Steven Pinker summarises modern pro-choice thinking in a paragraph

[prodigalson2011]

The problem with his ramblings is that suffering and torture of others is still going on en masse, of course, not in the majority of Western nations, but in enough countries that his point falls flat… China, Africa, places in the Middle East, people are suffering terribly, and to say those people causing the suffering aren’t aware of their victims humanity via consciousness is assinine at best.

The other point, that I see a lot of, both from pro-lifers and abortion supporters, this idea that life beginning at conception is some kind of “belief”, its not a “belief” its a cold stone, scientific fact. People can grumble about brain function all they want happening at x weeks in gestation, but really, its a slipperly slope indeed whne people determine life as starting at some form of consciousness or awareness, kids aren’t fully aware of self until about 2 years, and even then its debatable. Some people never develop full awareness. Should we kill them also?

The pro-abortion stance is an illogical and quite frankly, stupid one.

If you read the article, also by Steven Pinker, that I posted in post #2, you’ll see that Pinker thinks killing infants might be “acceptable” from an “evolutionary perspective.”

 

[Hokomai]

I think you’re onto something here- they do believe that killing a human being is wrong, but they don’t agree that the embryo *is *a human being. That is why we have all those frozen embryos- they truly aren’t perceived as actual human beings. This is why Terri Schiavo was killed. This horrifies me- how do we convince these people that human beings are being killed? They just don’t understand. I truly don’t know what to do about this mindset except to pray, pray, pray.

You are exactly right. Pro-choice people don’t get up in the morning and thing"what can I do to kill more people today?". They get up and think: “how can we stop religious dogma ruining the freedoms and sometimes the loves of women?”

To make progress in the choice-life debate, there needs at least to be understanding of the other side’s position. Pro-choice people often think that pro-life people get up in the morning and wonder: “what can I do today to take away women’s rights, and force them to abide by my moral code?”. And of course they don’t. They think “I hope I can do something to save a baby”. Pinker’s description of pro-life attitudes is I think a help in this.

 

[Hokomai]

The problem with his ramblings is that suffering and torture of others is still going on en masse, of course, not in the majority of Western nations, but in enough countries that his point falls flat… China, Africa, places in the Middle East, people are suffering terribly, and to say those people causing the suffering aren’t aware of their victims humanity via consciousness is assinine at best.

The other point, that I see a lot of, both from pro-lifers and abortion supporters, this idea that life beginning at conception is some kind of “belief”, its not a “belief” its a cold stone, scientific fact. People can grumble about brain function all they want happening at x weeks in gestation, but really, its a slipperly slope indeed whne people determine life as starting at some form of consciousness or awareness, kids aren’t fully aware of self until about 2 years, and even then its debatable. Some people never develop full awareness. Should we kill them also?

The pro-abortion stance is an illogical and quite frankly, stupid one.

Pinker’s book has stats which indicate that violence is decreasing in the countries you mention also.

On the issue of ‘life beginning at conception’, I respectfully suggest that you are wrong. Both egg and sperm are alive. The bodies which produced them were alive. ‘Life’ is continuing at conception, not beginning. Again, respectfully, I think your position is that ‘a human being begins at conception’. But this begs the very point being debated: what, exactly is a human being? To equate ‘human life’ or ‘26, more or less, human chromosones replicating’ with a human being is an assertion. A zygote is certainly human, and it has a more-or-less individual combination pf genetic material. But does its life have the same value as, say, mine? The assertion that a zygote is ‘alive’ or ‘human’ does not establish that it has a ‘right to life’. This needs to be demonstrated. To pro-choice people the arguments of the Church at this level appear to include one unproved statement: All (or nearly all) human beings have a right to life, a zygote, embryo or fetus is a human being, in the same sense that a baby child or adult is, therefore it has a right to life.

 

[Hokomai]

Phrases such as, “If everyone jumped off a cliff…” spring immediately to mind. I understand the opposition’s argument perfectly well, but I happen to think its hogwash. Steven Pinker, on the other hand, doesn’t just disagree with Catholic morality, he challenges the morality of, I’d be willing to bet, 99 percent of the civilized world. We should reconsider whether young babies are really people?
And while many may not fully agree with the Catholic position, the fact is that over 50 percent of Americans currently identify as pro-life, so your assertion that Pinker speaks for 90 percent of them is grossly deceptive.

