Twenty Sided makes a good point that our attempts to distinguish a clear line between human and inhuman life could simply come down to human chauvanism, but i think part of the reason for my moral framework is that it not only strives for logical consistency but for legal applicability. In law you need a cutoff point: drink the beer 2 minutes before your 21st birthday and go to jail, no it's not logical per se but in order to create a universally applicable code there has to be a hard cutoff somewhere, which is why i put a lot of weight on the mirror test despite its somewhat arbitrary nature. Something like a Turing Test for humans: are you merely alive and responsive or are you self-aware? All self-aware people would have the same moral value despite differences in intellectual ability. Life forms that have not achieved self-awareness or lack the capacity to do so end up being treated differently.
So it sets a line, and as with all line-setting creates annoying questions when something falls right smack on top of the line.
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
The except in case of a rape clause is absurd. The only way to prove, legally, that sexual assault occurred is through a trial and we all know how good those are at successfully prosecuting rapists. Not to mention how long that would take.
The except in case of a rape clause is absurd. The only way to prove, legally, that sexual assault occurred is through a trial and we all know how good those are at successfully prosecuting rapists. Not to mention how long that would take.
It's also inconsistent with an belief in fetal personhood.
But it is totally consistent with an aversion to female promiscuity.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
This is exactly the biggest issue I have with politicians who say they are "pro-life."
They are "pro-life" but they aren't "pro quality of life."
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
While Tooley is logically coherent, we know this is basically something people will never go for legally or in practice, as it would reduce infants down to chattel. It's only wrong to kill babies because somebody already called dibs. So already our law has a special case pleading involved by saying that babies are not self-aware but it counts as murder.
But perhaps I'm just a provincial Euclidean human instead of a higher-plane Cthulhu alien.
Twenty Sided makes a good point that our attempts to distinguish a clear line between human and inhuman life could simply come down to human chauvanism, but i think part of the reason for my moral framework is that it not only strives for logical consistency but for legal applicability. In law you need a cutoff point: drink the beer 2 minutes before your 21st birthday and go to jail, no it's not logical per se but in order to create a universally applicable code there has to be a hard cutoff somewhere, which is why i put a lot of weight on the mirror test despite its somewhat arbitrary nature. Something like a Turing Test for humans: are you merely alive and responsive or are you self-aware? All self-aware people would have the same moral value despite differences in intellectual ability. Life forms that have not achieved self-awareness or lack the capacity to do so end up being treated differently.
So it sets a line, and as with all line-setting creates annoying questions when something falls right smack on top of the line.
I just don't think there's any real one-to-one overlap between logical consistency and legal applicability.
I'd even go so far as to say that the universe actively defies us on that matter.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but law are just an implementation of policy and is forever hung up on precedents and tradition. What is right and what is legal are not necessarily the same even.
The only common logical point of consistency is that we have no problem eating self-aware animals or experimenting on them, value other animals which are not self aware (including infants and coma patients) and, frankly, conservatives have no problem creating special classes of people which are superior or inferior to others in practice. At this point, I've just decided to make peace with the idea, that even at my best, I only extend the right to life to other sapient creatures provisionally as a matter of convenience.
I guess that could change when we all ascend to Buddha space aliens with a reverence for all life and no need to involve ourselves in the struggle of survival, but that day is a long time coming.
i feel like journalists should pursue this line of questioning, like really try to get a straight answer regarding how government intends to assist and care for women who are forced to bring a child to term.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
I'm pretty sure that any argument that ends with "And that's why killing babies is OK!" is going to be pretty unconvincing.
It may be logical given the premise but it is so outside our common moral intuitions that it seems more likely that the premise is flawed than that 99% humanity has gotten this while morality thing wrong. If I ended up proving that 2+2 = 5, I'd be more likely to check my work rather than conclude that everyone else prior has gotten 2+2 wrong.
There is also some strong arguments against basing a "right to life" on internal mental states (can you kill sleeping people?) but I think other people can make those arguments equally well or better than I can.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
I'm pretty sure that any argument that ends with "And that's why killing babies is OK!" is going to be pretty unconvincing.
It may be logical given the premise but it is so outside our common moral intuitions that it seems more likely that the premise is flawed than that 99% humanity has gotten this while morality thing wrong. If I ended up proving that 2+2 = 5, I'd be more likely to check my work rather than conclude that everyone else prior has gotten 2+2 wrong.
There is also some strong arguments against basing a "right to life" on internal mental states (can you kill sleeping people?) but I think other people can make those arguments equally well or better than I can.
Early infanticide was a strongly accepted practice throughout many cultures, especially because of the low chance that your baby would survive infancy even if you did want it. Pretty sure Christianity didn't baptize until Day 3 (unless it was clear the child was going to die before that point), and the Chinese didn't name their babies until a few days or weeks into life.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's not "against moral intuition" historically.
I'd hazard a guess and say that even if that was the case historically, people still found it quite unpalatable and stopped doing that when they started having better options.
I'd guess they think you were worse than Hitler if you just up and stuck a knife in a perfectly viable baby because you wanted to eat it or something.
It's a lot like how people are only for abortion under those special case medical exceptions or because they're incapable of caring for the child.
There's definitely a moral instinct against it, to be sure, but there's also a moral instinct against doing the same thing to a cat. The question is, how much of that is constructed? I tend to have a dim view of the idea that a thing is right or wrong just because it feels that way. Rather, it feels that way because we've absorbed cultural values throughout our whole lives. That guilt you feel when telling a lie isn't because lying is bad (although it is), it's because you feel the collective weight of the western tradition against lying thrusting back against you.
We can understand that something is bad through reflection, but intuition is not to be trusted (which is where i diverge from Kant, who felt that the moral imperative could be understood a priori, but he was also a devout Lutheran which might have shaded some of his conclusions).
