I thought Hanania's arguments were both morally and conceptually confused, and it's nice to see a coherent refutation here. More importantly though, it's nice to see Hanania come here and engage in the comment section. Good for the culture. He's a true poaster in the best sense of the word.
I don’t think one needs to pick a moral philosophy (like utilitarianism) in the way one picks a favourite team, then cheer for that and forsake all others. Take the good stuff from each philosophy, and apply it when it’s pertinent, applicable, and ultimately furthers human flourishing.
I agree that “when life begins” is an important question here. So for me, it’s when life can be sustained by a third party. Ergo, the point of medical viability. Before that, nothing in the universe (even god, for folks who believe in those sorts of things) can keep a fetus “alive” besides the mom. At all such points, I’d say it’s the mom’s decision and hers alone. No one else can affect that outcome, so no one else has skin in the game, and should stay out of it.
Past the point of viability, medical science can intervene and sustain that fetus, and only then would I allow such a third party (like self-righteous red state republican legislators) to have standing in the mom’s decisions. Of course, this also means the threshold for “legal abortion” will change as medical science progresses….but that is as it should be. How silly would some arbitrary limit be, when there might come a day when a fetus becomes viable long before that cutoff?
People want abortions because they don’t want the guilt of feeling there is a child “out there” that they abandoned. If they get an abortion they can act as if “nothing ever happened”.
There is no line. There is no moment beyond which it is wrong to kill. There is always a wrongness and a moral cost to killing that must be balanced against other factors. If you have ever killed then you know that it doesn't come for free. It isn't something only 'evil people' do. Medicos do it accidentally as well as purposely, soldiers do it purposely, many of us do it indirectly. And for most people it's hard to live with.
We have all killed and saved, via "butterfly effect" causation. The difference with the people you describe is epistemological: they're in a position to see the causal threads.
Furthermore, it’s irrelevant whether the desire to continue living is a conscious one. It being an implicit desire, or it just being within the nature of a thing to keep on living seems sufficient for there to be some reason to not kill it. While sleeping you’re not actively desiring to keep on living, but it would still be wrong to kill someone who is sleeping
I agree. I don't think (most) animals have a concept of "keeping on living" but it's clear from their actions that they generally resist dying, and assuming a cow has an interior experience (as I do assume), she probably hopes to wake up the next day and go eat some grass and hang out with her cow friends rather than be killed.
Hello Mr. Bulldog. You seem reasonable, maybe I can get a decent answer from you.
How do you square the belief that abortion is okay while the fetus is unconscious with the fairly frequent bouts of unconsciousness which occur later on in a person's life? Both common stuff, like sleep, and rarer things like going comatose or suffering dementia. Society seems to agree that it is morally wrong to kill someone who is unconscious later in life, so what's fundamentally different early on? It's always rubbed me the wrong way that (what feels like) the most common view on abortion wants to directly tie human rights to how well the brain is functioning at any given moment.
So, it's okay to end life that has yet to gain consciousness, but not life that has had consciousness in the past? Even if the present state is equivalent?
Yeah but... Why would one matter, but not the other? This is a pretty important difference, morally speaking. Surely you've got some line of reasoning that separates the two.
Not trying to drag you through a massively in-depth conversation, but I'm really struggling to see things from your side here. You've been very matter of fact, without going into the matter of your facts.
Come on man, can you give me something here? A hanging question bothers me to no end, particularly when I'm genuinely interested in the answer.
You seem either busy or disinclined to chat on this particular topic, so I won't reply further, if that's the issue. But it's very difficult to learn the pro-choice rationale when people keep disappearing in the middle of the conversation.
This is one of the better arguments re: abortion that I have read.
The "mainstream" arguments pro/con generally suck:
1) "It's a woman's right to choose" or the pathetic "No uterus=no opinion*" argument are both red herrings. Choose *what*, exactly? I think one side purpose of this argument is to make this a woman's rights issue with that corresponding built-in constituency, package-dealing it (another fallacy! 0 for 2!) with other women's rights issues.
