is still immoral since it risks violating a moral entitlement with disastrous consequences. Con does not dispute that if the probability of unborn children having moral entitlements is even 2% (i.e. if it’s at all plausible), abortion is immoral. And as I have shown via abduction and analyzing the wrongness of killing, it’s significantly more likely than not that unborn children have moral entitlements (i.e. much higher than 2%).
Con
#6
Thanks Savant for an engaging debate. This discussion has boiled down to answering two questions - when does an entity become a person with moral entitlements, and does abortion have deleterious social consequences? Hence I’ll dedicate this round to three projects: i) defending by answer to the first question (and thereby upholding the proposed theory of personhood), ii) critiquing Savant's answer to the first question, and iii) assessing the social effects of abortion.
Before all that, Savant has repeatedly brought up the uncertainty principle. I feel it has been adequately passively responded to. Because Savant never disagreed with p2.2 The fetus is not E or p2.3 If the fetus is not E, abortion does not violate its moral entitlements there is no question that given the fetus is a person, abortion is therefore immoral. This was supported by various scientifically substantiated papers pertaining to the fetus’ brain which were never disputed. Hence, no reasonable fear about uncertainty is warranted.
I. What is my answer to the question of when an entity becomes a person?
My basic view is that someone is a person when they have been sentient or are capable of being sentient (with capable being defined specifically here). This was supported by general abduction and contraposition.
Doll Analogy
- A keen eye may observe that this seems to exclude hypothetical babies who have never been sentient, but will be in a short period of time. Surely it’s wrong to kill these individuals?
- To address this, I (in the first round mind you) presented a symmetrical case in an attempt to show why the analogy is not so absurd. Take this baby which we intuitively think has moral entitlements, by virtue of it almost being sentient (note that it is this trait which the objector maintains is problematic) . Now, let’s say that we replicate this baby, where its skin becomes plastic, its organs become synthetic and its hair becomes thread. It is, in ordinary parlance, a doll, except that it will in the future become sentient (remember this is the trait which is being tested). In this case, would it be wrong to kill such a doll? The answer seems to be no. Why would we care about some plastic doll just because in the future it could become something we care about (note how sperm and egg also could become something we care about, yet most of us don’t consider masturbation a sin.)?
- Savant provides several responses to this defence
- “It’s not abductively virtuous”
- This point was already refuted. Abduction is an inference to the best explanation not the first explanation. Just because something is not immediately intuitive does not count against it as an explanation, just like how the world intuitively seeming to be prima facie flat does not provide abductive justification for this position. Savant attempts to refute this reply by saying that I don’t defend my position with science like the globe earther does but this is obviously a tangential point. This does not challenge the initial rebuttal that immediate intuitions furnish abductive justifications.
- “It’s needlessly complicated”
- First, the example is clearly not complicated - the reason for selecting a doll is to remove the fact that it is a human being in question (an inherently normatively loaded category) with something neutral, to assess whether the trait being questioned is actually problematic.
- Second, complication is no defence. Consider Davidson’s ostensibly ridiculous “swamp man” analogy as a prominent example.
- “Attempted reversal”
- Savant specifically claims “Con also holds that (a) a person who has temporarily transformed into a non sentient doll, and (b) a doll that was sentient in the past and will be in the future, are persons”.
- Both of these points are essentially equivalent to the “corpses fit the conjunct” criticism which Savant has dropped (the response can be read here and stands uncontested). In short
- A standard non sentient doll (without the predicate of “will be sentient”) is not capable of sentience and hence a transformation into it is equivalent to death.
- Even if this were an issue, CON can just stipulate that a person has to be sentient in the future. In any case, the rebuttal has no impact on the resolution.
- “Biting the bullet”
- Savant seems to bite the bullet when stating that given the ability to apply my theory to such an entity, they would say that the entity is a person, but it makes no sense to apply our intuition to dolls since this being is hardly an ordinary doll.
- Savant has gotten it completely backwards. The question being asked is “does it make sense to kill an entity E who is at the stage of pre-sentience”. Savant argues it doesn’t and substitutes E with a pre-sentient baby. I argue it does and substitute E with a doll. Clearly then, the ickiness of pre sentient babies elicited when selecting an E which is normatively loaded (a baby, thereby begging the question), and the ickiness disappears when selecting something normatively neutral (a doll). Given this, we can see the power of Savant's critique exists only when we consider an entity who we already usually think is a person, and not when we consider a normatively neutral entity.
