A Philosophical Debate On The Problem Of Abortion

[MindOverMatter]

Indeed, you are quite right. But consider this: if it is immoral to prevent a potential sentient life from being actualized, would it not be immoral for a fertile woman to refuse to produce a child? Had they not refused, an actual being of value would have been produced. Thus, a fertile woman choosing to not have children must be immoral, since it prevents sentient beings from being produced.

Just because a women has the potential to become pregnant does not necessarily imply immorality, at least not in the sense of “murder”, if she chooses to avoid becoming pregnant, since the potential person is not in effect or actual production; thus one is not taking away from the existence of any being, since the being or the process that leads to the being is not real. I agree with this, but you have failed to see the relevance of my point. The production (as in a process that is in the actual effect of developing a sentient being) of a living person is not just a potential, but is in fact a potential “pending” actuality. Which means given that there is no error, a sentient being is going to be born. So i say again, if you value my existence “now” you cannot accept my abortion, since my being now is intrinsically linked to all stages of my development including stages in which i am not sentient. This does not include natural events that existed before my mother became pregnant even though by virtue of preceding my mothers pregnancy, such events are inextricably linked. The only way that such events would be a moral concern, is if you went back in time “knowing” that i existed in the present, and told my mother to have an abortion or knowingly tried to destroy events leading up to my mother pregnancy. This of coarse this is would be impossible as it would entail an irreconcilable paradox. In any case such possibilities are only relevant ethically in so for as we are talking about “moral choice” as a matter of knowledge and somebody willfully acting upon that knowledge.

Since everything we choose to do is done for the sake of satisfying a preference of ours, all of our conscious acts are selfish. A supposedly altruistic act, such as giving to charity, is done only because a person prefers to help others. Because the person derives pleasure from knowing they’ve helped, the action is at least partially selfish.

Given this, altruism can never be realized, no matter how philanthropic a person is.

To seek the good of the self, is a good thing, since it is to value that which is intrinsically valuable in the Christian sense of the term. However to value the self above a “greater good”, is to be selfish.

 

[MindOverMatter]

Main Arguement: since “me” now as a “sentient being” was in production within the “first three months”, i cannot help but see this as the mother of all insults to my dignity as human being and a complete disregard for the value of my human life “now”.

Abortion is a selfish act.

The fact of the matter is this. I am the end result of a process that began when my mum became pregnant. If you value my life as a person “now” and you believe i have intrinsic value as a person “now”, then you cannot possibly agree with my abortion; because to abort the process that leads to me, is to abort that which we know or believe to be intrinsically valuable “Now”.

 

[hatsoff]

Human life does not have “intrinsic” value. Nothing does.

 

[MindOverMatter]

Human life does not have “intrinsic” value. Nothing does.

Assertions are easy to create when we wish to avoid responsibility for our actions. However when you are suffering the consequences of your own baseless philosophy, such a baseless belief doesn’t seem practical. In such times we align are selves with human rights and assume that its true that human life has an intrinsic value because thats the most practical and instinctual thing to believe given human nature and need. The fact is we assign intrinsic value to living persons, and thus my arguement applies.

Perhaps somebody who has a mature concern for ethical issues will make a better contribution to this thread.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Human life does not have “intrinsic” value. Nothing does.

If nothing has intrinsic value, then truth does not have intrinsic value.

If truth does not have intrinsic value, then it is by no means to be preferred to untruth.

If the statement “nothing has intrinsic value” is true, then the statement “something has intrinsic value” is false.

If the statement “nothing has intrinsic value” is true, then it is by no means to be preferred to the statement “something has intrinsic value”.

In other words, apart from value, the idea that we should believe truth instead of untruth is incoherent. But perhaps you’re willing to live with that consequence?

 

[a_priori]

Human life does not have “intrinsic” value. Nothing does.

In a strictly mechanical universe this is true. But then don’t claim your “inalienable rights” when you become inconvenient to someone else’s political expedient. You have nowhere to appeal. The stars are silent. False presuppositions then make the Declaration of Independence a dead letter. It’s only value apparently was to arouse deluded people into taking military action to protect these imagined rights?

Whether one thinks abortion is wrong or not depends on which end of the suction curette one finds themselves.

People who reject a Creator should have the strength of their convictions to live in their own philosophical universe and not borrow benefits from someone else’s worldview when they get in a pinch.

 

[Spock]

Perhaps somebody who has a mature concern for ethical issues will make a better contribution to this thread.

It is a cop-out to attack the person, rather the argument itself. You should establish that a “human life” has an “intrinsic value”, and then you could argue that hatsoff’s argument is incorrect. Just saying that anything (for example a human life) has an intrinsic value is an expression of your opinion, nothing more.

The concept of “value” is tied to three things: 1) the person to whom something is valuable, 2) the circumstances where (or when) something is valuable and 3) the reason “why” something is valuable. There is no such thing as a “concrete value” separated from the “who”, the “where” (or “when”) and the “why”. You may, of course disagree with this, but then you should argue for your opinion, and not just dismiss it as “immature”. Show me something that is “valuable” for a non-existent person, which “value” is not-present for no “reason”.