2) "Life begins at conception"? Epic-level question-begging. I mean, Olympic gold-medal question-begging. What do you mean by "life", exactly (the author covers this well)? Furthermore, at what point does that "life" acquire rights coequal to those of the woman, or perhaps junior to the woman's rights but still worthy of some protection? I don't know, you don't know, and there's no place to draw a bright line between conception and birth, unless you want to risk making people legally liable for something that might not be wrong from a moral perspective--something that is generally morally (and legally) repulsive. Yes, I know, mala prohibita exist, often for the sake of drawing a bright line (what harm is really done by letting someone in the back seat enjoy a cold beer?) and this is often a legal fig leaf to let the state run amok; however, we're discussing right and wrong, not legal and illegal here. Let's not confuse mala prohibita with mala in se.
And I haven't even covered what some consider to be the feature-not-bug of using unplanned pregnancies as a way to enforce traditional sexual mores or, failing that, ill-advised shotgun marriages. Harm amplification seems like a cruel way to do that.
"Imagine that fetuses, while in the womb, became very developed—they learned physics and calculus and philosophy. Surely it wouldn’t be okay to kill them simply because they haven’t exited the womb yet."
You'd think this ought to warrant a "surely", but the fraction of readers who've agreed with Judith Jarvis Thompson on her Violinist thought experiment speaks to the contrary. :-/
Body integrity argument doesn't mean that it's okay in itself to kill the person whose life depends on yours. It means that despite the fact that the death of this person would be a bad thing, it would be a less bad thing after we took into account all the costs/benefits.
Really? That's not how I recall JJT's original reasoning. I recall her considering the version where the agent would only need to be connected to the violinist for an hour, and saying that it would be wrong only for virtue ethics reasons (e.g. being cruel), not for what to me is the obvious reason, that the violinist's own well being plus indirect effect on others would be vastly larger than my own suffering.
> The problem: thinking that it’s good when happy people come to exist is very different from accepting the repugnant conclusion. One can consistently think that it’s only good when people come to exist if their welfare level is above a certain threshold, but not good when just barely happy people come to exist.
This is the repugnant conclusion. You just redefine "barely happy" as "having a specific welfare level" but the whole dynamic is the same. You are still actively pushed to reallocate every extra resources towards creating more people with this same level of welfare.
> Also, we should obviously accept the repugnant conclusion
The so called "Sadistic Conclusion" makes much more sense, in my opinion. It's the simple principle of making sure that the life standards of the sentient beings you are going to create are on the level, before you create them. No one is actually pushed towards creating unhappy people. It just stated that creating a lot of *not happy enough* people can be worse than creating one very unhappy person.
Probably shouldn’t platform Hanania, just fyi. See HuffPost article about his past anti-semitic & racist writings that he refuses to acknowledge or even deny authorship of.
He both acknowledged and repudiated his views here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully. But I'm replying mainly to register my discontent with your demanding the Bulldog not "platform" another author. It's terribly tiresome and distasteful.
“Imagine that fetuses, while in the womb, became very developed—they learned physics and calculus and philosophy. Surely it wouldn’t be okay to kill them simply because they haven’t exited the womb yet. But if this is true then the wrongness of abortion depends, not on whether one leaves the womb, but on some feature of their development (in my view, when the fetus becomes conscious).”
This would be a refutation if the moment of birth argument was what my position depended on. I’m actually beginning with the low mental capabilities of fetuses to argue they don’t matter, and then using the argument about a moment of birth cutoff in order to refute the idea of a slippery slope. So yes if they could do physics it would be much worse to kill them even in the womb, though still not as bad as a physics understander outside the womb.
Okay but if you argue that the low mental capacities of fetuses mean they don't matter then you're just staking out a position on the "whether fetuses are persons" debate. You're saying that they are not persons in the important sense--beings it's wrong to kill.
It's likely not much worse to kill someone inside of "communities" then outside of communities. Killing a hermit that is the last person on Earth doesn't seem *intrinsically* different from killing a normal person inside a community. Both are murders.
It obviously is worse to kill someone who a lot of people care about, than someone who no one cares about. Because in the former case you not only pessimize the utility function of a person killed but also utility functions of people who want this person not to be killed.
The point is that neither fetuses nor newborn babies are sentient beings whose utilities are ethically relevant. But their parents and community are. So, it's okay to abort a fetus, but not okay to kill a baby.
The fact that someone sentient doesn't have a community that cares about them, isn't itself a license to kill. But having a community of people who care deeply about non-sentient being not dying is a reason enough not to kill this non-sentient being.
