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1. Man, all the most controversial topics in one 7 day stretch!

   It is really hard to credibly deny that human life begins at conception. This overview article on abortion lays out the case reasonably well.

   The main questions are revolve around the following related cluster:
   (1) Are “human rights” a mis-named? (Are there rights that entities have simply in virtue of being human?)
   (2) If not, is the right not to be killed is one of those rights?
   (3) What are we? A new member of the human species comes into existence at conception (this is basic science), but are we members of the human species, or are we something else: souls, brains, “personalities” (in square quotes because it is radically unclear what it would mean to say that I am a personality), …)?
   (4) It is very plausible that I am (am identical to) a person, something that (by the definition of “person” has a right to life). It is also plausible that I am a member of the human species, something that came into existence at conception. If both these are true, fetuses have a right to life. If one of them is false, which one?
   (5) Is there a plausible argument that abortion is the justified taking of innocent life, as Thomson has argued?

   Abortion is an issue where once I did the research I was taken aback by the imbalance of the arguments…in the direction that you have probably guessed from the above comments. I was confident for a long time that the “pro-choice” position had much better arguments than it does.

   — John 4 · Nov 9, 10:22 PM · #

2. I expect my views on abortion are identical in every respect to Conor’s but I have learned to notice the one clue that someone (someone like John 4, for example) has not weighed the issue as carefully as they claim to: the word ‘mother’ is completely absent from their argument.

   — Kevin Lawrence · Nov 9, 10:59 PM · #

3. “It is really hard to credibly deny that human life begins at conception” Sure, it’s hard to deny that human life begins at conception, but the real question is if your life started at conception. Did the person (not human) you are begin its life at conception? Do you really consider the loss of a zygote to be equivalent or even comparable to the death of 25 year old?

   I’m not explicitly making an argument here about the status of a zygote or a fetus, just trying to show that most people who say “human life starts at conception” and think there’s real moral significance to that fact haven’t really thought through what they’re saying.

   — McMahan · Nov 9, 11:12 PM · #

4. I didn’t present an argument. I have “learned to notice” that an opponent who cannot be bothered to differentiate a list of numbered questions from an argument is probably not really interested in the truth.

   In addition, I DID bring up the question of whether (and how) the rights of the fetus would be traded off the rights of the mother in (5), although I didn’t use the word ‘mother’. Again, if you’re not willing or unable to actually listen to your opponent, I find it difficult to believe that you’re arguing in earnest.

   — John 4 · Nov 9, 11:14 PM · #

5. “Sure, it’s hard to deny that human life begins at conception, but the real question is if your life started at conception.”

   Well, whose life would it be? A human life began at conception (you grant). When did it end? It didn’t, by any reasonable standard I can think of. (If it did end, what was the cause of death?) If it didn’t end, which human is it? Surely it’s me. But then I came into existence at conception. Is your thought that a genetic twin of mine came into existence at conception, and that I came into existence later? This seems pretty implausible.

   I don’t think that there are no responses to my position. But the most plausible ones involve denying that I am an animal belonging to the species homo sapiens sapiens. And I think that most people think they are such human animals, and that there aren’t arguments that would convince most people to reject this intuitive view. In other words, most people accept (and not just tentatively) claims that one can use to construct a logically valid argument for the conclusion that something with a right to life comes into existence at conception.

   — John 4 · Nov 9, 11:22 PM · #

6. John 4, the point your interlocutor is trying to make is that you’re conflating the life of a biological human organism——let’s say that begins at conception if you like——with moral personhood. The former is a biological taxonomic category of no intrinsic moral importance, though for obvious reasons we use it as a proxy for moral personhood in a wide variety of circumstances. But it’s just that: a proxy. I doubt people really have any strong intuitive view that moral personhood is directly a function of species membership; I tend to find that view wildly intuitively IMplausible myself. It would be a hell of a coincidence, at any rate.

   On a totally different note, Continetti is really one of this town’s great tragedies… He started out as a razor-sharp journalist who took great pride in being, above all, a reporter—not a member of any team. I don’t know what brought him around to the approach he takes now, but it always makes me a little sad when I think of the work he was doing circa 2005.

   — Julian Sanchez · Nov 10, 12:31 AM · #

7. The argument from personhood leads to uncomfortable places, since humans are squeezed out well before they gain personhood due to certain morphological and developmental constraints. And the literature taken as a whole suggests that personhood arrives kind of late in the game: if we can abort nonpersons, then infants are on the chopping block, and probably even toddlers and Chet.

   Fact: conception is a brighter line concept than personhood (though I’m not arguing for it). If elegance in solution was our north star, conception would be our answer.