You stipulated that something (human life) has an intrinsic value. That is a positive assertion. Can you establish it? Until you do, this is just an experssion of your opinion, which can be “respected”, but will be rejected.

 

[Shredderbeam]

When a pregnancy is aborted, the “now” (stage where the fetus was born and grew up into a sentient being) hasn’t happened yet. So, it may be an insult to your human dignity were you to travel back in time and abort yourself, but in cases where time travel is not involved, there is no insult to human dignity.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

It is a cop-out to attack the person, rather the argument itself. You should establish that a “human life” has an “intrinsic value”, and then you could argue that hatsoff’s argument is incorrect.

Did hatsoff make an argument? I thought it was simply a claim.

The concept of “value” is tied to three things: 1) the person to whom something is valuable, 2) the circumstances where (or when) something is valuable and 3) the reason “why” something is valuable.

Human life is valuable to 1) all psychologically healthy sentient beings, 2) in every circumstance they find themselves, 3) because they cannot help but believe it is so.

Mind you, this is a descriptive, not a normative, account. A normative account – proving that people *should *consider one another valuable – would be highly difficult to prove to a skeptic, because it would attack their entire worldview. Worldview attacks are extremely common on this forum, but one might hope that some thread, some day, will not simply become a battle of worldviews.

I would prefer to simply consider how we *do *look at the world, for a moment. If any healthy person truly considered the fetus a human person, is there any question that they would refrain from aborting it?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

When a pregnancy is aborted, the “now” (stage where the fetus was born and grew up into a sentient being) hasn’t happened yet. So, it may be an insult to your human dignity were you to travel back in time and abort yourself, but in cases where time travel is not involved, there is no insult to human dignity.

I assume you would say the same of infanticide?

 

[a_priori]

When a pregnancy is aborted, the “now” (stage where the fetus was born and grew up into a sentient being) hasn’t happened yet. So, it may be an insult to your human dignity were you to travel back in time and abort yourself, but in cases where time travel is not involved, there is no insult to human dignity.

In a strictly mechanical universe there can be no human “dignity”. People often insist on using terms that their worldview is incapable of producing. Words like dignity, rights and value have emotional gravitas because they came from an understanding that a Creator endowed people. People who reject a Creator want to steal these words and use the deep-rooted understanding that comes with them in order to advocate for some utilitarian benefit.

Using these words while rejecting the Creator is like trying to steal a car that has no gas in the tank. The words in the hands of mere men are ultimately meaningless in an absolute sense.

One simply cannot stack particulars high enough to ever produce a universal no matter how hard one huffs and puffs.

 

[Shredderbeam]

I assume you would say the same of infanticide?

Are you implying that all non-religious people are cold-hearted and amoral?

I would not condone infanticide.

In a strictly mechanical universe there can be no human “dignity”. People often insist on using terms that their worldview is incapable of producing. Words like dignity, rights and value have emotional gravitas because they came from an understanding that a Creator endowed people. People who reject a Creator want to steal these words and use the deep-rooted understanding that comes with them in order to advocate for some utilitarian benefit.

Using these words while rejecting the Creator is like trying to steal a car that has no gas in the tank. The words in the hands of mere men are ultimately meaningless in an absolute sense.

One simply cannot stack particulars high enough to ever produce a universal no matter how hard one huffs and puffs.

Why does a Creator have to give us those things in order for us to have them?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Are you implying that all non-religious people are cold-hearted and amoral?

I would not condone infanticide.

I’m sorry if you thought I was saying you were cold-hearted. I simply fail to understand what your position is based on. You said:

When a pregnancy is aborted, the “now” (stage where the fetus was born and grew up into a sentient being) hasn’t happened yet.

For clarification, sentient means “having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.” One does not "grow up into a sentient being, according to this definition. As soon as a being has consciousness, they are sentient. Biologists tell us this occurs sometime late in the first trimester of a pregnancy.

Obviously, this is not what you meant by sentient. By context, you must have meant something that either occurs a) at birth, or b) after birth. But the moment of birth carries no major change to the baby’s sentient experience. Some babies are born at 5 months gestation, while many fetuses are aborted at six months gestation. How can you say that the 6-monther (whom we kill) has less dignity than 5-monther (whom we save)?

It seems that the milestone you’re talking about must occur (for some babies, at least) after birth. But if this is the case, some instances of infanticide would seem to be acceptable. Can you clarify what you meant, in this context?

 

[a_priori]

Why does a Creator have to give us those things in order for us to have them?

Because in a world where the stronger animal can eat the weaker animal, the stronger person can mistreat the weaker person. It is starkly Darwinian. The only thing we can do is enter into an arbitrary social contract where we agree that we don’t want to be murdered so we agree not to murder someone else and call it a law.

The term “inalienable rights” is simply meaningless. If there is no God to endow them they cannot be inalienable. As I said before, the stars are silent. To whom or what do we appeal to ultimately enforce our “rights”? The consensus of men? Hardly inalienable.

 

[Oreoracle]

Hey, MoM. I’m glad you made the thread.

