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).
I disagree about existential risks--particularly those from disease, for instance. And even if they don't kill everyone, if they kill 4 billion people, a 1 in 5,000 chance of them is far more salient than abortion. If we take into account future generations, it becomes even more severe.
As for the second point, I don't think this is right. Thought experiment:
You see to your left a murder being committed. To your right, five people are dying because they lack access to medicine. You can either give the medicine to the five or stop the murder (assume the murderer won't commit future murders). Which should you prevent? My intuition is you should deliver the medicine even if you're not a utilitarian--even if it was only two people.
Of course, causing a murder isn't worth preventing some deaths, but preventing a murder isn't much more important than preventing other deaths.
But it might be the case that your political community has an obligation not to legally permit the killing of its members, and so by voting to continue (and even expand) that legality, one violates the rights of all those members who it remains (or becomes) legal to kill. Crucially, this holds even if they are not *actually* killed: simply being treated as a non-person (e.g. by one's government permitting people to kill one) constitutes a violation of one's rights. So the number of rights violations which result from the legality of abortion is probably a lot larger than people think.
Disease is extremely unlikely to kill all human life; we know this because human life has been around for a very long time, and disease hasn't wiped us all out yet. We've survived the Black Death, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, Spanish Flu, and more. And the risk is basically the same whether Trump or Kamala are in office: the odds of a disease coming along that's capable of wiping out even half of all human life are extremely long (Ord put them at 1/10,000, which is think is still to high), and either of them sitting in the Oval Office doesn't change those odds. Once the disease is here there is an argument that competent vs incompetence in the White House might change the odds of how many people will die from it, but I don't expect them to change the odds that much. There is only so much good governance can do in the face of a new Black Death. Will Harris close the borders? I expect Trump will. Will Harris push through an Operation Warp Speed to find a vaccine or cure? We know Trump would, he did it before.
Now you can argue that the odds of natural pandemics wiping out all or most human life is extremely low, but we live in an age of wonders and miracles and somebody could engineer n x-risk worthy disease. That certainly is possible, but I still don't see a significant advantage in favor of Harris in such a case. The Republicans seem to be the party most likely to cut off funding for labs doing gain of function research right now. Honestly though, in almost all scenarios where someone has made an x-risk pathogen there is almost nothing the President of the US can do to stop it.
As far as your thought experiment goes, I would say that even if many people would choose to give medicine to the 5, their choices and preferences have built a society that prioritizes stopping the murder. If someone murders someone else, and you had the power to stop him and did nothing, then you could wind up in jail. If you don't give medicine to 5 dying people (assuming you're not a doctor who has been charged with caring for them) then you have committed no crime. Murder is worse than dying of a disease, and our society tolerates it less.
It is also simple to generate an experiment where most people's intuitions would go in the opposite direction. Simply say that the murder is a mad surgeon who is planning on harvesting his victim's organs, which he will then give to the five sick people to save their lives. You have the choice whether to stop the murder or not. If you do, the five people will die. The numbers stay the same, the choice stays the same, you are not any more responsible for the murder than in the previous thought experiment, yet I would wager most people's moral intuitions would tell them they need to stop the murderer in such a case. I would agree.
By the same token, the American Civil War is generally considered to have been a just war, a good war, and a necessary war. Yet more than 600,000 people died in that war, and in exchange 4 million slaves got their freedom. Lets say I give you a scenario: either let one man die in agony on a battlefield, or prevent his death but 6 people will live a life of slavery. Arguably from a utilitarian perspective it may be a bad trade! After all, the 6 will live regardless, while soldier will die young. That's pretty bad! But maybe it's worth the trade. Well, what if it was 1 soldier or 3 slaves? What about 1 soldier or 1 slave? Would the Civil War have not been worth it if there were only 500,000 slaves to free instead of 4 million?
My own intuition is that slavery was an evil institution, and should not have been tolerated even if the war would have killed many more people than it freed. It is also my belief that as many people as died in the Civil War are killed each year under legal sanction. And that if you try to disrupt the machine that grinds up that 600,000 each year, even by peaceful means, then you get thrown in jail for years (even if you're an old woman: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/final-defendant-sentenced-federal-civil-rights-conspiracy-and-freedom-access-clinic). And if you speak out as an activist against this horror, well, under the Biden administration the FBI has been extremely aggressive in intimidating pro-life activists (https://www.newsweek.com/campaign-intimidate-churches-pro-life-groups-getting-worse-opinion-1802384). You just might wake up and find a whole FBI squad there with guns, waiting to drag you away in chains under the flimsiest of pretenses.