   But there’s a lot more to it than elegance; the moral complexity is irreducible. No, in the end the ‘right answer’ will only be got by consensus or some kind of stable equilibrium.

   One problem: both pro- and anti-abortioners are making moral claims, but about different things. The latter characterize the act as evil, the former characterize the right (both positive and negative) as fundamental. The latter emphasize the mother, the former emphasize the potential life. They are both right, of course; therefore, they are both wrong.

   Okay, hotshot, what’s the answer? — you might ask. I’m not telling, and I don’t have to. After all, I’m Voltron’s Dick.

   — Voltron's Dick · Nov 10, 12:45 AM · #

8. “John 4, the point your interlocutor is trying to make is that you’re conflating the life of a biological human organism——let’s say that begins at conception if you like——with moral personhood.”

   Maybe. But many, many people do not believe this, and so I don’t assume automatically that people are using “human being” to mean person. In any case, Connor explicitly says “human life”, which seems less likely to be confused with “person” than “human being”. And McMahn writes, “Sure, it’s hard to deny that human life begins at conception, but the real question is if your life started at conception.”

   In any case, I do think that people believe in rights we have simply in virtue of being human. And I think that they would be unlikely to be convinced of the falsity of that view if they saw the arguments on both sides.

   In any case, one more example:

   “The latter emphasize the mother, the former emphasize the potential life.”

   It isn’t a potential life, it is a living member of the human species. And the reason I emphasize its rights isn’t a puzzle. If I want to know whether it is morally permissible for someone to destroy some thing, call it X, it is damn important to know whether X has a right not to be destroyed. Our rights end where others begin. Women can (plausibly) do whatever they want if there are no other persons involved. But if there is another person involved, then of course that person’s rights determine what kind of conduct toward it is morally permissible. That’s pretty much the definition of “right”.

   — John 4 · Nov 10, 02:03 AM · #

9. The right should wipe the slate clean and announce a rebirth of the Republican Party, develope a clear and inspirational platform of positions which address the 21st century need for a new type of government based on private realm solutions. There has to be a concerted effort to show how private education, charity and creative insurance arrangements can replace old and bloated social programs — plus the economic focus must be related to social concerns, so that it’s obvious only a prosperous nation can handle the social needs related to poverty, old age, health, unemployment, education, energy and environment and that it’s in the creative, innovative private realm that solutions lie, to first create a vibrant economy, then rebuild the safety net sans politics. It should be a challenge to society to re-create America, based on what we know about our successes and failures.

   — mike farmer · Nov 10, 02:10 AM · #

10. Well, right now, we have the first truly conservative, Oakeshottian president in history. So the first step would be for conservatives to relax, enjoy the fulfillment of all our dreams, and realize how great the moment is. Higher taxes, more government regulation, our brilliant negotiations with Iran, the widespread love for America in the Muslim world now that we have a dark-skinned president whose middle name is “Hussein”—it doesn’t get any better than this. The millennium is almost here.

    The second step would be to move forward with the true conservative program of using the fairness doctrine to silence the carpers on talk radio, enforce gay marriage, and eliminate the Christianists from all positions of power. At that point, conservatism rightly understood will have been fulfilled, and politics—especially the negative kind that criticizes Andrew’s and Conor’s leader—will no longer create divisions between men. Then finally we can move on the really important question: who is Trig’s mother?

    — y81 · Nov 10, 02:26 AM · #

11. Julian Sanchez asserts that John 4 is “conflating the life of a biological human organism with personhood.” The use of “conflating” begs the question, though. John 4’s question 4 asks whether “I am (identical to) a person,” and whether “I am a member of the human species.” As I understand it, the attempt is to bind the pro-choicer into arguing that “I am NOT (identical to) a person,” that personhood is an accidental feature of being human (and of being “I.”) When the pro-choicer is asked to conceptually seperate two things, it is not really adequate to say that the two things are being conflated.
    So if personhood is natural, but that the person comes into existence after the human (is seperate from mere “biological taxonomy,”) the pro-choicer ought to tell us what a person is and how (if at all) it is a different entity from the human. If personhood and rights are just a social construct, that raises a whole different set of questions.

    — Aaron · Nov 10, 05:31 AM · #

12. Julian is both right and wrong. He says, that the argument is “conflating the life of a biological human organism——let’s say that begins at conception if you like——with moral personhood.” That part is right, there is no question—scientifically speaking—that human life begins at conception.

    The question of when does moral personhood occur is indeed a separate question and one that is only raised about humans when we want to deny it (think: Jews, African Americans, children with Down Syndrome, etc.).

    He is wrong, though, to claim that moral personhood not directly a function of species membership. If it is not then that means there is some arbitrary function that we could use as a criteria. Since there is presumably no objective standard from which to decide, why should we think that people who denied it to other groups (see the list above) were wrong to do so?