Edit: I feel the argument is getting off-base a bit. The point is that abortion and infanticide are not categorically good, just that the badness of them are on a lower order than the badness of the murder of a fully-realized sapient being. The pro-birth side of the argument rates all human life as equal, the argument here is that life is not worthless before self-awareness, but that life is... worth less. Just as a cat's life is worth less, or a cow's. It still has some value which deserves respect and wanton destruction of any life is a moral ill, but the standard for justifiable killing drops.
Kill a self-aware human? Pretty much needs to be for immediate self-defense, kill-or-be-killed scenario, some exceptions for people with terminal illness who are making a clear, competent decision to die.
Kill something else? Well that depends on where on the scale it lies.
There's definitely a moral instinct against it, to be sure, but there's also a moral instinct against doing the same thing to a cat.
We can also recognize that just because an act is wrong (eg, killing a cat) doesn't make it murder. A position that a fetus is not a person, but does have some moral value, is remarkably consistent with a lot of mainstream American positions on both sides of the debate, as well as many cultures worldwide today and throughout history.
Edit: I think your edit was along the same lines...
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
I'm pretty sure that any argument that ends with "And that's why killing babies is OK!" is going to be pretty unconvincing.
It may be logical given the premise but it is so outside our common moral intuitions that it seems more likely that the premise is flawed than that 99% humanity has gotten this while morality thing wrong. If I ended up proving that 2+2 = 5, I'd be more likely to check my work rather than conclude that everyone else prior has gotten 2+2 wrong.
There is also some strong arguments against basing a "right to life" on internal mental states (can you kill sleeping people?) but I think other people can make those arguments equally well or better than I can.
Early infanticide was a strongly accepted practice throughout many cultures, ...
As were chattel slavery, forced concubinage, forced castration ... All sorts of fun things.
There's definitely a moral instinct against it, to be sure, but there's also a moral instinct against doing the same thing to a cat. The question is, how much of that is constructed? I tend to have a dim view of the idea that a thing is right or wrong just because it feels that way. Rather, it feels that way because we've absorbed cultural values throughout our whole lives. That guilt you feel when telling a lie isn't because lying is bad (although it is), it's because you feel the collective weight of the western tradition against lying thrusting back against you.
We can understand that something is bad through reflection, but intuition is not to be trusted (which is where i diverge from Kant, who felt that the moral imperative could be understood a priori, but he was also a devout Lutheran which might have shaded some of his conclusions).
Edit: I feel the argument is getting off-base a bit. The point is that abortion and infanticide are not categorically good, just that the badness of them are on a lower order than the badness of the murder of a fully-realized sapient being. The pro-birth side of the argument rates all human life as equal, the argument here is that life is not worthless before self-awareness, but that life is... worth less. Just as a cat's life is worth less, or a cow's. It still has some value which deserves respect and wanton destruction of any life is a moral ill, but the standard for justifiable killing drops.
Kill a self-aware human? Pretty much needs to be for immediate self-defense, kill-or-be-killed scenario, some exceptions for people with terminal illness who are making a clear, competent decision to die.
Kill something else? Well that depends on where on the scale it lies.
I don't like where that argument leads because it seems to end up putting a value on the head of every human and how much their life is worth (how "bad" it is to kill them). This is a half-step from eugenics. Unless I am drastically misunderstanding/misreading?
Edit: removed a saved draft of an earlier tangent I decided not to follow. Dumb drafts!
It's not like those early cultures practiced infanticide because they sat down and came to a conclusion using then mirror test and then were just okay with it. I'm only disagreeing in so far as you initially claimed that it wasn't against moral intuition historically.
I'm probably a lot more existential on these matters in that I think that subjective interpretation is pretty much inescapable after a point, no matter how much you'd like everything to be perfectly and logically coherent. It's not like people go, "I value my baby because of its future moral value."
Also, I would never stick a knife in the cat in my avatar. Just look at him.
Too adorable.
There's definitely a moral instinct against it, to be sure, but there's also a moral instinct against doing the same thing to a cat. The question is, how much of that is constructed? I tend to have a dim view of the idea that a thing is right or wrong just because it feels that way. Rather, it feels that way because we've absorbed cultural values throughout our whole lives. That guilt you feel when telling a lie isn't because lying is bad (although it is), it's because you feel the collective weight of the western tradition against lying thrusting back against you.
I mean, I am the guy that argued we do all that stuff because of human chauvinism.
There's definitely a moral instinct against it, to be sure, but there's also a moral instinct against doing the same thing to a cat. The question is, how much of that is constructed? I tend to have a dim view of the idea that a thing is right or wrong just because it feels that way. Rather, it feels that way because we've absorbed cultural values throughout our whole lives. That guilt you feel when telling a lie isn't because lying is bad (although it is), it's because you feel the collective weight of the western tradition against lying thrusting back against you.
We can understand that something is bad through reflection, but intuition is not to be trusted (which is where i diverge from Kant, who felt that the moral imperative could be understood a priori, but he was also a devout Lutheran which might have shaded some of his conclusions).
Edit: I feel the argument is getting off-base a bit. The point is that abortion and infanticide are not categorically good, just that the badness of them are on a lower order than the badness of the murder of a fully-realized sapient being. The pro-birth side of the argument rates all human life as equal, the argument here is that life is not worthless before self-awareness, but that life is... worth less. Just as a cat's life is worth less, or a cow's. It still has some value which deserves respect and wanton destruction of any life is a moral ill, but the standard for justifiable killing drops.
Kill a self-aware human? Pretty much needs to be for immediate self-defense, kill-or-be-killed scenario, some exceptions for people with terminal illness who are making a clear, competent decision to die.