That last bit, at least, I expect to stop if Trump is elected and continue under Harris.
The existence of slippery slopes would be another reason for pro-lifers to be hesitant. I think legalising post birth infanticide or neglect resulting in death is unlikely to happen even if thats what various philosophical positions entail, such as Thomson or Rothbard etc. But making late term abortion more prevelant and casual does seem like a very serious concern. I'm not sure if Hanania was trolling but I do remember some Randians seriously arguing that abortion till birth should obviously be legal.
I wouldn't be so quick to write off infanticide as a possibility if people really keep giving ground on this stuff. It seems impossible from here but 20 years ago just legalizing gay marriage would've felt impossible, never mind the trans insanity.
Actually, it would be interesting to see the legal status of human infants become more equal with that of sentient non-human animals, either by upgrading the status of these animals or by downgrading the status of human infants.
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.
Yes it's strange that utilitarians and even others such as Huemer embrace the repugnant conclusion, yet have very little interest in promoting fertility. I'm not sure what the effects of legal abortion are on fertility, but it's very plausible that it reduces it. But even the general lack of concern with fertility is a good illustration that such philosophical commitments are merely signalling/vibes not something that they actually take seriously to inform their policy beliefs.
One possible additional consideration: it's plausible that political communities have a duty to criminalize the violation of their members' rights, *even when* this criminalization would not do much to reduce the number of rights violations. Failure to do this itself constitutes a distinct violation of the members' right to be treated as basic moral equals. If this is true, then the mere fact that it is legal to kill fetuses constitutes a violation of the rights of every single fetus (including those who are not actually aborted) to be treated as a basic moral equal. This *massively* expands the number of rights violations which result from the legality of abortion. It also means that there is a strong imperative to ban abortion *even if* we don't think this would sharply reduce the number of abortions which take place.
Are a lot of pro-lifers utilitarians? I wouldn't think they are and so I'm a little confused what's going on here. If you're sympathetic to utilitarian arguments, then you're probably not a single-issue pro-life voter, right?
I agree with you but there are a lot of other parts in this equation that complicate things. Hypothetical existential risk arguments are fraught, because like Peter Thiel says, if we were to weigh every plausible existential risk in the way you just did, society would have to grind to a halt in order to avoid drawing any of the black balls from the urn of possibility, spiritually dying of stasis. Foreign aid also raises the question of whose interests a national government should be working for, and while ideally every government should be working for the benefit of all people regardless of borders and ethnicities, unfortunately thats not the premise of the international order, nor is it how most people see things (and there are non-trivial arguments for such positions).
Pro-lifers often respond to this kind of point by pointing to "the expressive function of law," and a deontic requirement to get the law to express that fetuses are human people. I'm not sure they ever make it explicit, but many of them seem to operating with either some kind of axiological non-determinacy between expressivist and welfarist reasons, or some sort of Gert-style distinction between justifying and requiring force of reason, where the welfarist reasons merely justify while the expressivist reasons can require.
I don't endorse many of the pieces of this response (I do think axiological non-determinacy is a thing, but that's about it). But I'm curious how you'd respond.
I mean, it just seems obviously wrong. If it's a choice between thousands of extra lives being saved or the law expressing the right sort of thing, saving thousands of extra lives seems more important.
Qualifiedly? I think that fetuses aren't people until they have a mind, which it's an empirical question when that happens but my best guess is sometime in the second trimester. Pre-mind I think fetuses are still significant value bearers, but that the trade-off between that and the thousand other considerations one might reasonably have in planning a family is not a good topic for legislation.
If you are a consequentialist, once a fetus is past 8 weeks, it has an 80%+ chance of living to be a healthy adult. It’s capacities at the time of the abortion are hardly relevant if it will predictably grow to have greater capacities.
It's reporting specific lines of argumentation that non-utilitarians offer. "I'm not a utilitarian" isn't in itself any good as a response to the argument. Non-utilitarian moral theories with any degree of plausibility still care about well-being, often to a considerable degree.
It seems plausible (to me, at any rate) that people have a right to be recognized as basic moral equals, and that it is therefore a violation of a person's rights to be treated as a non-person by their government. But this seems to imply that the mere legality of abortion is a violation of the rights of every fetus (including those who are not actually aborted). Is that distinct from "the expressive function of law," or is that just the sort of thing you had in mind?
