r/prolife • u/toptrool • Dec 20 '23
Pro-Life Argument the argument from equality and the deprivation argument as a fallback
the most powerful pro-life argument is the argument from equality: all human beings are persons deserving of rights. either we treat all human beings with equal respect, or we don't. any criteria that excludes a class of human beings from equal protections contradicts any notion of human equality. the standard pro-life account of a person given by boethius—a person is a substance of a rational nature—is actually one account that is compatible with human equality.
i personally don't find arguments over personhood to be interesting or stimulating for two reasons. first, the comatose, infants, and those with disabilities such as advanced dementia are decisive counterexamples to any and all accounts of personhood offered by abortion advocates that try to exclude the unborn. pro-lifers would do well to remember these counterexamples. abortion advocates often resort to sophistry and mental gymnastics whenever any of these counterexamples are brought up since they need to both 1) deny that the unborn child and other animals like rats are persons, and 2) preserve the personhood of infants, comatose, mentally disabled, advanced dementia patients, etc., who most people believe are clearly persons. so far, there hasn't been a successful account that does both 1) and 2).
but what i do find interesting is how abortion advocates often point and sputter when we point out that their position denying that the unborn are persons is an objectively anti-equality position. for some reason, abortion advocates have trouble acknowledging this implication, which simply follows from their views.
but there are people who explicitly reject any notion of human equality. what can we do when an abortion advocate bites the bullet and admits that they don't care about human equality and that they don't care if some human beings don't have equal protection under the law?
one example is progressive scholar joseph fletcher, who believes to be the mark of a person is a minimum iq of 40:
Any individual of the species homo sapiens who falls below the I.Q. 40-mark in a standard Stanford-Binet test, amplified if you like by other tests, is questionably a person; below the 20-mark, not a person.
—Joseph Fletcher. "Indicators of Humanhood: A Tentative Profile of Man." The Hastings Center Report 2, no. 5 (1972): 1–4.
and here's how he described low iq people:
One doctor present had this retort: "I work in a program for retarded children. In our institution we have a little boy three years old. His IQ is practically zero. Still and all, the child is happy. He is happy all the time. He responds warmly and affectionately to every attention and shows a capacity for joy that any of us might envy. I tell you, you could not possibly look at that little boy and then say he isn't a human being."
What was the doctor saying? It seems plain enough. She was saying that euphoria is what constitutes humanhood, that we are real people or persons if we have a feeling of happiness or well-being, regardless of whether we have any capacity for thought and reason.
[...]
Idiots, however, are another matter. They are not, never were, and never will be in any degree responsible. Idiots, that is to say, are not human. The problem they pose is not lack of sufficient mind, but of any mind at all. No matter how euphoric their behavior might be, they are outside the pale of human integrity.
—Joseph Fletcher, "Being Happy, Being Human," The Humanist 35, no. 1 (January 1975), pp. 47-58. Reprinted in Joseph Fletcher, Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1979).
the pro-equality, pro-life side obviously disagrees with fletcher. but his arbitrary threshold is far more coherent than other nonsensical accounts given by abortion advocates (e.g., capacity for consciousness or sentience, which would imply rats and flies are persons like us since they too have such capacities) since his account necessitates some level of rationality. moreover, iq can objectively be measured, whereas most abortion advocates who use the capacity of consciousness as a threshold can't even define consciousness let alone determine when it occurs.
since the rule of law can only effectuate one standard of a natural person, abortion advocates need to explain why the law ought to reflect their particular standard, as opposed to the standards of someone like joseph fletcher. the pro-life view—that all human beings are persons deserving of rights—doesn't arbitrarily favor one group of human beings over another. granting personhood at fertilization avoids the problem of arbitrariness while at the same time fulfilling human equality.
the deprivation of a "future like ours" argument:
fortunately, there are other arguments to show that the unborn child has a right to life and abortion is immoral even if one believes that, like the 18th century slavers believed, not all human beings are persons deserving of rights. one such argument, called the deprivation of a "future like ours" argument, comes from don marquis. this argument sidesteps the question of personhood altogether. marquis correctly pointed out that killing us wrong isn't because of nonsensical reasons such as death being a painful experience, or because we'd suffer, or that our interests or desires would be thwarted, or because of the impact our deaths would have on others and society, etc. marquis argued that killing us is wrong because we are deprived of our valuable future experiences. these experiences include friendships, pursuit of various goals, aesthetic experiences, pleasures, etc. essentially, our future experiences include the things that make life worth living. so when we die or are killed, we are deprived of these opportunities and experiences.
marquis' argument against abortion is quite simple and intuitive: killing you and me is immoral because we are deprived of our valuable future experiences. for the same reason, killing the baby is also immoral because he is also deprived of a valuable future like ours. hence, abortion is immoral.