Kill something else? Well that depends on where on the scale it lies.
I don't like where that argument leads because it seems to end up putting a value on the head of every human and how much their life is worth (how "bad" it is to kill them). This is a half-step from eugenics. Unless I am drastically misunderstanding/misreading?
Edit: removed a saved draft of an earlier tangent I decided not to follow. Dumb drafts!
The idea is that "all men are created equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights" kicks in once you achieve self-awareness, whether you are physically or mentally disabled, a genius, a celebrity, or just a painfully boring and mediocre person. It's not a sliding scale based on mental acuity that continues to accrue.
That, however, is possibly where Twenty Sided's argument about human perspective and chauvanism really kicks in here, in a hypothetical world where humans became the lesser order to something else, which would force a new moral paradigm where we'd have to seriously reconsider our approach to killing and eating animals unless we wanted to submit to the idea that we are as chattel to our alien/robot overlords. Sapience is still probably an important distinction, however.
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
While Tooley is logically coherent, we know this is basically something people will never go for legally or in practice, as it would reduce infants down to chattel. It's only wrong to kill babies because somebody already called dibs. So already our law has a special case pleading involved by saying that babies are not self-aware but it counts as murder.
But perhaps I'm just a provincial Euclidean human instead of a higher-plane Cthulhu alien.
Tooley is a philosopher making an ethics argument not a legal one. People like to conflate them, but they are distinct.
There are practical issues of infanticide that make disallowing it legally sensible, even if it may be moral. The simplest being that its hard to establish concept of self from a corpse, and there is a large range of developmental variability.
So it may only be ethical to kill some 1 year olds, most 9 month olds, and the vast majority but not all 6 month olds, but we don't have a good way to know for sure. But what we do know for sure is that no fetus has a concept of self, because no infants under X months have one. And since nature provides us with a bright line in womb and out of womb, we can use that to legally allow abortion and know its ethical. Especially because with safe surrender their are no-cost options for people to unburden themselves of an infant if they want to.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
I'm pretty sure that any argument that ends with "And that's why killing babies is OK!" is going to be pretty unconvincing.
It may be logical given the premise but it is so outside our common moral intuitions that it seems more likely that the premise is flawed than that 99% humanity has gotten this while morality thing wrong. If I ended up proving that 2+2 = 5, I'd be more likely to check my work rather than conclude that everyone else prior has gotten 2+2 wrong.
Some other people have pointed out that infanticide was historically widely accepted, but I'd like to point another example less prone to "Well they also though X was okay". Basically any modern argument supporting the concept of Just War implicitly has to endorse the idea that actions leading to the death of not just babies, but large numbers of children and other non-combatants can be ethical. This is in some ways even more so today than previously in history when fighting was done with spear or musket.
There's the whole side argument of intent, but from a consequential point of view "and that's why drone strikes are OK!" has a (killing babies) component.
Some other people have pointed out that infanticide was historically widely accepted, but I'd like to point another example less prone to "Well they also though X was okay". Basically any modern argument supporting the concept of Just War implicitly has to endorse the idea that actions leading to the death of not just babies, but large numbers of children and other non-combatants can be ethical. This is in some ways even more so today than previously in history when fighting was done with spear or musket.
There's the whole side argument of intent, but from a consequential point of view "and that's why drone strikes are OK!" has a (killing babies) component.
I'm not sure I follow your argument here, can you explain the connection with just war again? I don't think just war has many modern supporters through I could be wrong.
I think historical arguments are difficult to make in general as they tend to go around in circles based on interpretation of often scarce historical facts. Did early greeks really view infanticide as acceptable or was it Christian propaganda? Does the presence of X indicate that it was an accepted part of culture Y or was it a condemned aberration? Difficult doesn't mean impossible through it is much easier when discussing more recent history (like the last 400 years or so) where you actually have things like records and data rather than having to guess at facts.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
I'm pretty sure that any argument that ends with "And that's why killing babies is OK!" is going to be pretty unconvincing.
It may be logical given the premise but it is so outside our common moral intuitions that it seems more likely that the premise is flawed than that 99% humanity has gotten this while morality thing wrong. If I ended up proving that 2+2 = 5, I'd be more likely to check my work rather than conclude that everyone else prior has gotten 2+2 wrong.
There is also some strong arguments against basing a "right to life" on internal mental states (can you kill sleeping people?) but I think other people can make those arguments equally well or better than I can.
Early infanticide was a strongly accepted practice throughout many cultures, especially because of the low chance that your baby would survive infancy even if you did want it. Pretty sure Christianity didn't baptize until Day 3 (unless it was clear the child was going to die before that point), and the Chinese didn't name their babies until a few days or weeks into life.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's not "against moral intuition" historically.
Some cultures also had folklore explaining how disabled babies aren't actually human.
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
While Tooley is logically coherent, we know this is basically something people will never go for legally or in practice, as it would reduce infants down to chattel. It's only wrong to kill babies because somebody already called dibs. So already our law has a special case pleading involved by saying that babies are not self-aware but it counts as murder.
But perhaps I'm just a provincial Euclidean human instead of a higher-plane Cthulhu alien.
Tooley is a philosopher making an ethics argument not a legal one. People like to conflate them, but they are distinct.
There are practical issues of infanticide that make disallowing it legally sensible, even if it may be moral. The simplest being that its hard to establish concept of self from a corpse, and there is a large range of developmental variability.
So it may only be ethical to kill some 1 year olds, most 9 month olds, and the vast majority but not all 6 month olds, but we don't have a good way to know for sure. But what we do know for sure is that no fetus has a concept of self, because no infants under X months have one. And since nature provides us with a bright line in womb and out of womb, we can use that to legally allow abortion and know its ethical. Especially because with safe surrender their are no-cost options for people to unburden themselves of an infant if they want to.