I think it is different, since the folks who offer this argument make a big deal about the law as tutor, not the right to having your equality codified.
But suppose it is a rights violation. Presumably rights-based reasons and welfarist reasons have some rate of exchange, especially when the right in question has no direct effect on well-being (the fetuses have no idea what the law says about them). So then the counter to Matthew's argument would have to go further and try to articulate the weight of the right's based reasons and a rate of exchange that makes abortion predominant over every other issue.
Right, in order for this argument to counter Matthew's, we'd need to say more about the strength of the relevant rights-based reasons. But it does seem prima facie as though it should make a difference: after all, if it's true that being legally treated as a non-person is a rights violation, then there are a *lot* more rights violations involved in the legality of abortion than we might initially have thought.
Well, depending on where the personhood facts actually lie.
It also introduces an intriguing question in both animal and AI ethics, if there are person-level minds in the animal world (maybe among cetaceans or cephalopods) or 'behind the mask' of some fancy neural net.
Oh yeah, I'm assuming here that fetuses are persons (since Matthew's argument was about whether those of us who think that should vote solely on that basis).
I agree about animals and AI. At the very least, I think these considerations should lead us to take questions of non-human personhood much more seriously. (For what it's worth, I don't think AI or any non-human animals of which we are aware are persons. But I agree concerning the seriousness of the question, as well as the potential moral risk involved.)
You seem to be applying consequentialism less rigorously here than in other areas. An abortion snuffs out whatever utility and disutility the fetus would experience and cause during its lifetime.
Perhaps abortions are good because they reduce demand for poultry. I’m prepared to accept that a chicken is 1/480th as important as a human because chickens have 200M neurons and humans have 82 billion. Counting neurons seems like a good first approximation of how much pleasure and pain animal can experience.
Anyway, the average American eats about 2.5 chickens per month or 2200 over their life expectancy. Thus, the unaborted child is, on average, going to kill about 4 human equivalents of chickens during his or her life time. This is the strongest pro choice argument for a utilitarian, but few normies would find it persuasive.
>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.<
How does this not lead to acceptance of infanticide?
Another reason the death of a living person is more serious is that the fetus's death does not produce much in the way of secondary effects. Murder victims have friends and family. They're so upset by the death that in many cases they're willing to commit acts of retributive violence. At a minimum, they're likely to spend numerous waking hours fearing for their own safety or the safety of others close to them. These fears grow even among those who don't know any victims.
The termination of a pregnancy causes none of that. There are no cycles of retributive violence, only rare instances of terrorism. Nobody moves to the suburbs because their city has lots of abortion clinics.
Meanwhile the death of an African child or adult due to AIDS produces significant secondary effects. Perhaps not as much as murder, but it's still a loss. Society likely invested in that individual in the form of education and other social supports. They may leave behind orphans, or older family members that depended in their support. I just don't think there's any comparison.
I don't think this will convince many people because absolute majority of people (wrongly) have Copenhagen intuitions: killing by direct acting is many times worse than killing by inaction or side effects.
"I don’t think that early abortions kill any person because a person is a mind, not a biological organism."
OK: So, if you press a magic button that creates someone in Anna Bagenholm's condition back when she was still frozen, but unlike Anna, without any prior history of sentience or consciousness, such an organism should still have a legal right to life, right? Because in their case, unlike that of the embryo or early fetus, their mind already exists but is simply in an off state, albeit with it never previously having been in an on state?
One thing that may be helpful is to institute a sort of social credit system. But more of a personal value credit system, the more healthy relationships one has, the more people one supports financially or emotionally. The younger one is, the more beliefs and opinions, one holds which promotes human flourishing, and the physically healthier one is the less one is making use of any kind of government dole, etc.the higher one’s score.
Then perhaps those of us trying to decide who to vote for based on how many people will die, will have something tangible, statistically, speaking to sink our teeth into. Surely what kind of people will die must be factored in?
Trump is much less likely to start a nuclear war than Harris. Compared to Harris and Democrats, Trump and Republicans are far more dovish on Russia, and Russia and America still have the world's #1 and #2 nuclear arsenals. Trump also de-escalated tensions with North Korea and Trump's first term was more militarily restrained than Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan.