“But it seems like he just failed to really analyze the rights-based opposition to abortion, which claims that a fetus is a person and you need a really good reason to kill persons.”
I honestly don’t start with the presumption that the barrier to killing should be all that high. There are other values to trade off against mere life, and when we go issue by issue it seems to me that the anti-life argument is practically always the correct one when it’s traded off against quality of life and individual liberty.
It's true that there might be cases where killing is okay and we should trade it off against other things. But killing people is seriously bad! Like, if you just went out and murdered someone, that would be much more wrong than most things. Pro-lifers say abortion is like that.
In the pre-Christian Roman pagan moral order, it was widely accepted that you could kill babies, typically by "exposure" (leaving them outside). People often killed babies for reasons of inconvenience or due to the economic burden, but in short there was not a clear limiting moral factor on one's ability to kill their child. Do you think this way of thinking about babies is okay?
Seems like a reasonable way of thinking to me. Babies just aren't mentally developed enough to be persons until well after birth, but I agree with Richard that we should draw the line at birth to avoid slippery slope issues since we don't know exactly when a baby goes from being a thing to being a person. In the modern era with ample abilities to detect and terminate unwanted pregnancies, there isn't really much cost to drawing the line at birth even if it's too early.
Edit to add - If abortion bans proliferate and successfully make it difficult for people to terminate unwanted pregnancies, that would mean drawing the line at birth would no longer be cost free.
I just read things the opposite direction. To me, a baby is clearly within the core category of personhood the way any normal person would use it. Given that societies have condoned infanticide in the past, we should be very aware of the risk that we condone something similar. Thus the key worry would be that we're making an error in favor of devaluing child life, and we should tend towards drawing the line sooner.
I thought Hanania's arguments were both morally and conceptually confused, and it's nice to see a coherent refutation here. More importantly though, it's nice to see Hanania come here and engage in the comment section. Good for the culture. He's a true poaster in the best sense of the word.
I don’t think one needs to pick a moral philosophy (like utilitarianism) in the way one picks a favourite team, then cheer for that and forsake all others. Take the good stuff from each philosophy, and apply it when it’s pertinent, applicable, and ultimately furthers human flourishing.
I agree that “when life begins” is an important question here. So for me, it’s when life can be sustained by a third party. Ergo, the point of medical viability. Before that, nothing in the universe (even god, for folks who believe in those sorts of things) can keep a fetus “alive” besides the mom. At all such points, I’d say it’s the mom’s decision and hers alone. No one else can affect that outcome, so no one else has skin in the game, and should stay out of it.
Past the point of viability, medical science can intervene and sustain that fetus, and only then would I allow such a third party (like self-righteous red state republican legislators) to have standing in the mom’s decisions. Of course, this also means the threshold for “legal abortion” will change as medical science progresses….but that is as it should be. How silly would some arbitrary limit be, when there might come a day when a fetus becomes viable long before that cutoff?
People want abortions because they don’t want the guilt of feeling there is a child “out there” that they abandoned. If they get an abortion they can act as if “nothing ever happened”.
Artificial wombs won’t change this dynamic.
There is no line. There is no moment beyond which it is wrong to kill. There is always a wrongness and a moral cost to killing that must be balanced against other factors. If you have ever killed then you know that it doesn't come for free. It isn't something only 'evil people' do. Medicos do it accidentally as well as purposely, soldiers do it purposely, many of us do it indirectly. And for most people it's hard to live with.
We have all killed and saved, via "butterfly effect" causation. The difference with the people you describe is epistemological: they're in a position to see the causal threads.
Furthermore, it’s irrelevant whether the desire to continue living is a conscious one. It being an implicit desire, or it just being within the nature of a thing to keep on living seems sufficient for there to be some reason to not kill it. While sleeping you’re not actively desiring to keep on living, but it would still be wrong to kill someone who is sleeping
I agree. I don't think (most) animals have a concept of "keeping on living" but it's clear from their actions that they generally resist dying, and assuming a cow has an interior experience (as I do assume), she probably hopes to wake up the next day and go eat some grass and hang out with her cow friends rather than be killed.
Hello Mr. Bulldog. You seem reasonable, maybe I can get a decent answer from you.