I think that Tooley's argument is interesting, but I think that the consequence of it being totally permissible to just throw babies into a woodchipper is intuitively unsatisfying.
Now you can make all the hulabaloo that you want about how there may be practical reasons to make it illegal but it certainly doesn't seem like we think that the only problem with throwing babies into a mulching machine is a practical one. It's not that it's imprudent, it's that it's wrong.
I think that there are lots of good arguments about why we ought to allow abortions, but one that has the consequence of it being morally permissible to just slaughter infants by the dozens is flawed.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I get that argument, but I think the flaw it points out in Tooley is not because Tooley is wrong, but that Singer in Animal Welfare is right.
Tooley presumes a level of okayness with lots of ongoing killing. If you get rid of the idea that killing a pig or a cow or a chicken etc is okay, the infanticide aspect of it sort of retreats as you move the okay to kill line to shrimp or some other lower creature.
Maybe the issue isn't that killing the babies is wrong, its that all the other things that are less mentally aware we are intuitively okay with killing, we shouldn't be?
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
While Tooley is logically coherent, we know this is basically something people will never go for legally or in practice, as it would reduce infants down to chattel. It's only wrong to kill babies because somebody already called dibs. So already our law has a special case pleading involved by saying that babies are not self-aware but it counts as murder.
But perhaps I'm just a provincial Euclidean human instead of a higher-plane Cthulhu alien.
Tooley is a philosopher making an ethics argument not a legal one. People like to conflate them, but they are distinct.
There are practical issues of infanticide that make disallowing it legally sensible, even if it may be moral. The simplest being that its hard to establish concept of self from a corpse, and there is a large range of developmental variability.
So it may only be ethical to kill some 1 year olds, most 9 month olds, and the vast majority but not all 6 month olds, but we don't have a good way to know for sure. But what we do know for sure is that no fetus has a concept of self, because no infants under X months have one. And since nature provides us with a bright line in womb and out of womb, we can use that to legally allow abortion and know its ethical. Especially because with safe surrender their are no-cost options for people to unburden themselves of an infant if they want to.
I think that Tooley's argument is interesting, but I think that the consequence of it being totally permissible to just throw babies into a woodchipper is intuitively unsatisfying.
Now you can make all the hulabaloo that you want about how there may be practical reasons to make it illegal but it certainly doesn't seem like we think that the only problem with throwing babies into a mulching machine is a practical one. It's not that it's imprudent, it's that it's wrong.
I think that there are lots of good arguments about why we ought to allow abortions, but one that has the consequence of it being morally permissible to just slaughter infants by the dozens is flawed.
The idea of throwing babies into a woodchipper is revolting, and is suggestive of a level of wanton cruelty that I don't think Tooley was endorsing. Maybe you were exaggerating for rhetorical effect, but think about who it is that likes to get people associating the thought of abortion with the thought mutilated infants.
I don't think Tooley is literally saying that throwing babies into a woodchipper is okay. Tooley uses the word "serious" a lot - killing a person is "seriously wrong," a human being has a "serious right to life."
AFAIK he never explicitly says that it is still wrong to kill an entity that doesn't have a "serious" right to life, but also he never says that it's okay to kill such entities indiscriminately. I do not, for example, get the impression that he would support throwing kittens into woodchippers, even though he explicitly says in "Abortion and Infanticide" that kittens do not have a serious right to life.
The word "serious" used as an intensifier so frequently in his writings seems deliberate.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
There's definitely a moral instinct against it, to be sure, but there's also a moral instinct against doing the same thing to a cat. The question is, how much of that is constructed? I tend to have a dim view of the idea that a thing is right or wrong just because it feels that way. Rather, it feels that way because we've absorbed cultural values throughout our whole lives. That guilt you feel when telling a lie isn't because lying is bad (although it is), it's because you feel the collective weight of the western tradition against lying thrusting back against you.
We can understand that something is bad through reflection, but intuition is not to be trusted (which is where i diverge from Kant, who felt that the moral imperative could be understood a priori, but he was also a devout Lutheran which might have shaded some of his conclusions).
Edit: I feel the argument is getting off-base a bit. The point is that abortion and infanticide are not categorically good, just that the badness of them are on a lower order than the badness of the murder of a fully-realized sapient being. The pro-birth side of the argument rates all human life as equal, the argument here is that life is not worthless before self-awareness, but that life is... worth less. Just as a cat's life is worth less, or a cow's. It still has some value which deserves respect and wanton destruction of any life is a moral ill, but the standard for justifiable killing drops.
Kill a self-aware human? Pretty much needs to be for immediate self-defense, kill-or-be-killed scenario, some exceptions for people with terminal illness who are making a clear, competent decision to die.
Kill something else? Well that depends on where on the scale it lies.
I don't like where that argument leads because it seems to end up putting a value on the head of every human and how much their life is worth (how "bad" it is to kill them). This is a half-step from eugenics. Unless I am drastically misunderstanding/misreading?
Edit: removed a saved draft of an earlier tangent I decided not to follow. Dumb drafts!
It's just a natural consequence of the most parsimonious explanation of the reason we think (human) life, suffering, pleasure etc. is valuable or deplorable (and also answers the earlier question of why we value human life more than pigs in a way that isn't social convention or chauvinism). There is a reason we find rocks of no moral relevance but we find a rabbit to be of some concern (for example we might think it permissible to killl them but torturing them for the mere 'pleasure' of doing so would be deplorable) and humans of the most moral import.