There's some reason to think otherwise. While Trump's chumminess with Putin might deescalate matters in the short run, it also boosts the chances of Putin probing the borders of former soviet entities and testing the NATO's integrity/resolve, which ultimately elevates the danger of a nuclear exchange. Plus, Trump has an unusual alacrity to violate precious and longstanding norms (like the norm against using nuclear weapons), and he's less curious about world affairs and more impetuous generally and therefore more likely blunder. So it's more easily imaginable that a situation goes so sideways that a nuclear option is on the table if Trump is in office. Isn't the better pro-Trump argument that under some Mutual-Assured-Destruction-type strategy, he's such a loose cannon that it paradoxically lowers the potential for an outbreak of nuclear conflict (given enemy thinking would overlap with the Harris-supporter's analysis)?
Trump can't start a nuclear exchange without the approval of the regime because his order to fire simply won't be obeyed. Military leadership didn't even want to deploy to quell riots under his administration in 2020, they're not going to fire nukes on his order unless the rest of the government (the so-called "deep state") is generally on board with the idea already.
Putin has been probing the borders of former soviet states at least since the 2008 Russo-Georgian war and Russia is currently at war with Ukraine after an initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, so that definitely was not caused by Trump. While Trump does violate norms, one of the norms which he violated was the consensus that America ought to have a belligerent foreign policy. For example, when he called off a military strike on Iran which the State Department wanted. In any case, I don't believe that Trump is less stable than Harris/Democrats. The Democrats have a cult-like quality that make them prone to fanaticism. Just look at how they rushed to boycott all things Russian when the war began.
Sorry I should have written "probing the borders of more former soviet entities." And you're right that it predates Trump--he's not the origin of the issue, but still he could exacerbate it. The relevant question is whether Putin can be deterred from making even riskier plays moving forward.
It seems your theology is reflected in this blog. You compare the expected amount of life under Harris vs Trump. The premise is that more life is better. Your rationale behind that premise was employed when you argued that there would be many more people under Theism than Atheism, which was a key idea in your Anthropic/SIA argument. You are apparently not only a theologian, but a systematic theologian
Indeed. But "more life = better" occupies a lofty spot on your theological hierarchy, and it was directly applied here. Of course it's not "controversial", but it seems to be a grand narrative principle for you
Additionally, you pose a potential loss of life through indirect means to an assured loss of life through direct means, as if they are in anyway equivalent.
Imagine saying that "slavery is certainly evil, but isn't the conditions of the factory worker similar?" To maintain a position of equivalence between Lincoln Republicans, and the Pro-Slavery Democrats. Any obvious outrage forming in our intuitions on that front?
Well the difference in that case would be that slavery was by far the most consequential issue in American politics. But if one of the candidates would save millions of lives overseas and they both were supportive of slavery but that one who'd save millions of lives would perhaps regulate it slightly more, I think it would be better to pick to pro slavery candidate. Of course, as it turned out, slavery was by far the most consequential issue and the candidates were very different on it.
If we could force people to become vegans through enslaving them, and that reduced demand for factory farmed chicken, wouldn’t slavery be a positive good?
Yes, and there is reason to think that Trump will be much better on abortion (from a pro-life perspective) than Harris even though he’s not running on it.
It seems he's saying the probability/expected value you associated with such an event was about as hand-waved as if you'd pulled it from a fortune cookie. No shame in the game, tho, that's were I get all my probabilities
When Trump first ran, and won, the people who opposed him claimed his interactions with North Korea would cause an atomic war. People "knew" this to be the case. The speculations on how that would play out became part of the supposed "balance of horrors" that motivated pro-life democrats to vote for Hillary. I remember all of this. How did it play out? Unlike the "projections" of the intelligent commentator. What should this tell us? It should tell us that we can't predict the future.
But if you run on a "kill babies" campaign, then we don't have to guess as to the consequence.
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).
I disagree about existential risks--particularly those from disease, for instance. And even if they don't kill everyone, if they kill 4 billion people, a 1 in 5,000 chance of them is far more salient than abortion. If we take into account future generations, it becomes even more severe.
As for the second point, I don't think this is right. Thought experiment:
You see to your left a murder being committed. To your right, five people are dying because they lack access to medicine. You can either give the medicine to the five or stop the murder (assume the murderer won't commit future murders). Which should you prevent? My intuition is you should deliver the medicine even if you're not a utilitarian--even if it was only two people.