    — Joe Carter · Nov 10, 05:54 AM · #

13. The sine qua non of moral personhood is cognitive self-reference. Unless one is prepared to argue that one may abort any being — animal, human, alien, whatever — whose machinery cannot support the massive performance cost of cognitive self-reference, then the argument from personhood is a DOA.

    The problem is multivalent, but one thing in particular sticks out about the argument from personhood. No set of premises is valid unless you can derive this particular conclusion: a day old baby is not OK-Abortion. As far as I can see that is a primary constraint — a nigh universal, intractable parameter of human thought, in fact — that limits the kinds of arguments you may use. If your argument allows you to kill a perfectly healthy infant, you might want rethink your premises.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Nov 10, 06:22 AM · #

14. KVS, you at least sound like you’re granting too much. You write, “The sine qua non of moral personhood is cognitive self-reference.” But do you mean the actual occurrent ability? So passed out drunk people are not moral persons? Anesthetized people, sleeping people, people in comas, etc? No – those are all moral persons. So it is really not the occurrent ability for self-refernence, but a non-occurent (i.e., long term) ability. And fetuses have that.

    — John 4 · Nov 10, 03:38 PM · #

15. John 4,

    Passed out drunk people have the machinery to support ‘it’, whether or not they are using it at the time. Newborn babies do not. So yeah, current ability, not necessarily current use.

    The argument from moral personhood has many flavors (believe me, I had to take an entire semester on this shit), but the weakest argument possible still depends on, as its threshold precondition, a current ability to perform cognitive self-reference. This is the case even when the actual arguer disdains the physicalist standpoint: unless they are idiots or mystics, even pie-in-the-sky philosophers must concede that, for all practical purposes, mental states appear to emerge wholly from neurological states. (Don’t trust anybody who tells you otherwise; they’re either stupid or selling something.)

    When you read through all the self-indulgent, masturbatory literature on moral personhood, the fundamental premise is a release from fixed action responses, a transcendence of id, the ‘logic of identity’ and so on. To be a moral person one must be able to conceive, at minimum, an ‘I’ that is apart and set against an ‘everything else’, a type of Fichtean ‘I’ on which all agency depends. Clearly, to get to that one must be able to perform cognitive self-reference, that is, self-reification, an ability to conceive of oneself as a given when choosing among alternative scenarios.

    Again, babies can’t do that. And, as a practical matter, any rationalization of abortion needs to expressly prohibit the murder of a perfectly healthy newborn. Call it a parameter of the system, a fact of life, a political reality or an a priori constraint on abortion justification. Whatever you call it, it is vital for an abortion advocate that his premises do not allow post-natal murder — if, that is, he wants his argument to do work in the real world. If not, then fine. Masturbate away.

    The argumentative arena with abortion is bounded by conception, on the one hand, and birth on the other. Therefore, any argument you take into the arena must be able to do its work within that space. Unfortunately for personhood, it does no work on the central questions of 1) conception vs. fetus vs. baby, 2) 1st vs. 2nd vs. 3rd trimesters, and 3) mother’s interests and rights vs. fetus’s interests and rights. So it is DOA and a distraction.

    — Kristoffer V. Sargent · Nov 10, 04:52 PM · #

16. Another way of eliciting our intuitions here is considering the possibility of either Chimpanzees (or any animals) somehow programmed or given some sort of therapy that gave them the cognitive capacity of an adult human. Would they be under the same morality as adult humans. What about intelligent aliens? What morality governs them? What about anencephalic infants who are born without the necessary physical structures for cognition. Do the anencephalic infants get treated under the morality for humans, whereas the superchimps and the aliens don’t? That view seems to have problems for it.

    Say what you will about using cognitive abilities of some sort as the mark of moral personhood, but I can see no justification for seeing genetic make up or biological taxa as morally significant. We reject the conflation of biology and morality when it comes to race, but seem to readily accept it when it comes to animals. The properties we use to morally distinguish beings must themselves have moral significance — and DNA most certainly does not.

    Also, even if this view would allow for infanticide in a very limited number of cases (remember, just because someone isn’t a person doesn’t mean they don’t have interests that deserve some respect), that does not necessarily justify or mandate a change in laws against it.

    — McMahan · Nov 11, 07:54 AM · #

17. 4a) “…politicians interfering in matters that would otherwise be left to doctors and patients.”

    I think this is where your assumptions are different from those of most progressives. Private insurance companies already come between doctor and patient as much as – I would argue more than – a public insurer. Since few of us can commit to paying for any and all future medical catastrophes with our own money, there will always be someone responsible for the collective pool of private or public money who demands a say in the decisions. I’d rather this person had one eye on the voters than one eye on the company’s profits.