If the ability to suffer, have aspirations and self identity et al are linked to consciousness, self awareness and general intelligence AND those sorts of things are the things we ought to find valuable (which looks like a pretty good candidate to explain why we value dogs and not icecubes) then it is a simple consequence that lacking these things or having them diminished reduces the moral responsibility toward those people (which doesn't make anything permissible, of course).
And people are generally unable to handle this but there were multiple kinds of eugenics back when it was fashionable and we obviously find the authoritarian, totalitarian right's implementation deplorable. But there were more benevolently minded left and progressive eugenics programs that included things like support for public libraries, public lectures about reproductive health, booths at fairs about how to care for your children and the importance of washing et al. There were also excesses on the left that were deplorable as well but obviously not to the degree of the Nazis. I present this mainly as a historical footnote, but want to note that "eugenics is bad" is largely a knee jerk reaction that isn't clearly defined - it was, as implemented in the past, very bad but that isn't a fundamental property of the concept. Certainly, if the ability to screen and selectively terminate embryos with certain genetic conditions isn't eugenics then I don't know what else to call it.
+2
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited January 2017
My current overall view is that Don Marquis was right that valuable futures are the measure of moral status. Yet he was also very wrong about what it meant to be "a thing" that got to count as having a valuable future--his attempts to show that there is a serious distinction between pre- and post-conception fetuses were very weak. What I am trying to write on now is a sort of synthesis of Marquis and Tooley in light of that assessment, framed in terms of some other debates that are also ongoing. For the curious, from the intro:
I don’t have any children. Let’s suppose that I never have any, and hence that no children of mine ever exist. Does it make sense to think of those never-existing children as having missed out on life, to think of them as having been deprived of something as a result of my decision not to have them? A common answer: of course not. Although the death of an already-existing person may be a tragedy for the one who dies, failing to be created is no tragedy for the one who fails to be created. Strictly speaking, it is not even correct to say that there was someone--an individual--who failed to be created. The nature of the alleged harm guarantees that there can be no valid subject for its attribution, and, hence, that it is no harm at all.
This claim is a purported consequence of general metaphysical considerations about harm and existence. Grant that it holds. Does it have any significant upshot for our ethical theorizing? For some of the authors who endorse it, the answer is: not really. Parfit and Broome, for instance, both deny that someone can be harmed by missing out on life. Yet they nonetheless allow that the world as a whole may be made worse off by having fewer good lives contained within it--it is the world, rather than any person, that is comparatively impoverished by failures to create. In general, wherever such an author might (or might not) have wanted to appeal to a potential harm in missing out on life, they may instead appeal to (or decline to appeal to) a diminished total of impersonal goodness; the relevant question will just be in the details of how that impersonal goodness is to figure into reproductive decisions. Given the presence of this theoretical resource, their decision to deny that a harm in never-being is not in itself of any ethical moment. So their insistence on denying that harm really is just a matter of metaphysical hygiene.
For others, though, the lack of a harm in never-being is of great practical consequence. Some authors are deeply suspicious of considerations of impersonal goodness; some seek to bring ethics entirely in line with a “person affecting principle,” one which only recognized as ethically significant benefits and harms to people. This is of course vague without further specification, but we should already be in a position to see how something in this neighborhood would render the question of harm in missing out on life highly salient. After all, if no one can be harmed by not being created, then it may be that I harm no one when I decline to reproduce. But if I harm no one, there may be nothing the person-affecting principle can see as wrong in my actions--and this even under the supposition that I easily could have had children, had I set my mind to it, and that had I done so they would have gone on to live excellent lives. This conclusion, in turn, may be independently quite compelling, especially to those among us with no particular interest in having children, let alone producing children on the scale one suspects might be required if the hypothetical harm of never being created turned out to be both coherent and similar in magnitude to the harm of having an already-there life taken away. And so when we look to the literature we actually see arguments in both directions. Some, as above, have worked forward from endorsement of person affecting principles to claims about the ethics of reproduction, but others have worked backward from intuitive claims about the ethics of reproduction to the endorsement person affecting principles as those claims’ most intelligible explanation.
Regardless of where one starts, this is an interesting nexus of practical-metaphysical thought; it posits a sharp metaphysical distinction between the ever-existing and the never-existing, and in so doing offers the basis for further moral distinctions in our ethic of bringing new lives into existence. In this paper, my goal will be to take this package and throw some cold water on it. Specifically, I will argue that when it comes to the possibility of future existence, there is no viable difference between the strength of the claims on behalf of those who already exist and on behalf of those who do not yet exist but nonetheless could. So perhaps we ought to maintain the claim that there is no harm in not getting to exist, but we reject person affecting principles, a la Parfit or Broome. Alternately, perhaps we ought to retain our person affecting principle, but we modify our metaphysic of harm so as to allow that there is a harm in not getting to exist when you otherwise could've. If I am right, then either way something must go.
MrMister on
+1
Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
I've mentioned before that I find Michael Tooley's Abortion and Infantacide, to be a sort of base for my views on abortion. If you don't want to read the whole thing, this blog has a good summary.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
An organism possesses a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
While Tooley is logically coherent, we know this is basically something people will never go for legally or in practice, as it would reduce infants down to chattel. It's only wrong to kill babies because somebody already called dibs. So already our law has a special case pleading involved by saying that babies are not self-aware but it counts as murder.
But perhaps I'm just a provincial Euclidean human instead of a higher-plane Cthulhu alien.
Tooley is a philosopher making an ethics argument not a legal one. People like to conflate them, but they are distinct.
There are practical issues of infanticide that make disallowing it legally sensible, even if it may be moral. The simplest being that its hard to establish concept of self from a corpse, and there is a large range of developmental variability.