Of course, causing a murder isn't worth preventing some deaths, but preventing a murder isn't much more important than preventing other deaths.
But it might be the case that your political community has an obligation not to legally permit the killing of its members, and so by voting to continue (and even expand) that legality, one violates the rights of all those members who it remains (or becomes) legal to kill. Crucially, this holds even if they are not *actually* killed: simply being treated as a non-person (e.g. by one's government permitting people to kill one) constitutes a violation of one's rights. So the number of rights violations which result from the legality of abortion is probably a lot larger than people think.
Disease is extremely unlikely to kill all human life; we know this because human life has been around for a very long time, and disease hasn't wiped us all out yet. We've survived the Black Death, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, Spanish Flu, and more. And the risk is basically the same whether Trump or Kamala are in office: the odds of a disease coming along that's capable of wiping out even half of all human life are extremely long (Ord put them at 1/10,000, which is think is still to high), and either of them sitting in the Oval Office doesn't change those odds. Once the disease is here there is an argument that competent vs incompetence in the White House might change the odds of how many people will die from it, but I don't expect them to change the odds that much. There is only so much good governance can do in the face of a new Black Death. Will Harris close the borders? I expect Trump will. Will Harris push through an Operation Warp Speed to find a vaccine or cure? We know Trump would, he did it before.
Now you can argue that the odds of natural pandemics wiping out all or most human life is extremely low, but we live in an age of wonders and miracles and somebody could engineer n x-risk worthy disease. That certainly is possible, but I still don't see a significant advantage in favor of Harris in such a case. The Republicans seem to be the party most likely to cut off funding for labs doing gain of function research right now. Honestly though, in almost all scenarios where someone has made an x-risk pathogen there is almost nothing the President of the US can do to stop it.
As far as your thought experiment goes, I would say that even if many people would choose to give medicine to the 5, their choices and preferences have built a society that prioritizes stopping the murder. If someone murders someone else, and you had the power to stop him and did nothing, then you could wind up in jail. If you don't give medicine to 5 dying people (assuming you're not a doctor who has been charged with caring for them) then you have committed no crime. Murder is worse than dying of a disease, and our society tolerates it less.
It is also simple to generate an experiment where most people's intuitions would go in the opposite direction. Simply say that the murder is a mad surgeon who is planning on harvesting his victim's organs, which he will then give to the five sick people to save their lives. You have the choice whether to stop the murder or not. If you do, the five people will die. The numbers stay the same, the choice stays the same, you are not any more responsible for the murder than in the previous thought experiment, yet I would wager most people's moral intuitions would tell them they need to stop the murderer in such a case. I would agree.
By the same token, the American Civil War is generally considered to have been a just war, a good war, and a necessary war. Yet more than 600,000 people died in that war, and in exchange 4 million slaves got their freedom. Lets say I give you a scenario: either let one man die in agony on a battlefield, or prevent his death but 6 people will live a life of slavery. Arguably from a utilitarian perspective it may be a bad trade! After all, the 6 will live regardless, while soldier will die young. That's pretty bad! But maybe it's worth the trade. Well, what if it was 1 soldier or 3 slaves? What about 1 soldier or 1 slave? Would the Civil War have not been worth it if there were only 500,000 slaves to free instead of 4 million?
My own intuition is that slavery was an evil institution, and should not have been tolerated even if the war would have killed many more people than it freed. It is also my belief that as many people as died in the Civil War are killed each year under legal sanction. And that if you try to disrupt the machine that grinds up that 600,000 each year, even by peaceful means, then you get thrown in jail for years (even if you're an old woman: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/final-defendant-sentenced-federal-civil-rights-conspiracy-and-freedom-access-clinic). And if you speak out as an activist against this horror, well, under the Biden administration the FBI has been extremely aggressive in intimidating pro-life activists (https://www.newsweek.com/campaign-intimidate-churches-pro-life-groups-getting-worse-opinion-1802384). You just might wake up and find a whole FBI squad there with guns, waiting to drag you away in chains under the flimsiest of pretenses.
That last bit, at least, I expect to stop if Trump is elected and continue under Harris.
The existence of slippery slopes would be another reason for pro-lifers to be hesitant. I think legalising post birth infanticide or neglect resulting in death is unlikely to happen even if thats what various philosophical positions entail, such as Thomson or Rothbard etc. But making late term abortion more prevelant and casual does seem like a very serious concern. I'm not sure if Hanania was trolling but I do remember some Randians seriously arguing that abortion till birth should obviously be legal.