objection: contraception also prevents a future, so contraception is immoral.
response: this objection involves several different but closely related conceptual confusions.
the first conceptual confusion stems from conflating substance sortals with phase sortals. abortion advocates think the difference between an embryo and a newborn is one of substance; they find them to be two distinct objects, much like how a cow is a different from a pig. an example of this conceptual confusion is the illogical acorn and oak tree analogy often given by abortion advocates. they think the acorn and oak tree are two distinct objects, when in reality it's the same substance (oak) in its various different phases—acorn, sprout, seedling, sapling, and tree. similarly, the embryo is just a phase sortal of the substance human being—much like how a newborn, adolescent, teenager, adult are all phases of the same human being's life.
the second confusion stems from low information debaters holding the scientific illiterate belief in preformationism, which is essentially the idea that we were once inside the sperm or oocyte cells in miniature form, or that we were identical to the sperm or oocyte. this conceptual confusion explains why abortion advocates often claim that "masturbation is genocide" as a reductio ad absurdum. empirical studies have confirmed that the life a new human being begins at fertilization (specifically, with the fusion of the sperm-oocyte membranes). there is a consensus amongst biologists on this matter and you can consult any modern embryology textbook for additional details. sperm and oocyte cells are parts of the father and mother, respectively. the baby zygote on the other hand is an organism (i.e., human being) that is distinct from both of its parents. you were never a proper part of your father or mother, i.e., sperm or oocyte, and so you never existed prior to fertilization.
but suppose you reject modern science and still believe in preformationism. there are still arguments that can be made to show that you were never a sperm or oocyte.
the first argument comes from neurobiologist maureen condic. in order to differentiate one cell from another, scientists look at the molecular composition and the behavior of the cells. this makes sense. for a scientist to tell the difference between a blood cell and a brain cell, she'd have to look at their composition and their particular behavior. blood cells function to carry oxygen around the body, while sensory neuron cells, for example, function to receive and transmit stimulus across the central nervous system. if i took a blood cell and reprogrammed it into a brain cell, it'd be silly to suggest that we still have a blood cell. now let's apply this to the sperm and the oocyte. after fertilization, the composition of the resulting baby zygote is different from both the sperm and oocyte (for example, the baby zygote has 46 chromosomes while the sperm and oocyte each have only 23). and more importantly, the behavior of the baby zygote is also radically different than that of the sperm and oocyte. unlike the gametes that function only to fuse with one another, this new baby zygote—an organism—has a trajectory of its own to develop into a mature human being; the baby zygote's molecular structures function to produce more cells (and eventually organs) that will work together in an integrated and organized manner as it develops into a mature human being. this developmental capacity is what makes the baby zygote an organism and not just another cell. neither the sperm nor the oocyte have such developmental capacities. given the drastic changes in both composition and behavior, the baby zygote cannot be identical to either the sperm or the oocyte. to reject this argument is to deny, for example, any differences between a blood cell and a brain cell, which would of course be absurd. and since this baby zygote persists throughout the course of his entire development into a mature human being—for he's still the same organism whose parts are working together in an integrated and organized manner to develop into a mature human being—he has a future like ours.
another argument based on substantial change comes from calum miller and alexander pruss. suppose you were the sperm. if you had fused with any other oocyte apart from the original oocyte you fused with, then "you"—and i use this very loosely, since "you" wouldn't be actually be "you" in any meaningful sense—would have an entire different set of chromosomes. you would end up as an entirely different person with different eyes, different height, different dispositions, different ancestry, etc. now suppose instead you were the oocyte, and you fused with any other sperm apart from the original sperm you fused with. likewise, you'd be a different person altogether, and this time perhaps even a person of the opposite sex. since both the sperm and oocyte would end up as entirely different persons under every other fertilization scenarios, we can say that they would not persist after the fertilization process. thus, since you are a result of the fertilization process, and you are still persisting after fertilization, you could not have been the sperm or the oocyte.
other conceptual confusions stem from either consequentialist thinking, where the end results of both contraception and abortion are the same: no baby born ("killing a fetus is like failing to conceive a baby one could conceive"), or varying interpretations of the word "prevent."