So it may only be ethical to kill some 1 year olds, most 9 month olds, and the vast majority but not all 6 month olds, but we don't have a good way to know for sure. But what we do know for sure is that no fetus has a concept of self, because no infants under X months have one. And since nature provides us with a bright line in womb and out of womb, we can use that to legally allow abortion and know its ethical. Especially because with safe surrender their are no-cost options for people to unburden themselves of an infant if they want to.
I think that Tooley's argument is interesting, but I think that the consequence of it being totally permissible to just throw babies into a woodchipper is intuitively unsatisfying.
Now you can make all the hulabaloo that you want about how there may be practical reasons to make it illegal but it certainly doesn't seem like we think that the only problem with throwing babies into a mulching machine is a practical one. It's not that it's imprudent, it's that it's wrong.
I think that there are lots of good arguments about why we ought to allow abortions, but one that has the consequence of it being morally permissible to just slaughter infants by the dozens is flawed.
I don't think that's a natural consequence of the argument. I don't think that the argument is that the sole marker of ethical behaviour is murder - it might not be murder to terminate a pregnancy and infanticide might be permissible but that is no more a license to woodchip babies than the acceptability of butchery is an endorsement of the wanton mutilation of livestock.
Posts
So it sets a line, and as with all line-setting creates annoying questions when something falls right smack on top of the line.
The TLDR^2 version of Tooley's argument:
I find this line of thought compelling for a couple of reasons, relating both to the idea itself and it's rhetorical usefulness.
1)It removes the idea of being Human(species wise) from the equation. Most anti-abortion arguments, have this built in premise that because the fetus is a human embryo it has a right to life. A chimp embryo doesn't. A equally sentient alien embryo doesn't. The fact that it's human is what makes it murder, and this unpacks this and goes "what's the significance of it being human". Which argumentatively tends to get people into the weeds of 'a Soul'/'Every Sperm is Sacred', which each have their own slew of counter arguments. Or they argue DNA, which again, is a minefield of counter examples.
2)By making the person hood distinction, it reframes the debate for the anti-abortion side. Most the bodily autonomy arguments are essentially affirmative defenses. They grant that abortion is murder(or at least a bad thing) and then argue why it is morally permissible. With Tooley you don't cede that. You aren't arguing "why abortion should be legal" you're making them argue why the hell it should be illegal, it's not even bad.
3) It fits with my views on 'euthanasia-lite' aka removal of life support. Why is it okay to remove a feeding tube made of plastic from someone with no mental faculties, but not a much more burdensome one of flesh.
4)It dovetails with, what are imo the correct views, on non-human persons. Apes, elephants, dolphins, whales, some cephalopods etc. Are all sufficiently advanced to, again imo, have deserve protections against captivity and hunting. Along with 3, the idea of a sort of contiguous moral curve vs a flat one with a giant spike for "Human" is I think a more rational conclusion than simply human.
5)Given some of Singer's arguments for moral duty, there may be a compelling case that killing another person, just to avoid the burden of pregnancy, is not moral. Singer is kind of a mess in a lot of ways that I disagree with, so I'm not saying definitively there is one, but once you start balancing burdens vs lives it gets murky.
6)I love the fact that it doesn't shy away from the fact that the conclusion applies to infants as well as fetuses. Not only is that just so fucking metal, but its also a refreshing bit of intellectual honesty in a debate that is full of special case pleading(incest,rape,non-viability, severe disability, etc), to just be like "no special cases, follow the conclusion all the way through!"
It's also inconsistent with an belief in fetal personhood.
But it is totally consistent with an aversion to female promiscuity.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
tooley sounds okay in your summary, except he also seems to conclude that it's okay to kill babies, which i have a feeling is decidedly not okay.
the thing i could never understand about the pro-life crowd is why life is only important until birth.
if the pro-life crowd is willing to pull money out of their pockets to pay for a woman's medical costs + 18 years of child support for any unwanted child, then maybe i feel like we could actually have an intellectually honest discussion.
as it is, it just sounds like people wanted to condemn others and say they are bad without actually following up on the logical consequences of the stances they pretend to take.
give me a republican who wants to significantly expand government funding of welfare, health care for the poor and foster care for children and then maybe i'll believe that he's actually a moral dude. as it is, they just sound like sanctimonious assholes.
edit: this is coming from a person who is leans conservative but mostly votes democrat.
This is exactly the biggest issue I have with politicians who say they are "pro-life."
They are "pro-life" but they aren't "pro quality of life."
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While Tooley is logically coherent, we know this is basically something people will never go for legally or in practice, as it would reduce infants down to chattel. It's only wrong to kill babies because somebody already called dibs. So already our law has a special case pleading involved by saying that babies are not self-aware but it counts as murder.
But perhaps I'm just a provincial Euclidean human instead of a higher-plane Cthulhu alien.
I just don't think there's any real one-to-one overlap between logical consistency and legal applicability.
I'd even go so far as to say that the universe actively defies us on that matter.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but law are just an implementation of policy and is forever hung up on precedents and tradition. What is right and what is legal are not necessarily the same even.
The only common logical point of consistency is that we have no problem eating self-aware animals or experimenting on them, value other animals which are not self aware (including infants and coma patients) and, frankly, conservatives have no problem creating special classes of people which are superior or inferior to others in practice. At this point, I've just decided to make peace with the idea, that even at my best, I only extend the right to life to other sapient creatures provisionally as a matter of convenience.
I guess that could change when we all ascend to Buddha space aliens with a reverence for all life and no need to involve ourselves in the struggle of survival, but that day is a long time coming.
I'm pretty sure that any argument that ends with "And that's why killing babies is OK!" is going to be pretty unconvincing.
It may be logical given the premise but it is so outside our common moral intuitions that it seems more likely that the premise is flawed than that 99% humanity has gotten this while morality thing wrong. If I ended up proving that 2+2 = 5, I'd be more likely to check my work rather than conclude that everyone else prior has gotten 2+2 wrong.