I wouldn't be so quick to write off infanticide as a possibility if people really keep giving ground on this stuff. It seems impossible from here but 20 years ago just legalizing gay marriage would've felt impossible, never mind the trans insanity.
I know there are some communities that actively fetishize abortion and infanticide. I wouldn't rule it out becoming more mainstream.
Actually, it would be interesting to see the legal status of human infants become more equal with that of sentient non-human animals, either by upgrading the status of these animals or by downgrading the status of human infants.
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.
Yes it's strange that utilitarians and even others such as Huemer embrace the repugnant conclusion, yet have very little interest in promoting fertility. I'm not sure what the effects of legal abortion are on fertility, but it's very plausible that it reduces it. But even the general lack of concern with fertility is a good illustration that such philosophical commitments are merely signalling/vibes not something that they actually take seriously to inform their policy beliefs.
FYI NIH on RvW's effect on fertility. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1508542/
One possible additional consideration: it's plausible that political communities have a duty to criminalize the violation of their members' rights, *even when* this criminalization would not do much to reduce the number of rights violations. Failure to do this itself constitutes a distinct violation of the members' right to be treated as basic moral equals. If this is true, then the mere fact that it is legal to kill fetuses constitutes a violation of the rights of every single fetus (including those who are not actually aborted) to be treated as a basic moral equal. This *massively* expands the number of rights violations which result from the legality of abortion. It also means that there is a strong imperative to ban abortion *even if* we don't think this would sharply reduce the number of abortions which take place.
For more on the duty to criminalize: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10982-014-9209-6
(Also, I just noticed Daniel Rubio's comment below references, though does not endorse, something similar to this.)
how about all the other issues? BLM and black crime rates?
Are a lot of pro-lifers utilitarians? I wouldn't think they are and so I'm a little confused what's going on here. If you're sympathetic to utilitarian arguments, then you're probably not a single-issue pro-life voter, right?
I agree with you but there are a lot of other parts in this equation that complicate things. Hypothetical existential risk arguments are fraught, because like Peter Thiel says, if we were to weigh every plausible existential risk in the way you just did, society would have to grind to a halt in order to avoid drawing any of the black balls from the urn of possibility, spiritually dying of stasis. Foreign aid also raises the question of whose interests a national government should be working for, and while ideally every government should be working for the benefit of all people regardless of borders and ethnicities, unfortunately thats not the premise of the international order, nor is it how most people see things (and there are non-trivial arguments for such positions).
Pro-lifers often respond to this kind of point by pointing to "the expressive function of law," and a deontic requirement to get the law to express that fetuses are human people. I'm not sure they ever make it explicit, but many of them seem to operating with either some kind of axiological non-determinacy between expressivist and welfarist reasons, or some sort of Gert-style distinction between justifying and requiring force of reason, where the welfarist reasons merely justify while the expressivist reasons can require.
I don't endorse many of the pieces of this response (I do think axiological non-determinacy is a thing, but that's about it). But I'm curious how you'd respond.
I mean, it just seems obviously wrong. If it's a choice between thousands of extra lives being saved or the law expressing the right sort of thing, saving thousands of extra lives seems more important.
Out of curiosity, are you pro life?
Qualifiedly? I think that fetuses aren't people until they have a mind, which it's an empirical question when that happens but my best guess is sometime in the second trimester. Pre-mind I think fetuses are still significant value bearers, but that the trade-off between that and the thousand other considerations one might reasonably have in planning a family is not a good topic for legislation.
If you are a consequentialist, once a fetus is past 8 weeks, it has an 80%+ chance of living to be a healthy adult. It’s capacities at the time of the abortion are hardly relevant if it will predictably grow to have greater capacities.
That seems like a very complicated way of saying that most people are not utilitarians.
It's reporting specific lines of argumentation that non-utilitarians offer. "I'm not a utilitarian" isn't in itself any good as a response to the argument. Non-utilitarian moral theories with any degree of plausibility still care about well-being, often to a considerable degree.
It seems plausible (to me, at any rate) that people have a right to be recognized as basic moral equals, and that it is therefore a violation of a person's rights to be treated as a non-person by their government. But this seems to imply that the mere legality of abortion is a violation of the rights of every fetus (including those who are not actually aborted). Is that distinct from "the expressive function of law," or is that just the sort of thing you had in mind?