Just because a women has the potential to become pregnant does not necessarily imply immorality, at least not in the sense of “murder”,

Certainly not. However, it has the same effects as “murder” in that it prevents a being from walking amongst us today. To say that abortion is bad just because a killing took place (keep in mind that the fetus would be a non-sentient being for a certain period of time) is to say that something is bad merely because it looks gruesome. This isn’t what I’d call an ethical system, but taste-testing.

if she chooses to avoid becoming pregnant, since the potential person is not in effect or actual production; thus one is not taking away from the existence of any being, since the being or the process that leads to the being is not real.

 

[Spock]

Did hatsoff make an argument? I thought it was simply a claim.

Well, he made a claim, that MoM made a claim - unsubstantited. Since MoM started the exchange, it is his responsibility to prop it up…

Human life is valuable to 1) all psychologically healthy sentient beings, 2) in every circumstance they find themselves, 3) because they cannot help but believe it is so.

This is very generic, and unfortunately not even correct. Right now we are assisting to a good friend of ours, who is close to 94 years old. He is sharp as a tackle, psychologically sane, and very weak physically. He can hardly wait to die. Obviously his own life is valueless for him. He is simply tired of living.

Usually, but not always, our own life is valuable to us (though there are exceptions, as claimed above). Also usually, the life of our loved ones is valuable to us. The life of someone we don’t even know cannot be valuable to us - it simply does not make sense. If we happen to know someone we have not met before, his life may become valuable. I can point out some humans, whose life is definitely not valuable to me. Of course, you may say that I am not nice for saying that, but at least I am honest about it. And I consider myself psychologically sane. Maybe you disagree…

I would prefer to simply consider how we *do *look at the world, for a moment. If any healthy person truly considered the fetus a human person, is there any question that they would refrain from aborting it?

Possibly so. But why should one consider a **potential **human being to be an **actual **human being? The fetus has quite a few attributes we associate with actual human beings, but also lacks quite a few - namely having a working human brain - at the early stages of pregnancy. Where one draws the line is subjective and arbitrary.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Possibly so. But why should one consider a **potential **human being to be an **actual **human being? The fetus has quite a few attributes we associate with actual human beings, but also lacks quite a few - namely having a working human brain - at the early stages of pregnancy. Where one draws the line is subjective and arbitrary.

This is precisely my point. Starting from the premise that human life is not valuable, along with any other set of reasonable premises, we can justify infanticide, when the following conditions are met: 1) nobody cares about the child or 1a) no one who cares about the child will possibly know, 2) the nonexistence of the child will benefit someone, anyone, in the slightest of ways, and 3) the child is not self-aware. Believing that human life is not valuable entails the acceptance of infanticide.

Many atheists accept this, but it isn’t very good PR for their positions.

 

[Spock]

This is precisely my point. Starting from the premise that human life is not valuable, along with any other set of reasonable premises, we can justify infanticide, when the following conditions are met: 1) nobody cares about the child or 1a) no one who cares about the child will possibly know, 2) the nonexistence of the child will benefit someone, anyone, in the slightest of ways, and 3) the child is not self-aware. Believing that human life is not valuable entails the acceptance of infanticide.

Many atheists accept this, but it isn’t very good PR for their positions.

Are we talking about PR? But, yes, it is a possible proposition. The line is arbitrary.

We can come to a compromise, however. We can say that the operational brain is the best dividing line - and that can be objectively verified. At that moment the fetus will have the most important attribute of a human being - a mind. Why would that be so unacceptable? (I certainly do not want to derail this thread, so please disregard this: I would be much more inclined to entertain the Catholic proposition, if it would be more flexible, namely that the artifical prevention of conception would be accepted and supported by the Church. But this is just a remark, which could be explored in a different discussion.)

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Are we talking about PR? But, yes, it is a possible proposition. The line is arbitrary.

We can come to a compromise, however. We can say that the operational brain is the best dividing line - and that can be objectively verified. At that moment the fetus will have the most important attribute of a human being - a mind. Why would that be so unacceptable? (I certainly do not want to derail this thread, so please disregard this: I would be much more inclined to entertain the Catholic proposition, if it would be more flexible, namely that the artifical prevention of conception would be accepted and supported by the Church. But this is just a remark, which could be explored in a different discussion.)

I think that dividing line would put us at about 4 or 5 weeks gestation. Many (most?) women wouldn’t know they were pregnant yet. I don’t think this line is adequate nor particularly measureable, but it would be *much *better than the current non-enforceable policies against abortion.

(As far as the parenthetical goes, many of the strongest arguments against the widespread use of contraception are, perhaps surprisingly, utilitarian.)

 

[Spock]

I think that dividing line would put us at about 4 or 5 weeks gestation. Many (most?) women wouldn’t know they were pregnant yet. I don’t think this line is adequate nor particularly measureable, but it would be *much *better than the current non-enforceable policies against abortion.

If you offer this as a compromise, I would be inclined to agree. To err on the side of caution is sensible. Of course we have no power over the matter. Sensible people never do… they wisely stay away from the swamp of politics.

(As far as the parenthetical goes, many of the strongest arguments against the widespread use of contraception are, perhaps surprisingly, utilitarian.)

Maybe we can elaborate on that, some other time.