A Philosophical Debate On The Problem Of Abortion

[MindOverMatter]

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.

Whether or not a human life has intrinsic objective value in reality outside of our beliefs is besides the point of the arguement. The people who argue that abortion should be a human right is making a value judgment about people. They “believe” that they have a moral right to have an abortion. They are saying that a person has value, they have human rights that people ought to recognize objectively, i e the freedom of a women to make a choice. Whether its pro life or pro choice, most people on both sides believe they are debating about the value of a human being, even though they might not consciously recognize the metaphysical implications of there beliefs. I am debating within the context of the belief that human life has value. Of coarse, then there are people like hats off and you, that “cop-out” and say there is no value to be arguing about. Thats fine, but i prefer you said nothing or argue within in the context of the debate. Thank you.

 

[MindOverMatter]

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.

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”.

 

[MindOverMatter]

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.

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 believe to be intrinsically valuable “Now”.
If you don’t believe that my life has any value at all, then any atheist who argues for rights and that people should recognize those rights under pain of being immoral are irrational. I don’t believe that they are irrational for fighting for objective human value, neither is there any reason to reject objective human value outside of a baseless impractical bias.

 

[Terry_from_Ypsi]

Science identifes 2 facts about what occurrs at “conception”:

1. It is the result of an action involving an egg and a sperm who are from a man and a woman.
2. The DNA which uniquely identifies a “person”, which determines physical characteristics and other charateristics, talents of the “person” is created.

Because of these scietific facts, from conception to death, that unique gift to humanity ought to protected, nurtured and allowed to “grow.”

A person does not stop “growing” until it is “dead”, when it ceases to exist in the physical world.

A person chosing to have an abortion is “robing” humanity of the gift of this person.
Therefore, abortion is the ultimate sin of “selfishness”, because the person does not want to “share.” It is also an act questioning whether there is an absence of love in the person’s life who has or supports abortion rights.

Regards from a amateur thinker,

 

[Fran65]

Spock,

If every human life is not intrinsically valuable then* who *decides which lives are valuable? You state that some lives have no value to you - does this mean that there are other people walking this earth who you would regard as nothing more than objects to be used and disposed of according to your needs and desires? That is the logical conclusion to your statement.

As someone with a life threatening heart condition who costs society quite a lot of money to keep alive, I am glad to be living in a society that has been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christianity. An atheistic society based on darwinistic principles and in which human life has no intrinsic value would be a truly heartless, desolate and terrible place. It would also be one in which I would face a panel in which my usefulness to society would be compared to the costs of keeping me alive and a rational decision made as to whether I would be given treatment or euthanised. That’s if I’d made it to birth as my condition is genetic…

 

[MindOverMatter]

As someone with a life threatening heart condition who costs society quite a lot of money to keep alive, I am glad to be living in a society that has been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christianity. An atheistic society based on darwinistic principles and in which human life has no intrinsic value would be a truly heartless, desolate and terrible place. It would also be one in which I would face a panel in which my usefulness to society would be compared to the costs of keeping me alive and a rational decision made as to whether I would be given treatment or euthanised. That’s if I’d made it to birth as my condition is genetic…

Thank God that there are Christians and people in general who believe in the value of a human being. A skepticism that ignores belief in values just for the sake of being radically skeptical about God only tells of the denial involved in those who want to escape the practical and social reasonableness of Christianity; and they will deny it even to the point of a social breakdown in to complete nihilism. If there is a concept of human rights in society today then you can guarantee that Christianity has played a big part in planting that concept into the minds of todays society.

 

[MindOverMatter]

Science identifes 2 facts about what occurrs at “conception”:

1. It is the result of an action involving an egg and a sperm who are from a man and a woman.
2. The DNA which uniquely identifies a “person”, which determines physical characteristics and other charateristics, talents of the “person” is created.

Because of these scietific facts, from conception to death, that unique gift to humanity ought to protected, nurtured and allowed to “grow.”

A person does not stop “growing” until it is “dead”, when it ceases to exist in the physical world.

A person chosing to have an abortion is “robing” humanity of the gift of this person.
Therefore, abortion is the ultimate sin of “selfishness”, because the person does not want to “share.” It is also an act questioning whether there is an absence of love in the person’s life who has or supports abortion rights.

Regards from a amateur thinker,

Very good. Thanks for the (name removed by moderator)ut.

 

[Oreoracle]

MoM,

Are you ignoring my post (#15)?

 

[Spock]

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 believe to be intrinsically valuable “Now”.

Your life may have value, if you make it valuable. Your mere existence - separated from the actions you may make is not “valuable”. Your actions can make it valuable.