There is also some strong arguments against basing a "right to life" on internal mental states (can you kill sleeping people?) but I think other people can make those arguments equally well or better than I can.
Early infanticide was a strongly accepted practice throughout many cultures, especially because of the low chance that your baby would survive infancy even if you did want it. Pretty sure Christianity didn't baptize until Day 3 (unless it was clear the child was going to die before that point), and the Chinese didn't name their babies until a few days or weeks into life.
I'm not saying it's right, but it's not "against moral intuition" historically.
I'd guess they think you were worse than Hitler if you just up and stuck a knife in a perfectly viable baby because you wanted to eat it or something.
It's a lot like how people are only for abortion under those special case medical exceptions or because they're incapable of caring for the child.
We can understand that something is bad through reflection, but intuition is not to be trusted (which is where i diverge from Kant, who felt that the moral imperative could be understood a priori, but he was also a devout Lutheran which might have shaded some of his conclusions).
Edit: I feel the argument is getting off-base a bit. The point is that abortion and infanticide are not categorically good, just that the badness of them are on a lower order than the badness of the murder of a fully-realized sapient being. The pro-birth side of the argument rates all human life as equal, the argument here is that life is not worthless before self-awareness, but that life is... worth less. Just as a cat's life is worth less, or a cow's. It still has some value which deserves respect and wanton destruction of any life is a moral ill, but the standard for justifiable killing drops.
Kill a self-aware human? Pretty much needs to be for immediate self-defense, kill-or-be-killed scenario, some exceptions for people with terminal illness who are making a clear, competent decision to die.
Kill something else? Well that depends on where on the scale it lies.
We can also recognize that just because an act is wrong (eg, killing a cat) doesn't make it murder. A position that a fetus is not a person, but does have some moral value, is remarkably consistent with a lot of mainstream American positions on both sides of the debate, as well as many cultures worldwide today and throughout history.
Edit: I think your edit was along the same lines...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As were chattel slavery, forced concubinage, forced castration ... All sorts of fun things.
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I don't like where that argument leads because it seems to end up putting a value on the head of every human and how much their life is worth (how "bad" it is to kill them). This is a half-step from eugenics. Unless I am drastically misunderstanding/misreading?
Edit: removed a saved draft of an earlier tangent I decided not to follow. Dumb drafts!
I'm probably a lot more existential on these matters in that I think that subjective interpretation is pretty much inescapable after a point, no matter how much you'd like everything to be perfectly and logically coherent. It's not like people go, "I value my baby because of its future moral value."
Also, I would never stick a knife in the cat in my avatar. Just look at him.
Too adorable.
I mean, I am the guy that argued we do all that stuff because of human chauvinism.
The idea is that "all men are created equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights" kicks in once you achieve self-awareness, whether you are physically or mentally disabled, a genius, a celebrity, or just a painfully boring and mediocre person. It's not a sliding scale based on mental acuity that continues to accrue.
That, however, is possibly where Twenty Sided's argument about human perspective and chauvanism really kicks in here, in a hypothetical world where humans became the lesser order to something else, which would force a new moral paradigm where we'd have to seriously reconsider our approach to killing and eating animals unless we wanted to submit to the idea that we are as chattel to our alien/robot overlords. Sapience is still probably an important distinction, however.
Tooley is a philosopher making an ethics argument not a legal one. People like to conflate them, but they are distinct.
There are practical issues of infanticide that make disallowing it legally sensible, even if it may be moral. The simplest being that its hard to establish concept of self from a corpse, and there is a large range of developmental variability.
So it may only be ethical to kill some 1 year olds, most 9 month olds, and the vast majority but not all 6 month olds, but we don't have a good way to know for sure. But what we do know for sure is that no fetus has a concept of self, because no infants under X months have one. And since nature provides us with a bright line in womb and out of womb, we can use that to legally allow abortion and know its ethical. Especially because with safe surrender their are no-cost options for people to unburden themselves of an infant if they want to.
Some other people have pointed out that infanticide was historically widely accepted, but I'd like to point another example less prone to "Well they also though X was okay". Basically any modern argument supporting the concept of Just War implicitly has to endorse the idea that actions leading to the death of not just babies, but large numbers of children and other non-combatants can be ethical. This is in some ways even more so today than previously in history when fighting was done with spear or musket.
There's the whole side argument of intent, but from a consequential point of view "and that's why drone strikes are OK!" has a (killing babies) component.
I'm not sure I follow your argument here, can you explain the connection with just war again? I don't think just war has many modern supporters through I could be wrong.
I think historical arguments are difficult to make in general as they tend to go around in circles based on interpretation of often scarce historical facts. Did early greeks really view infanticide as acceptable or was it Christian propaganda? Does the presence of X indicate that it was an accepted part of culture Y or was it a condemned aberration? Difficult doesn't mean impossible through it is much easier when discussing more recent history (like the last 400 years or so) where you actually have things like records and data rather than having to guess at facts.
Some cultures also had folklore explaining how disabled babies aren't actually human.
I think that Tooley's argument is interesting, but I think that the consequence of it being totally permissible to just throw babies into a woodchipper is intuitively unsatisfying.
Now you can make all the hulabaloo that you want about how there may be practical reasons to make it illegal but it certainly doesn't seem like we think that the only problem with throwing babies into a mulching machine is a practical one. It's not that it's imprudent, it's that it's wrong.
I think that there are lots of good arguments about why we ought to allow abortions, but one that has the consequence of it being morally permissible to just slaughter infants by the dozens is flawed.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Tooley presumes a level of okayness with lots of ongoing killing. If you get rid of the idea that killing a pig or a cow or a chicken etc is okay, the infanticide aspect of it sort of retreats as you move the okay to kill line to shrimp or some other lower creature.