How do you square the belief that abortion is okay while the fetus is unconscious with the fairly frequent bouts of unconsciousness which occur later on in a person's life? Both common stuff, like sleep, and rarer things like going comatose or suffering dementia. Society seems to agree that it is morally wrong to kill someone who is unconscious later in life, so what's fundamentally different early on? It's always rubbed me the wrong way that (what feels like) the most common view on abortion wants to directly tie human rights to how well the brain is functioning at any given moment.
It hasn't acquired consciousness yet.
*Nudge Nudge*
So, it's okay to end life that has yet to gain consciousness, but not life that has had consciousness in the past? Even if the present state is equivalent?
Indeed. The present state of a fetus is similar to that of one in a permament coma, but one matters and the other doesn't.
Yeah but... Why would one matter, but not the other? This is a pretty important difference, morally speaking. Surely you've got some line of reasoning that separates the two.
Not trying to drag you through a massively in-depth conversation, but I'm really struggling to see things from your side here. You've been very matter of fact, without going into the matter of your facts.
Come on man, can you give me something here? A hanging question bothers me to no end, particularly when I'm genuinely interested in the answer.
You seem either busy or disinclined to chat on this particular topic, so I won't reply further, if that's the issue. But it's very difficult to learn the pro-choice rationale when people keep disappearing in the middle of the conversation.
Sorry I have a lot of commenters! But in short, the reason to think it matters is that it intuitively seems to matter.
It’s rumored that, if the conception is nonconsensual, the resultant offspring will be a podcaster.
This is one of the better arguments re: abortion that I have read.
The "mainstream" arguments pro/con generally suck:
1) "It's a woman's right to choose" or the pathetic "No uterus=no opinion*" argument are both red herrings. Choose *what*, exactly? I think one side purpose of this argument is to make this a woman's rights issue with that corresponding built-in constituency, package-dealing it (another fallacy! 0 for 2!) with other women's rights issues.
2) "Life begins at conception"? Epic-level question-begging. I mean, Olympic gold-medal question-begging. What do you mean by "life", exactly (the author covers this well)? Furthermore, at what point does that "life" acquire rights coequal to those of the woman, or perhaps junior to the woman's rights but still worthy of some protection? I don't know, you don't know, and there's no place to draw a bright line between conception and birth, unless you want to risk making people legally liable for something that might not be wrong from a moral perspective--something that is generally morally (and legally) repulsive. Yes, I know, mala prohibita exist, often for the sake of drawing a bright line (what harm is really done by letting someone in the back seat enjoy a cold beer?) and this is often a legal fig leaf to let the state run amok; however, we're discussing right and wrong, not legal and illegal here. Let's not confuse mala prohibita with mala in se.
And I haven't even covered what some consider to be the feature-not-bug of using unplanned pregnancies as a way to enforce traditional sexual mores or, failing that, ill-advised shotgun marriages. Harm amplification seems like a cruel way to do that.
*Stop me before I opinion again :)
"Imagine that fetuses, while in the womb, became very developed—they learned physics and calculus and philosophy. Surely it wouldn’t be okay to kill them simply because they haven’t exited the womb yet."
You'd think this ought to warrant a "surely", but the fraction of readers who've agreed with Judith Jarvis Thompson on her Violinist thought experiment speaks to the contrary. :-/
Body integrity argument doesn't mean that it's okay in itself to kill the person whose life depends on yours. It means that despite the fact that the death of this person would be a bad thing, it would be a less bad thing after we took into account all the costs/benefits.
Really? That's not how I recall JJT's original reasoning. I recall her considering the version where the agent would only need to be connected to the violinist for an hour, and saying that it would be wrong only for virtue ethics reasons (e.g. being cruel), not for what to me is the obvious reason, that the violinist's own well being plus indirect effect on others would be vastly larger than my own suffering.
> The problem: thinking that it’s good when happy people come to exist is very different from accepting the repugnant conclusion. One can consistently think that it’s only good when people come to exist if their welfare level is above a certain threshold, but not good when just barely happy people come to exist.
This is the repugnant conclusion. You just redefine "barely happy" as "having a specific welfare level" but the whole dynamic is the same. You are still actively pushed to reallocate every extra resources towards creating more people with this same level of welfare.