Of course, I asserted no such thing. I said that 90% of Americans disagree with the Church’s position. I was working from memory from Pew Forum surveys. "Pro-life’ people usually do disagree with the Church’s view - on abortion in the case of incest, pregnant children, rape, threat to the life of the mother, on the need to alway employ indirect means, even if it causes harm to the mother (as in the case of ectopic pregnancies etc)

 

[Hokomai]

If you read the article, also by Steven Pinker, that I posted in post #2, you’ll see that Pinker thinks killing infants might be “acceptable” from an “evolutionary perspective.”

The word “acceptable” and the term “evolutionary perspective” do not appear in that article. Your quotation marks are clearly inappropriate, at least. What exactly did he say that you are referring to?

I note that Pinker does describe killing infants as 'immoral".

 

[prodigalson2011]

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The word “acceptable” and the term “evolutionary perspective” do not appear in that article. Your quotation marks are clearly inappropriate, at least. What exactly did he say that you are referring to?

I note that Pinker does describe killing infants as 'immoral".

Those words were my own very concise paraphrasing of his article. I quote:

The leniency shown to neonaticida mothers forces us to think the unthinkable and ask if we, like many societies and like the mothers themselves, are not completely sure whether a neonate is a full person.

I would venture to say very few people think this is a valid question. No one I know, and that includes a ton of nonreligious people, express anything but absolute outrage at these incidents.
The leniency shown is much more likely so due to pleas of temporary insanity than any idea that the baby is not a person. This is pure conjecture, and a poor one at that.

The only thing both sides agree on is that the line must be drawn at some point before birth. Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other.

Go ahead and defend that. Sure he makes uturns after every statement like this to avoid blatantly endorsing it, but this is clearly the theme of the article.

Perhaps only the members of our smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.

I quote this just to show how brilliant he is not. Science has already proven that race is illusory. The genetic differentiation between any 2 human beings is less than that of 2 members of neighboring tribes of the same species of apes (who have no such distinction as race.) He may as well say all blue eyed people can say all brown eyed people have no right to life, because the scientific distinction between races is no more significant. It’s a false dichotomy, and he makes it simply to undermine the argument from human dignity.

So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don’t make it easy. Some neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn’t allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise.

This is what being intelligent and having no common sense gets you. “The facts don’t make it easy?” His “facts” are the observations of philosophers and anthropologists, two fields where bias can easily flourish. He seems to ignore the “fact” that most people clearly see it as evil. But then, that fact doesn’t jive with his agenda. Much better to stick with those scant researchers who are sympathetic to baby killers.

He is careful throughout the article to offer counterpoint and avoid full endorsement, but he does a very poor job of hiding the fact that he thinks the "wrongness"of neonaticide is uncertain, and, with a good deal of concessionary "foreplay,"attempts to bring the reader to this same sense of moral ambiguity. Clever, but not that clever.

 

[MrSylvester]

Even if the fetus didn’t feel pain until ten seconds before his birth, it is still removing the potential not of human life as human life already exists but its removal to do good. Pinker can go screw himself and swallow his ******** rhetoric with all the bastards who support the killing of children. Just as much as our pro-life arguments ‘fail’ (because as everyone knows, there has NEVER been a well written argument against abortion and in favor of life written by pro-lifers) to convince others, so do the arguments of pro-choice twats fail to convince us.

A fetus grows, reproduces cells, is made out of two sets of genes, feels pain and touch, feeds and is most definitely not a plant so the argument that a fetus is pile of tissue and as significant as a piece of hair is bull****. Even if the majority of abortions are done before those weeks, the fact that governments allow them to happen and the fact that people still do them is proof that this evil exists and how low humanity can stoop to.

Mr. Pinker, I don’t ususually swear publicly but when it comes to the lvies of children, I do. Go to hell you son of *****. How would you feel if you’re own mother aborted you? Are those children who survived abortions not to be considered? If they weren’t aborted, would they be good people if they were brought up to be pro-choice?

 

[James924]

illustrate why the pro-life causes continues to lose its arguments.

Continues to lose its arguments? Are talking about the unprecedented amount legislative and judicial pro-life victories that have been won at the state and federal level over the past 5 years (especially the last 2)? Or are you talking about the growing percentage of Americans changing their minds on the issue, or the abortionists and abortion mill managers that have converted or the amount of abortion clinics shutting down around the country? You’re too funny.

 

[kama3]

Now, as to his argument in this particular case, it seems to me to be dressed with a lot of misleading valuations. I disagree that life can be defined as beginning with brain activity. I suppose, in that case, plants are never alive? Not much brain activity going on there.
Personhood itself is a valuation that is beyond scientific description, so resorting to science for ethical judgments is a doomed enterprise.