If you don’t believe that my life has any value at all, then any atheist who argues for rights and that people should recognize those rights under pain of being immoral are irrational. I don’t believe that they are irrational for fighting for objective human value, neither is there any reason to reject objective human value outside of a baseless impractical bias.

Except there are no “rights”. The concept of “rights” is merely the recognition that the strong one (the state) allows the weak one (you) to do certain things without fear of repercussions. Of course we like this fact. We do value our freedom to engage in certain activities.

 

[Spock]

Spock,

If every human life is not intrinsically valuable then* who *decides which lives are valuable? You state that some lives have no value to you - does this mean that there are other people walking this earth who you would regard as nothing more than objects to be used and disposed of according to your needs and desires? That is the logical conclusion to your statement.

A very incorrect conclusion. I accept the age-old norm of mutual respect, the maxim of “live and let live” without putting any value on mere existence. I do value positive actions.

As someone with a life threatening heart condition who costs society quite a lot of money to keep alive, I am glad to be living in a society that has been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christianity. An atheistic society based on darwinistic principles and in which human life has no intrinsic value would be a truly heartless, desolate and terrible place. It would also be one in which I would face a panel in which my usefulness to society would be compared to the costs of keeping me alive and a rational decision made as to whether I would be given treatment or euthanised. That’s if I’d made it to birth as my condition is genetic…

A usual misstatement of the facts. Being atheistic does not preclude being helpful to others, if and when one feels inclined to do so. And many do, since the rational person recognizes the fact that humans are both individuals and herd-animals. It is a sensible strategy to suspend one’s own effort to maximize one’s own well-being. The point is that “what goes around comes around” and being helpful to others is something that may pay itself back, when one happens to fall on hard times. Yes, it can be labeled as selfish, so what? Help is help, whatever the motivation might be.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Your life may have value, if you make it valuable. Your mere existence - separated from the actions you may make is not “valuable”. Your actions can make it valuable.

MOM is right, however, to point out that this is not the premise our culture is using in the abortion debate. The culture wars argue from the premise of the intrinsic value of personhood. Neither side disputes this, although certain fringe elements may.

 

[Spock]

MOM is right, however, to point out that this is not the premise our culture is using in the abortion debate. The culture wars argue from the premise of the intrinsic value of personhood. Neither side disputes this, although certain fringe elements may.

Then I am the fringe element. Come to think of it, always been. I always question the dogma. (I love the bumper sticker: “My karma ran over your dogma”.)

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Then I am the fringe element.

I figured you’d appreciate the term.

 

[RobbyS]

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

I would not condone infanticide.

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

SOMEONE one gave them to you. In fact a long chain of ancestors gave them to you. The difference would be that the Creator-God intends you to have them. You are part of the gift.

 

[RobbyS]

Then I am the fringe element. Come to think of it, always been. I always question the dogma. (I love the bumper sticker: “My karma ran over your dogma”.)

Americans think in terms of dogma, not in terms of Karma. Karma is more an attitude than an opinion.

 

[hatsoff]

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.

I take exception to your implication that my statement was immature.

You seem to think that I have the burden of proof in showing that human life has “intrinsic” value. I don’t. If you think life is somehow valuable for its own sake, whatever that would mean, then you need to demonstrate that. Until you do, I am obliged to dismiss your assumption that it does.

If you think God values human life, that’s fine. But I don’t believe in your God.

 

[hatsoff]

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

Correct.

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

Incorrect. Truth does lack “intrinsic” value, but people can still value truth for their own reasons, whatever they might be. And those people will often prefer truth as a result.

And so the rest of your post…

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?

…is invalid.

 

[hatsoff]

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.

I have never claimed to possess “inalienable rights.” I agree that the concept is fallacious, regardless of its appearance in an otherwise brilliant document.

 

[hatsoff]

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

The “claim” (it was really more of a simple observation; do I need to make an argument that the sun rises in the morning, or that the stars appear at night?) was an objection to MindOverMatter’s controversial premise. If he doesn’t want to establish his premise, then that’s fine. I can’t prove that it’s false. But neither am I going to assume that it’s true.

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?

Human beings are usually but not always considered valuable. Certain unnamed criminals, for instance, are reviled, and not valued at all by a large portion of the American population. More importantly, though, fetuses aren’t valued at all by many. The hypothetical human beings MindOverMatter mentioned aren’t valued by anyone at all, because they do not exist.

Now, maybe you think this is horrific in some way. But that’s a value judgment on your part, and not a factual issue.

