Pro-Lifers Shouldn't Be Single-Issue Voters
You should seriously consider supporting Harris even if you think abortion is murder
Edit 8/30 IGNORE THE EXACT PEPFAR NUMBERS. THE 20% CUT SOURCE WAS MISREAD BY ME AND DOES NOT SAY WHAT I THINK IT SAID. STILL A SERIOUS ISSUE, BUT THE NUMBERS WERE OFF.
Most people don’t vote on the basis of explicit arguments. They watch the news and see constant negative reporting on their political opponents. From this, they conclude that their opponents are bad, don’t carefully investigate the issues, and vote on that general sense. I don’t expect to convince people like that.
But some people do form their political views on the basis of carefully considering the policies of both candidates and deciding which one is better. Hanania does that, yet I think his considerations are quite wrong. When people form their beliefs by carefully considering the arguments on both sides, it is genuinely possible to persuade people of political conclusions, so continuing my attempt to reason people out of their political views—a notoriously fraught endeavor—I’ll here address what is, I think, one of the best cases for Trump, and explain why I don’t think it works.
I’m not pro-life, at least, not in the early stages. I don’t think that early abortions kill any person because a person is a mind, not a biological organism. If you want to see this position masterfully defended in one of the most impressive debate performances I’ve ever seen, watch this debate between Dustin Crummett and Trent Horn. Trent is a smart guy and a good debater, but he gets pretty thoroughly beaten in this debate.
But suppose that you are pro-life. There is, on its face, a pretty powerful case for Trump: the Democrats are major supporters of the mass murder of babies. You should vote for the party opposed to mass murder, and for this reason, one might argue, you should vote for Republicans. I think this is perhaps the best argument for voting for Trump, but nonetheless, it is wrong.
About 600,000 fetuses get aborted each year. Now, that’s a pretty big number, but it’s not the biggest number in the world. Other political issues are much more consequential. There are ~8 billion people in the world, so even a 1 in 10,000 chance of ending the world per year—which is a plausible estimate of the difference in risk of ending the world between Trump and Harris, given Trump’s opposition to international cooperation—is worth 800,000 lives, even if we ignore all the lost future generations. Given how close we have been to nuclear war and the myriad emerging risks from AI, synthetic biology, and other future technology, the importance of having a candidate even marginally better on existential risks is greater than having a candidate who would end all abortions.
The Republicans support cuts to the PEPFAR program which saves about a million lives a year! Even a 20% cut—a reasonable estimate of how much less funding there’d be under Trump than Harris—per year would cost 300,000 lives. So a 20% PEPFAR cut alone would cost about half as many lives as are lost from all abortions.
In contrast, Trump is unlikely to reduce abortion by very much. Trump recently declared “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Roe v. Wade was already overturned, Harris wouldn’t be able to pass a national abortion protection law both on political and legal grounds, and Trump certainly wouldn’t push for it. If we’re really confident in Trump’s ability and desire to restrict abortions, maybe Trump will reduce the number of abortions per year by 30,000.
But 30,000 deaths is well within the range of acceptable political costs. Presidents make decisions that affect many millions of people. It’s the cost, in lives lost, of a 2% PEPFAR cut, of a reduction in existential threats of ~ 1 in 250,000. It’s less than the number of lives lost annually from lack of healthcare.
Furthermore, 30,000 lives lost is an overestimate of how bad abortion is for two reasons. First, you should have some uncertainty about the ethics of abortion given how tricky and complicated the issue is. For this reason, you should think it’s only as bad as, perhaps 25,000 deaths (assuming you’re very confident about it).
Second, even pro-lifers generally don’t think that a fetus matters exactly as much as a non-fetus. If a person could rescue either three embryos in a fertility clinic or a five-year-old, generally rescuing the five-year-old is seen as more important. But this seems to indicate that even if abortion is immoral, it’s not as bad as other sorts of deaths (for more on this point, see Dustin Crummett’s paper and Joe Schmid’s video).
If the death of a fetus is half as bad as the death of a full-fleged adult, then the difference between the candidates is in terms of ~12,500 lives lost per year from abortion. That’s significant, but far from the most significant issue—about as significant as a 1% PEPFAR cut, or over the course of four years, about 10% as significant as the Iraq war.
As a single issue pro-life voter, I see two problems with your case.
The first, and most salient from your point of view, is the existential risk calculation. The risk of a Trump presidency resulting in the deaths of all 8 billion people on Earth is not 1 in 10,000. I doubt it is even 1 in 1,000,000. Killing everyone on Earth is an extremely difficult thing to do. Even if Trump was more likely than Harris to start the worst kind of nuclear war possible (which I don't agree with, but lets say he was) that still wouldn't be an existential risk, because nuclear war is not an existential risk. Every nuke on Earth could be detonated in anger and it likely wouldn't even kill half of human life (https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness). It would be a Very Bad Thing, to be sure, but not existential. As far as AI and pandemics go, I do not expect there to be much difference in effectiveness between a Trump and Harris administration. In the event of a pandemic or an actual AI goes crazy and tries to kill everyone scenario I predict both administrations to be about equally ineffective.
The second objection is that there is a serious moral difference between the murder of 600,000 innocents each year, and the possibility of more people dying due to policies regarding funding and the like. I do not expect this to be salient to you because it is not a utilitarian argument and you are a utilitarian. To myself, (and most humans, really, utilitarianism is not that popular or morally intuitive) it is worse to deliberately kill an innocent than it is to, say, not donate to a charity when your donation would have saved two lives.
To put this last objection another way: if we still lived in a society where slavery was legal, would you argue that abolitionists should not be single issue voters on slavery? Perhaps you would, you're a fairly consistent utilitarian and if you believed that the pro-slavery party, running on a platform of forcing slavery to be legal in all states, would be more likely to fund programs that would save lives and less likely to actually achieve their goal of forcing slavery on the free states then I can image you voting for the pro-slavery party with a clean conscience. But most abolitionists would not, and I do not think they are illogical for doing so. In the same way, I will not vote for the party that advocates for the murder of innocents, even up until the moment of birth (https://ag.ny.gov/publications/abortion-legal-and-protected-new-york-state).
At what age, would you say it becomes less of a loss if a person dies? anytime after their regional average age of death? Would it be more utilitarianly desirable to kill, say 100 80-year-olds, than to kill 10 5-year-olds? It seems it should be a sliding scale. Perhaps a Logan‘s Run scenario is not so dystopian. perhaps persons who have the most potential life left should be the most valuable. but that’s a little inconvenient because fetuses whether persons or not certainly have the most amount of potential life left on average by time span.
One of the most impactful movie quotes for me is Clint Eastwood characters’ line in unforgiven : “ it’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away everything he has and everything he will have.”
It’s obviously true that an 80 year old will have less loss if he is killed or allowed to die than a 20 year-old or a five-year-old or a one second old zygote.