Deceptive coma murderer analogy
- This analogy was presented here by Savant. Essentially, given my criteria of past and present sentience, Savant argues that someone could hypothetically kill a mothers child and exonerate themself if they reveal that the baby was never actually sentient. I claimed that this is a clear violation of p3 given its unacceptable social consequences.
- Savant's latest rebuttal claims that under my theory, the wrongness of such an action is indexed to the mother, and that absent her negative feelings, the action would be considered heroic. This is clearly incorrect. Suppose a man hires a hitman to kill his wife. Yet, the hitman is actually a government agent, and the wife is in on it. So the man pays the hitman to have his wife “killed”, without knowing that no such action will ever take place. Now suppose that the wife gets cold feet and in a heap of irrationality, pleads for her husband to be free. She is so convincing that even the government agents start sympathising for her. In such a case, it is clear that despite the feelings of the victim or even those around, actions can still be immoral. In Savant's analogy, the wrongness of killing the baby is not indexed to the mothers psychological states.
II. What is Savant's answer to the question of when an entity becomes a person?
Savant began the debate with several answers, however by the end, they do not dispute that their position can be reduced to an FLO account of harm.
Engineer analogy
- The FLO account of harm can be thoroughly dismantled with the engineer example (first presented here). Despite this being my primary criticism of their entire position, Savant unfortunately does not offer much defence in the last round, opting to group this with the doll analogy.
- However, the final remark on the analogy seems to be a bite of the bullet - “with this stipulation, I would hold that a non sentient “robot” in the process of gaining sentience is no less a person than a currently-sentient robot or a robot that used to be sentient and will regain sentience”.
- Voters should recognise how absurd this is. To say that not charging a robot to 100% battery and preventing it from deploying sentience is tantamount to murder is simply ridiculous. The FLO account makes no distinction between preventing this robot from being charged with killing a standard human person. Hence, Savants accounts of rights should be vehemtly rejected.
- Contrast this to CON’s proposed theory, which does respect this critical distinction. Because the doll has never been sentient, there is obviously nothing wrong with not charging it and giving it a sentient experience, and doing so is certainly incomparable to murder.
Grain of sand analogy
- To show how absurd Savant's position is, I raised the sand analogy (first presented here). Essentially, because the FLO account only places the FLO as its only predicate for affording personhood (and not any restrictions on what this being may be), a grain of sand can be said to have rights. If we say that an omnipotent deity makes it such that a given grain of sand will in an hour mutate into a sentient being, it will satisfy the criteria of having an FLO and under Savant's view, be a person.
- Savant tries to refute this by saying that the sand requires something to add its bodily function. This can easily be stipulated away in the proposed analogy. It can be said that the omnipotent deity has made it such that every molecule in the grain of sand, upon divine intervention, is slowly acting in such a way that it will become a sentient entity at some future time.
- Voters might think this is absurd, but such an example is simply a consequence of Savants position. Under their theory of harm, all that matters is whether an entity can be deprived of a future. A counter example can be constructed if we just imagine that some arbitrary object (like a grain of sand) is developing in such a way that in some future time, it will become sentient. Under Savant's view, breaking this object is tantamount to murder.
- The issue could be better illuminated when considering CON’s remedy. Given my proposed theory does place restrictions on features which the entity must currently possess (it must currently be sentient or have been sentient), rocks and sand are immediately excluded.
III. Social impacts of abortion
Recall that this section is a defence of p3. of my initial argument - Abortion does not have morally unacceptable consequences.
To defend the premise, CON presented the following arguments.
- This has been dropped throughout the debate and should be taken as conceeded.
- In defence of this premise, I presented studies which suggeted that abortion access is correlated with economic freedom. Savant rightly points out the correlation is not causation. However, the burden of proof to substantiate the positive claim is on Savant. Imagine you wanted to prove that legal drug access didn’t harm society. One way could be to show that countries with legal access are generally happier. Even though this is correlative, it still provides prima facie reason for believing in the proposition. However, the strongest evidence for the statement is the absence of any positive justification for the contrary - that is, proof that drug uses causes social disharmony. So whilst causation may be preferenced over correlation, the burden is ultimately on Savant to prove that abortion has negative effects on society.
- I argued that preventing abortions from occuring would harm society. I showed this by pointing at the dangers of illegal abortions. Savant attempted to refute this by saying that the harms of illegal abortions count in favour for the proposition (they actually said this here). I rejoined by pointing out the clear absurdity of this - just like how the badness of being black in the 60’s comes from a racist society, the badness of illegal abortions comes from harmful legislation.