Finally, even if most of the population did value fetuses the same as grown humans, that still wouldn’t necessarily provide incentive for some dissenter to conform to majority opinion.

 

[MindOverMatter]

Certainly not. However, it has the same effects as “murder” in that it prevents a being from walking amongst us today.

Functionally speaking in regards to a living person, a being that is not of the nature that it should necessarily arise from a precedent state of affairs is not a personal being because it is not in its nature to develop in to what we understand to be a living person with out the introduction of other entities, thus its non-actuality is not necessarily evil, unless one intentionally and knowingly intends to destroy the human race by rendering the necessary components, that go into making human production possible, biologically dysfunctional. Thus its status as a living person is void, because by itself it is just a being. The possibility of a person does not equal a person. The pending generation of a person, is equal to a person. The existential value of a person is relevant to its productive foundation as well as a persons actual existence now because a biological persons existential being is immanently defined by its origin in the human embryo. The production of a living person began with the embryo, and that production proceeds until the death of that person (as someone else intelligently pointed out). The idea of a person being a person just because we can see him or her speak or talk is a purely subjective not to mention naive concept of a person when taken apart from his or her immediate productive origins that go into actualizing what we know to be a person. My value and nature as a person now is dependent on the productive qualities of the human-embryo. Thus one must value the human embryo as him or her self, and for somebody to stop the process that leads to me, is to prevent me and thus undermines my dignity and value as a living person. A person obviously cannot be reduced only to the fact that a person is sentient, as you yourself pointed out in another thread.

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.

Thats certainly not what i am saying. I am saying that it is wrong only because you are destroying the “production” of a living person.

I’m not sure I get your meaning. The same could be said of any being that is not yet sentient.

The same cannot be said of an entity that is in the production of becoming “me” in the here and now. Me as a real being is only relevant and meaningful in regards to my moms “pregnancy”, since thats the point where something isn’t merely a “possibility” (a reality thats possible, but not necessary), but rather a potentiality pending actuality ( something thats no longer just a possibility, but rather is a potentiality in the process of becoming actual, unless prevented. Thus, so far as i exist and have value as a person now, it is right to call a human embryo a person, and thus apply the same rights and value that applies to me now. In this respect i can say with absolute certainty that to prevent the process of my becoming is to destroy my dignity as a person now. Its hard to see this because we speaking in reference to a process in time, thus the illusion is prevalent that a human embryo is not as valuable or moral relevant to a living person. I understand this; but my arguement is sound if you consider me of having value “knowing” that i exist “now”.

Let’s rephrase: “If she chooses to terminate, and the potential sentient being is not yet an actual sentient being, she is not taking away the existence of a sentient being, since the being or a portion of the process that leads to the being has not yet occured.”

False. A human embryo is in the process of becoming a person. If she prevents that process, she destroys the person. Consider that a sperm and an unfertilized egg is not a potential person, but rather two realities that have the possibility of being transformed into a person by their possible unification; thus a sperm and an unfertilized egg is not a person, since neither of them by them selves are in the process of becoming a person.

Whether the fetus is a future prospect considered by the mother, or whether it is already in her belly, the fetus is not sentient in either case.

Its irrelevant. What is important is whether or not we can identify a actual process of which a person is as far as we know the necessary and inevitable result. We witness that people are the end result of human pregnancy and thus we have good reason to consider abortion as murder.

Saying that it’s okay to turn down the possibility of getting pregnant but that it’s wrong to terminate the pregnancy creates an arbitrary stopping point.

No it does not, i have explained this thoroughly in this present post and my OP. Feel free to disagree, but what you can’t do is claim that i haven’t given you the philosophical criteria for my disagreement with abortion. It is not arbitrary. Its factual.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t anything that is “potential” also “pending?”.

No, there are also possibilities that are reliant or are contingent on particular events, which might not occur, in order to become a significant reality such as a person. A person, in so far as the ingredients for a person are present in the embryo, is the “necessary” result of a human embryo. Production is not the same as chance. We are talking about something that is proceeding necessarily toward a specific end in respect of its initial ingredients and the ordered and progressive powers inherent in the embryo.

This doesn’t matter, however, since the fetus is still not actually valuable since it isn’t sentient.

I’m sentient now, and i have value now, and my existence as a sentient being is intrinsically related to the fundamental process taking place in the human embryo. Thus i am correct to remind people of my human right to exist and how i value that existence and that people ought to value my existence, and thus in so far as i have value they must necessarily recognize and value the productive stages that went into my development as an existential being and that therefore the destruction of an embryo necessarily leads to the undermining of my value as a person now.