I think it is different, since the folks who offer this argument make a big deal about the law as tutor, not the right to having your equality codified.
But suppose it is a rights violation. Presumably rights-based reasons and welfarist reasons have some rate of exchange, especially when the right in question has no direct effect on well-being (the fetuses have no idea what the law says about them). So then the counter to Matthew's argument would have to go further and try to articulate the weight of the right's based reasons and a rate of exchange that makes abortion predominant over every other issue.
Right, in order for this argument to counter Matthew's, we'd need to say more about the strength of the relevant rights-based reasons. But it does seem prima facie as though it should make a difference: after all, if it's true that being legally treated as a non-person is a rights violation, then there are a *lot* more rights violations involved in the legality of abortion than we might initially have thought.
Well, depending on where the personhood facts actually lie.
It also introduces an intriguing question in both animal and AI ethics, if there are person-level minds in the animal world (maybe among cetaceans or cephalopods) or 'behind the mask' of some fancy neural net.
Oh yeah, I'm assuming here that fetuses are persons (since Matthew's argument was about whether those of us who think that should vote solely on that basis).
I agree about animals and AI. At the very least, I think these considerations should lead us to take questions of non-human personhood much more seriously. (For what it's worth, I don't think AI or any non-human animals of which we are aware are persons. But I agree concerning the seriousness of the question, as well as the potential moral risk involved.)
You seem to be applying consequentialism less rigorously here than in other areas. An abortion snuffs out whatever utility and disutility the fetus would experience and cause during its lifetime.
Perhaps abortions are good because they reduce demand for poultry. I’m prepared to accept that a chicken is 1/480th as important as a human because chickens have 200M neurons and humans have 82 billion. Counting neurons seems like a good first approximation of how much pleasure and pain animal can experience.
Anyway, the average American eats about 2.5 chickens per month or 2200 over their life expectancy. Thus, the unaborted child is, on average, going to kill about 4 human equivalents of chickens during his or her life time. This is the strongest pro choice argument for a utilitarian, but few normies would find it persuasive.
>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.<
How does this not lead to acceptance of infanticide?
Another reason the death of a living person is more serious is that the fetus's death does not produce much in the way of secondary effects. Murder victims have friends and family. They're so upset by the death that in many cases they're willing to commit acts of retributive violence. At a minimum, they're likely to spend numerous waking hours fearing for their own safety or the safety of others close to them. These fears grow even among those who don't know any victims.
The termination of a pregnancy causes none of that. There are no cycles of retributive violence, only rare instances of terrorism. Nobody moves to the suburbs because their city has lots of abortion clinics.
Meanwhile the death of an African child or adult due to AIDS produces significant secondary effects. Perhaps not as much as murder, but it's still a loss. Society likely invested in that individual in the form of education and other social supports. They may leave behind orphans, or older family members that depended in their support. I just don't think there's any comparison.
I don't think this will convince many people because absolute majority of people (wrongly) have Copenhagen intuitions: killing by direct acting is many times worse than killing by inaction or side effects.
"I don’t think that early abortions kill any person because a person is a mind, not a biological organism."
OK: So, if you press a magic button that creates someone in Anna Bagenholm's condition back when she was still frozen, but unlike Anna, without any prior history of sentience or consciousness, such an organism should still have a legal right to life, right? Because in their case, unlike that of the embryo or early fetus, their mind already exists but is simply in an off state, albeit with it never previously having been in an on state?
One thing that may be helpful is to institute a sort of social credit system. But more of a personal value credit system, the more healthy relationships one has, the more people one supports financially or emotionally. The younger one is, the more beliefs and opinions, one holds which promotes human flourishing, and the physically healthier one is the less one is making use of any kind of government dole, etc.the higher one’s score.
Then perhaps those of us trying to decide who to vote for based on how many people will die, will have something tangible, statistically, speaking to sink our teeth into. Surely what kind of people will die must be factored in?
Trump is much less likely to start a nuclear war than Harris. Compared to Harris and Democrats, Trump and Republicans are far more dovish on Russia, and Russia and America still have the world's #1 and #2 nuclear arsenals. Trump also de-escalated tensions with North Korea and Trump's first term was more militarily restrained than Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan.