> Also, we should obviously accept the repugnant conclusion
The so called "Sadistic Conclusion" makes much more sense, in my opinion. It's the simple principle of making sure that the life standards of the sentient beings you are going to create are on the level, before you create them. No one is actually pushed towards creating unhappy people. It just stated that creating a lot of *not happy enough* people can be worse than creating one very unhappy person.
Probably shouldn’t platform Hanania, just fyi. See HuffPost article about his past anti-semitic & racist writings that he refuses to acknowledge or even deny authorship of.
He both acknowledged and repudiated his views here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully. But I'm replying mainly to register my discontent with your demanding the Bulldog not "platform" another author. It's terribly tiresome and distasteful.
I disagree with your comment on platforming in general, but I wasn’t aware of this repudiation, so thanks for enlightening me! I rescind my og comment
What Phillip said, and Matthew is well aware of this I am certain.
“Imagine that fetuses, while in the womb, became very developed—they learned physics and calculus and philosophy. Surely it wouldn’t be okay to kill them simply because they haven’t exited the womb yet. But if this is true then the wrongness of abortion depends, not on whether one leaves the womb, but on some feature of their development (in my view, when the fetus becomes conscious).”
This would be a refutation if the moment of birth argument was what my position depended on. I’m actually beginning with the low mental capabilities of fetuses to argue they don’t matter, and then using the argument about a moment of birth cutoff in order to refute the idea of a slippery slope. So yes if they could do physics it would be much worse to kill them even in the womb, though still not as bad as a physics understander outside the womb.
Okay but if you argue that the low mental capacities of fetuses mean they don't matter then you're just staking out a position on the "whether fetuses are persons" debate. You're saying that they are not persons in the important sense--beings it's wrong to kill.
It's likely not much worse to kill someone inside of "communities" then outside of communities. Killing a hermit that is the last person on Earth doesn't seem *intrinsically* different from killing a normal person inside a community. Both are murders.
It obviously is worse to kill someone who a lot of people care about, than someone who no one cares about. Because in the former case you not only pessimize the utility function of a person killed but also utility functions of people who want this person not to be killed.
The point is that neither fetuses nor newborn babies are sentient beings whose utilities are ethically relevant. But their parents and community are. So, it's okay to abort a fetus, but not okay to kill a baby.
Even if this were the case, it's not much different as I said.
Not much compared to what?
The fact that someone sentient doesn't have a community that cares about them, isn't itself a license to kill. But having a community of people who care deeply about non-sentient being not dying is a reason enough not to kill this non-sentient being.
“But it seems like he just failed to really analyze the rights-based opposition to abortion, which claims that a fetus is a person and you need a really good reason to kill persons.”
I honestly don’t start with the presumption that the barrier to killing should be all that high. There are other values to trade off against mere life, and when we go issue by issue it seems to me that the anti-life argument is practically always the correct one when it’s traded off against quality of life and individual liberty.
It's true that there might be cases where killing is okay and we should trade it off against other things. But killing people is seriously bad! Like, if you just went out and murdered someone, that would be much more wrong than most things. Pro-lifers say abortion is like that.
In the pre-Christian Roman pagan moral order, it was widely accepted that you could kill babies, typically by "exposure" (leaving them outside). People often killed babies for reasons of inconvenience or due to the economic burden, but in short there was not a clear limiting moral factor on one's ability to kill their child. Do you think this way of thinking about babies is okay?
Seems like a reasonable way of thinking to me. Babies just aren't mentally developed enough to be persons until well after birth, but I agree with Richard that we should draw the line at birth to avoid slippery slope issues since we don't know exactly when a baby goes from being a thing to being a person. In the modern era with ample abilities to detect and terminate unwanted pregnancies, there isn't really much cost to drawing the line at birth even if it's too early.
Edit to add - If abortion bans proliferate and successfully make it difficult for people to terminate unwanted pregnancies, that would mean drawing the line at birth would no longer be cost free.
I just read things the opposite direction. To me, a baby is clearly within the core category of personhood the way any normal person would use it. Given that societies have condoned infanticide in the past, we should be very aware of the risk that we condone something similar. Thus the key worry would be that we're making an error in favor of devaluing child life, and we should tend towards drawing the line sooner.
Yes, I think a human killing a human is different than a human killing an animal. There's also the argument from potentiality availible.