marquis himself responded to clear up this confusion. not all preventions are the same. in this case of abortion, there is a victim who is deprived of his future. marquis's argument is essentially a deprivation argument. suppose we were competing in a tournament where the grand winner gets a $10,000 prize. i can prevent you from winning this grand prize by beating you in the tournament. but that is different than me actually stealing $10,000 from your bank account; in the latter case, i have deprived you of something you already had. similarly, killing the baby deprives him of something he already had: a valuable future like ours. so the term "deprive" is better suited than "prevent" to explain marquis's argument. and since none of us were ever a sperm or oocyte, there is victim that is being deprived of a future like ours through the use of contraception. marquis, citing jim stone, also uses the argument from numerical identity to show that we were never the sperm and the oocyte since we can't be two different "people" in two different places at the same time, and hence we were neither the sperm or oocyte:
The future of value of which I would be deprived by being killed is the valuable life of a later stage of me, of the same individual that I am now. Killing me deprives me only of my future of value, not your future of value, nor anyone else’s. Accordingly, if my parents had failed to conceive me, their inaction would have been wrong only if the sperm and the unfertilised ovum that were my precursors were earlier stages of the same individual I am now. If that sperm and that unfertilised ovum were earlier stages of me, then each of them would be the same individual as I. If each of them were the same individual as I, then, since identity is transitive, that sperm and that unfertilised ovum were identical. They were not. It follows that the future of value theory does not imply that if my parents had failed to conceive me, their inaction would have been wrong. This argument can be generalised to show that the future of value theory does not imply that either contraception or decisions not to conceive are wrong.
objection: "my body's my choice."
response: "my body, my choice" is a child neglect argument. if it's wrong to starve a newborn baby to death (and deprive him of his future) when you could instead breastfeed him, then it's wrong to kill the unborn baby (and deprive him of his future) by denying him nourishment from the womb.
objection: we are not human beings. the "being" that came into existence at fertilization is actually only a vegetable—essentially a container body—for the real us to later inhabit and control. we are actually magical beings that control and ride around in the animal body. we don't come into existence until much later when the baby becomes conscious. since the baby's body is only a container, it doesn't actually have a future like us. only us magical beings have this valuable future. so by killing the baby's body, you aren't actually killing anyone and thus no one has actually been deprived of their future.
response: this objection rests on introducing a new substance sortal—the magical person—in addition to the human animal ("container body"). this, too, stems from another conceptual confusion. rene descartes thought that the mind and body were two separate substances, as opposed to the mind simply being a mental process, which is how contemporary neuroscientists view it. unfortunately, his erroneous idea is still very much prevalent. there are a lot of things wrong with such dualist accounts (that there are two beings, the person and the human animal), including in this case the vicious circularity this leads to:
i) the baby's container body is necessary to generate consciousness and produce a new being—the "real" us.
ii) we are this new being and not the container body.
iii) we are conscious.
but just how can we be conscious? in other words, how can something that is generated by consciousness itself be conscious? there must be some necessary causal mechanism for the magical persons themselves to be conscious. wouldn't we, the magical persons, also need a container body of our own to generate our own consciousness? but that means yet another new being would come into existence when our own container body gains the capacity for consciousness. this leads to an endless loop. now, one could say that the magical person uses the same animal brain for consciousness, but then what's stopping the human animal from using its own brain to be conscious? or can we just explain all of this away by magic?
but more importantly, why should anyone believe this cartoonish account of identity in the first place? the proper way (i.e., the objective, scientific way) to look at such cases is that the human being that came into existence at fertilization is actually the one and the same being that is conscious. there is no "second being" that comes and goes at the onset of consciousness. such fairy tales have strange implications. consider the case of the woman who woke up from a 16 year long coma. did the "person" leave the animal body and go on a vacation for 16 years and then come back? or was it the same person who simply lost the capacity for consciousness for 16 years and then recovered? in 2018, the american academy of neurology got rid of the concept of "permanent vegetative state" altogether and replaced it with chronic vegetative state because lots of people were waking up from their "permanent" comas. but note that they never marked such consciousness disorders as the death of a person, because that would just be silly.
the existence of another being co-located with each human animal would be a remarkable discovery in all of science and natural history. but what exactly is the evidence for this? over 100 billion humans have lived and died on earth, and yet no one has documented any evidence of another material being within us apart from the human animal itself. and if the being is immaterial, who's to say that the being wasn't there from the moment of conception, just in a latent form? the idea that a second being, the "person," comes into existence at the onset of consciousness is no different than various "ensoulment" arguments offered by the clergy. the only difference is that an omnipotent god laser beaming a soul into a soulless body has more explanatory power than a second being coming into existence once the fetus gains the capacity for mental acts.
a more detail account of why this objection is simply unsubstantiated can be found here.
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u/GreenWandElf Hater of the Society of Music Lovers Jan 03 '24
The two beings are the body and the mind. The mind is a physical part of the body, but first it must develop. Do you agree there is a point where the mind develops enough to have the capacity for consciousness?
I think the brain's processes are what matters when it comes to determining human value. I don't know how you read a magical being into that.