There's some reason to think otherwise. While Trump's chumminess with Putin might deescalate matters in the short run, it also boosts the chances of Putin probing the borders of former soviet entities and testing the NATO's integrity/resolve, which ultimately elevates the danger of a nuclear exchange. Plus, Trump has an unusual alacrity to violate precious and longstanding norms (like the norm against using nuclear weapons), and he's less curious about world affairs and more impetuous generally and therefore more likely blunder. So it's more easily imaginable that a situation goes so sideways that a nuclear option is on the table if Trump is in office. Isn't the better pro-Trump argument that under some Mutual-Assured-Destruction-type strategy, he's such a loose cannon that it paradoxically lowers the potential for an outbreak of nuclear conflict (given enemy thinking would overlap with the Harris-supporter's analysis)?
Trump can't start a nuclear exchange without the approval of the regime because his order to fire simply won't be obeyed. Military leadership didn't even want to deploy to quell riots under his administration in 2020, they're not going to fire nukes on his order unless the rest of the government (the so-called "deep state") is generally on board with the idea already.
Putin has been probing the borders of former soviet states at least since the 2008 Russo-Georgian war and Russia is currently at war with Ukraine after an initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, so that definitely was not caused by Trump. While Trump does violate norms, one of the norms which he violated was the consensus that America ought to have a belligerent foreign policy. For example, when he called off a military strike on Iran which the State Department wanted. In any case, I don't believe that Trump is less stable than Harris/Democrats. The Democrats have a cult-like quality that make them prone to fanaticism. Just look at how they rushed to boycott all things Russian when the war began.
Sorry I should have written "probing the borders of more former soviet entities." And you're right that it predates Trump--he's not the origin of the issue, but still he could exacerbate it. The relevant question is whether Putin can be deterred from making even riskier plays moving forward.
It seems your theology is reflected in this blog. You compare the expected amount of life under Harris vs Trump. The premise is that more life is better. Your rationale behind that premise was employed when you argued that there would be many more people under Theism than Atheism, which was a key idea in your Anthropic/SIA argument. You are apparently not only a theologian, but a systematic theologian
I generally think it's bad when lots of people die, though I don't think this is some controversial or systematic bit of theology.
Indeed. But "more life = better" occupies a lofty spot on your theological hierarchy, and it was directly applied here. Of course it's not "controversial", but it seems to be a grand narrative principle for you
I wonder how this article would age circa 1860 with a heading like:
"Abolitionists shouldn't be single issue voters"
Can someone explain to me the difference?
Additionally, you pose a potential loss of life through indirect means to an assured loss of life through direct means, as if they are in anyway equivalent.
Imagine saying that "slavery is certainly evil, but isn't the conditions of the factory worker similar?" To maintain a position of equivalence between Lincoln Republicans, and the Pro-Slavery Democrats. Any obvious outrage forming in our intuitions on that front?
Well the difference in that case would be that slavery was by far the most consequential issue in American politics. But if one of the candidates would save millions of lives overseas and they both were supportive of slavery but that one who'd save millions of lives would perhaps regulate it slightly more, I think it would be better to pick to pro slavery candidate. Of course, as it turned out, slavery was by far the most consequential issue and the candidates were very different on it.
If we could force people to become vegans through enslaving them, and that reduced demand for factory farmed chicken, wouldn’t slavery be a positive good?
Abraham Lincoln didn't run on abolition.
The consequence of "potential global conflict" is fortune telling.
Right but I think there was a reason to expect he would be much better on slavery.
I don't understand your second sentence.
Yes, and there is reason to think that Trump will be much better on abortion (from a pro-life perspective) than Harris even though he’s not running on it.
It seems he's saying the probability/expected value you associated with such an event was about as hand-waved as if you'd pulled it from a fortune cookie. No shame in the game, tho, that's were I get all my probabilities
The odds of the abortion on demand campaign promise delivery on abortions: 100%
The odds of worse than that outcomes given x,y,z: less than 100%
When Trump first ran, and won, the people who opposed him claimed his interactions with North Korea would cause an atomic war. People "knew" this to be the case. The speculations on how that would play out became part of the supposed "balance of horrors" that motivated pro-life democrats to vote for Hillary. I remember all of this. How did it play out? Unlike the "projections" of the intelligent commentator. What should this tell us? It should tell us that we can't predict the future.
But if you run on a "kill babies" campaign, then we don't have to guess as to the consequence.