Maybe the issue isn't that killing the babies is wrong, its that all the other things that are less mentally aware we are intuitively okay with killing, we shouldn't be?
The idea of throwing babies into a woodchipper is revolting, and is suggestive of a level of wanton cruelty that I don't think Tooley was endorsing. Maybe you were exaggerating for rhetorical effect, but think about who it is that likes to get people associating the thought of abortion with the thought mutilated infants.
AFAIK he never explicitly says that it is still wrong to kill an entity that doesn't have a "serious" right to life, but also he never says that it's okay to kill such entities indiscriminately. I do not, for example, get the impression that he would support throwing kittens into woodchippers, even though he explicitly says in "Abortion and Infanticide" that kittens do not have a serious right to life.
The word "serious" used as an intensifier so frequently in his writings seems deliberate.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Would the size of the crowd have a positive or negative effect on the morality of abortion?
We're just trying to estimate the scope of the next trolley problem.
It's just a natural consequence of the most parsimonious explanation of the reason we think (human) life, suffering, pleasure etc. is valuable or deplorable (and also answers the earlier question of why we value human life more than pigs in a way that isn't social convention or chauvinism). There is a reason we find rocks of no moral relevance but we find a rabbit to be of some concern (for example we might think it permissible to killl them but torturing them for the mere 'pleasure' of doing so would be deplorable) and humans of the most moral import.
If the ability to suffer, have aspirations and self identity et al are linked to consciousness, self awareness and general intelligence AND those sorts of things are the things we ought to find valuable (which looks like a pretty good candidate to explain why we value dogs and not icecubes) then it is a simple consequence that lacking these things or having them diminished reduces the moral responsibility toward those people (which doesn't make anything permissible, of course).
And people are generally unable to handle this but there were multiple kinds of eugenics back when it was fashionable and we obviously find the authoritarian, totalitarian right's implementation deplorable. But there were more benevolently minded left and progressive eugenics programs that included things like support for public libraries, public lectures about reproductive health, booths at fairs about how to care for your children and the importance of washing et al. There were also excesses on the left that were deplorable as well but obviously not to the degree of the Nazis. I present this mainly as a historical footnote, but want to note that "eugenics is bad" is largely a knee jerk reaction that isn't clearly defined - it was, as implemented in the past, very bad but that isn't a fundamental property of the concept. Certainly, if the ability to screen and selectively terminate embryos with certain genetic conditions isn't eugenics then I don't know what else to call it.
This claim is a purported consequence of general metaphysical considerations about harm and existence. Grant that it holds. Does it have any significant upshot for our ethical theorizing? For some of the authors who endorse it, the answer is: not really. Parfit and Broome, for instance, both deny that someone can be harmed by missing out on life. Yet they nonetheless allow that the world as a whole may be made worse off by having fewer good lives contained within it--it is the world, rather than any person, that is comparatively impoverished by failures to create. In general, wherever such an author might (or might not) have wanted to appeal to a potential harm in missing out on life, they may instead appeal to (or decline to appeal to) a diminished total of impersonal goodness; the relevant question will just be in the details of how that impersonal goodness is to figure into reproductive decisions. Given the presence of this theoretical resource, their decision to deny that a harm in never-being is not in itself of any ethical moment. So their insistence on denying that harm really is just a matter of metaphysical hygiene.
For others, though, the lack of a harm in never-being is of great practical consequence. Some authors are deeply suspicious of considerations of impersonal goodness; some seek to bring ethics entirely in line with a “person affecting principle,” one which only recognized as ethically significant benefits and harms to people. This is of course vague without further specification, but we should already be in a position to see how something in this neighborhood would render the question of harm in missing out on life highly salient. After all, if no one can be harmed by not being created, then it may be that I harm no one when I decline to reproduce. But if I harm no one, there may be nothing the person-affecting principle can see as wrong in my actions--and this even under the supposition that I easily could have had children, had I set my mind to it, and that had I done so they would have gone on to live excellent lives. This conclusion, in turn, may be independently quite compelling, especially to those among us with no particular interest in having children, let alone producing children on the scale one suspects might be required if the hypothetical harm of never being created turned out to be both coherent and similar in magnitude to the harm of having an already-there life taken away. And so when we look to the literature we actually see arguments in both directions. Some, as above, have worked forward from endorsement of person affecting principles to claims about the ethics of reproduction, but others have worked backward from intuitive claims about the ethics of reproduction to the endorsement person affecting principles as those claims’ most intelligible explanation.
Regardless of where one starts, this is an interesting nexus of practical-metaphysical thought; it posits a sharp metaphysical distinction between the ever-existing and the never-existing, and in so doing offers the basis for further moral distinctions in our ethic of bringing new lives into existence. In this paper, my goal will be to take this package and throw some cold water on it. Specifically, I will argue that when it comes to the possibility of future existence, there is no viable difference between the strength of the claims on behalf of those who already exist and on behalf of those who do not yet exist but nonetheless could. So perhaps we ought to maintain the claim that there is no harm in not getting to exist, but we reject person affecting principles, a la Parfit or Broome. Alternately, perhaps we ought to retain our person affecting principle, but we modify our metaphysic of harm so as to allow that there is a harm in not getting to exist when you otherwise could've. If I am right, then either way something must go.
I don't think that's a natural consequence of the argument. I don't think that the argument is that the sole marker of ethical behaviour is murder - it might not be murder to terminate a pregnancy and infanticide might be permissible but that is no more a license to woodchip babies than the acceptability of butchery is an endorsement of the wanton mutilation of livestock.