Long time ago, Catholics would recognize that human beings were composed of body and soul, and that it was the soul which made one human. Thus, Catholic thinkers – including, famously, Aquinas – would differentiate between killing an ensouled and unensouled being. Aquinas would also believe that human ensoulment was delayed – occuring some 60 to 90 days after conception.

It seems to me that modern Catholics have dropped the notion of ensoulment – no, they dropped the body/soul duality altogether – and are instead ascribing value to a biologically defined life. Such view however is purely materialist: if it has right DNA (=it’s human), and it has the right chemistry going on in it (=it’s alive), then it must be a person.

In the mean time, the originally materialist side recognized that consciousness is linked to central nervous system and its electrical activity, and in a sense, (re-)discovered the soul. Conciousness arises from random firing of neurons, an order out of chaos; and it cannot arise until the underlying neural network is complex enough. It ceases when the neurons stop firing and is irreversibly destroyed together with the micro-structure of the brain.

So the materialists became the spiritualists, and the spiritualists became the materialists.

Paradox.

 

[JimG]

Long time ago, Catholics would recognize that human beings were composed of body and soul, and that it was the soul which made one human. Thus, Catholic thinkers – including, famously, Aquinas – would differentiate between killing an ensouled and unensouled being. Aquinas would also believe that human ensoulment was delayed – occuring some 60 to 90 days after conception.

It seems to me that modern Catholics have dropped the notion of ensoulment – no, they dropped the body/soul duality altogether – and are instead ascribing value to a biologically defined life. Such view however is purely materialist: if it has right DNA (=it’s human), and it has the right chemistry going on in it (=it’s alive), then it must be a person.

In the mean time, the originally materialist side recognized that consciousness is linked to central nervous system and its electrical activity, and in a sense, (re-)discovered the soul. Conciousness arises from random firing of neurons, an order out of chaos; and it cannot arise until the underlying neural network is complex enough. It ceases when the neurons stop firing and is irreversibly destroyed together with the micro-structure of the brain.

So the materialists became the spiritualists, and the spiritualists became the materialists.

Paradox.

Catholics have not dropped the notion of ensoulment. Every living being is considered to have a soul. And every human being is considered to have a human soul.

There never was a body-soul duality. Rather, the union of body and soul is considered to be a single substance, a union, not a duality.

But they don’t apply ensoulment to the abortion debate much, simply because we now know from a biological perspective that a new individual of the human species has its beginning at conception. And every new human being must have a soul, by virtue of being an individual of the human species.

Ensoulment can’t be observed, so there’s no point arguing about it. But we know when a new human being begins. Having a soul does not depend upon consciousness or the lack of it. It depends on being a human.

 

[sw85]

I have been reading psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest book The Better Angels of our Natures, (Allen lane 2011) in which he argues from hundreds of studies that violence between humans has lessened massively. He addresses the issue of abortion in the quote below. It seemed to me to accurately describe the thinking (with added science) of most people who support legal access to abortion. It also illustrates, to me, who so much pro-life argument fails to make progress: it is addressed to ideas that people do not have, such as that ‘it’s ok to kill children’.

Yes, we’re pretty much all aware that pro-choicers tie rights to consciousness. The problem is they have no reason to. On what grounds do you make the assertion “the right to life arises from your being aware of life”? It’s arbitrary nonsense. But then so is the entire idea of “rights” under a materialist paradigm.

By contrast we have two and a half millennia of natural theology to back up the idea that the right to live arises merely from one’s participation in human nature – a participation that, by definition, starts instantly and at the moment of conception.

So in short, our criticism of pro-choicers is not that they don’t think they’re killing babies. It’s that they’re killing babies. What they think about it doesn’t enter into at all. Natural law is nonconsequentialist. Good intentions can only justify inherently morally good or neutral acts.

 

[sw85]

The soul of a thing is simply its form. It is the principle of substantive unity – the principle that, for instance, allowed me to transition from fetus to infant to child to teenager to man, the matter of my body constantly being replaced, while the central core of “me” remains.

There is no Cartesian dualism in Catholic theology. The soul is to a person what the shape is to a statue. It is not reducible to anything about it, any more than you can p(name removed by moderator)oint the part of a statue wherein its shape resides. No “ghosts in the machine” here. It is impossible for a thing to exist without a soul.

You can point to Aquinas’ writings all you want – he simply wasn’t apprised of all the facts. We, today, are. We know that the embryo is not some undifferentiated substance which acquires its humanity at some point along the way. Its development unfolds according to a particular pattern precisely because it is already human. And if it is a human then it is entitled to all the rights which can meaningfully, under a scholastic framework, be said to apply to it, namely the right to live, grow, and flourish.

 

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