- Savants latest rebuttal is to say that being black is not a choice whereas getting an abortion is. This is a completely tangential rebuttal which fails to capture my response. Instead of being black in the 60’s the example can be substituted with acting out homosexuality (I specify “acting out” so Savant cannot say that it is not a choice). Clearly then, the baddness of being gay in the 60’s come from society, yet it would be absurd to make the argument that “being gay is bad because you’ll get attacked”, when the wrong maker clearly lies in the hands of society.
- I argued that legal abortions are safe, and beneficial to women's mental health. This was never disputed by Savant, hence it stands conceded.
In rebuttal, Savant provided the two following arguments.
Adultery
- Savant fails to understand the purpose of this premise . In assessing the social impacts, we are not considering whether the action is a moral violation (that dispute was left in p2). This premise asks whether there are undesirable social consequences. For instance, suppose we apply my syllogism to test whether drug legalisation is moral, and per p2, we find that (strangely) every instance of drug use is so dehabiliting that its users cannot provide informed consent and hence have their rights violated. Having established this, if we then move on the p3 to consider whether there are any deleterious social impacts (does drug use affect communities, GDP, family, etc), we would not go back to pointing at the rights violation that drug use entails. Thus, Savant commits the same category error.
- (Basically all of Savants arguments here commit the same error so keep this point in mind)
GDP reduction
- This argument fails for the above reasons. In calculating loss of GDP, the paper begs the question by considering the unborn to be people who are tangible economic stakeholders. Its success hinges on the presupposition that the unborn are people, which is precisely what is not what is up for debate in this section (that would be for p2). As such, this rebuttal simply begs the question in favour of the resolution.
As such, it should be clear that abortion has no negative social effects. Given this, it cannot be said that abortion entails any socially undesirable effects.
Conclusion
Savants case has two primary flaws. The first is that under their account of harm, breaking apart rocks and uncharged robots is tantamount to murder. This is clearly incorrect. My proposed theory provides a compelling resolution to this, by capturing our intuitions of precisely when an entity is a person and when they aren’t (recall the abductive and contrapositive proofs). Secondly, their case fails to establish any social harms of abortion. In fact, the social consequences Savants position are all negative. As such, abortion is not immoral and the resolution is negated.
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:
My vote: Pro
Pro: Consistently maintained a clear line of moral reasoning.
Con: Good direct rebuttals but less precise about why uncertainty is not sufficient.
Reasons:
Pro's “uncertainty principle” was never fully dismantled. Con challenged it but didn’t show it was unreasonable.
The autonomy defense was strong from con but relied on 'asserting' that bodily autonomy beats potential personhood without fully showing why that moral perspective outweighs the
precautionary harm.
Pro suggested and maintained a layered ethical framework (FLO, special obligations, uncertainty) throughout the debate.
Whereas con primarily offered counter-assertions and did not develop a comparable alternative moral framework.
I think Pro’s arguments were more compelling on balance. Pro demonstrated that even under uncertainty about personhood, the moral risk of abortion equates to potentially committing severe harm (comparable to homicide).
Con did effectively argue for autonomy, but he did not sufficiently counter the moral weight of the 'precautionary principle' or establish why bodily autonomy rejects that moral uncertainty.
Plus, con’s engagement with the 'Future-Like-Ours' argument was more dismissive than refutative.
Thus in my opinion, pro stood to their burden more convincingly.
Further reason for decision of best legibility: pro’s writing was clearer, better structured, and easier to follow.
Plus: Arguments were numbered and labeled (“1. Uncertainty,” “2. FLO,” etc.). I don't know how much this counts.
Yeah that’s right. You should definitely look into voting.
Don't use open voting for something like this, you will always get the idiots
Rage bait votes use to be believable
Looking forward to it!
All wrapped up - I think you'll enjoy this one a lot.
Probably don’t need me to say this, but when this is done, definitely hit me up for a vote. I know you both are excellent on this topic.
I realise that in the conclusion and else where, I used "pre sentient" to describe my criteria (to describe previously sentient). This is obviously confusing given I use "pre sentient" to also describe beings who have never been sentient. Hopefully this isn't too boggling but I'm sure you'll be able to tell which usage refers to what.
Oops
Wait, isnt Bones Pro for this topic?
One week is fine
Actually, would one week argument time be possible? If not that should be alright but I would prefer it.
Should I leave it up until then or take it down and repost in a week or so?
My schedule is a bit up in the air right now but I should be able to accept this at latest within two weeks. The definitions and burden are both good.
Lmk if these specifications work for you