    Ordinary people have very little recourse when their insurance company decides they can’t go to a midwife, or have to pay out-of-pocket for birth control pills, or that their policy is retroactively invalid because of a trivial omission on their original application. If Congress makes a decision we don’t like, we can try to change the law by voting or contacting our representatives. If the private sector makes the same decision, the best we can do is try to take our business elsewhere, to another giant, misanthropic company with almost exactly the same rules. Unless, of course, there’s no other company willing to offer us a policy, or our employer makes the decision for us…

    — Erik · Nov 11, 04:02 PM · #

18. “You’d think that as a result, the left would favor giving money to folks too poor to afford health care, so that they could spend it any way they wish.”

    Conor, first of all, subsidies for people to purchase their OWN coverage is exactly what this bill does. And the bill ALREADY restricted people from using those subsidies to purchase abortion coverage – instead, the bill required that abortion services within private plans use only private money. This is segregation of funds, which state Medicaid programs already use.

    The purpose of the Stupak Amendment is to prevent people from even INDIRECTLY purchasing abortion coverage. No PRIVATE plan within the insurance exchange can offer abortion coverage so long as anybody purchasing that plan uses public funds. In other words, it attempts to stop any indirect funding of abortion, on the grounds that because that plan is supported in part by public funds, it is subsidizing abortions.

    As has been pointed, taken to this logical extreme, even highway funding indirectly supports abortion, since women may have to take a highway to reach an abortion clinic.

    — Andrew · Nov 11, 05:48 PM · #

19. Mere species membership cannot be enough to grant human rights. A simple hypothetical establishes that.

    Imagine that a test showed conclusively that a fetus was developing in utero without a brain. The fetus would be expected to continue to develop, be born through normal labor, and die instantly upon birth. The mother desires to abort the fetus. I cannot imagine anyone would think it was morally wrong to abort the fetus. And if you want to heighten the moral obviousness hypothetical, imagine that the mother faces a severe health risk if she delivers the stillborn baby.

    This fetus is “human,” is species membership is sufficient, but nobody could seriously suggest that it would be wrong to abort the baby.

    Therefore, mere “species memberhsip” cannot be sufficient to grant a human right to birth, ie. a right not to be aborted.

    A human at conception is mere potential, it is the entity that it develops into that we want to protect with human rights. The distinction between a conceived zygote and all of the typical historical examples where human rights were denied that are trotted out (Jews in the holocaust, african slaves, down’s syndrome, etc.) is that in those examples the potential has been realized. I don’t think it is intuitively obvious, however, that we should protect unrealized potential (and a zygote is TOTALLY unrealized potential) with human rights. That is a difficult moral quandary.

    — Jason · Nov 11, 07:03 PM · #

20. <i>Well, whose life would it be? A human life began at conception (you grant).</i>

    John:

    Did an identical twin’s life begin at conception? If not, when did it begin? And that zygote that split into the two twins— was it one life or two? And if it was one, which twin’s life was it? Or was it a wholly separate human who was killed when the zygote split?

    The alternative to questions like that is to stop worrying about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and start worrying about how women will be harmed by abortion restrictions.

    — Dilan Esper · Nov 12, 12:08 AM · #

21. It seems to me that the basic disagreement between Friedersdorf and Hawkins is: Did Republicans spend so much when they were in charge because Power Corrupts, or because they weren’t really conservative? Or maybe a little of both. I would have said that a hefty chunk of Republicans are something like Huckabee or Bush – socially conservative but not very frugal, or big on national defense but not very frugal.

    The main thing now is that Tea Parties are coming from a very specific point of view. They may or may not be anti-abortion, they may or may not be in favor of troops to Afghanistan, but they want fiscal responsibility. They are angry about a liberal government spending the US into oblivion.

    I would suggest that the Republican party, and the conservative movement, needs to take this into account. Fight all you want in the primaries over social issues and foreign policy. But every Republican candidate must make a clear commitment to a balanced budget, period. And not by raising taxes on the middle class.

    — MikeR · Nov 12, 05:40 PM · #

22. “Imagine that a test showed conclusively that a fetus was developing in utero without a brain. The fetus would be expected to continue to develop, be born through normal labor, and die instantly upon birth. The mother desires to abort the fetus. I cannot imagine anyone would think it was morally wrong to abort the fetus.”

    I do think it is wrong. A human being is a human being, and human beings have a right to life. I don’t think this is a crazy position…if it IS, it’s sure funny that people assert it all the time. Your theory is that they’re not saying what they mean, and that only certain humans have a right to life. Which ones? I myself don’t like the flavor of that question.

    “Did an identical twin’s life begin at conception? If not, when did it begin? And that zygote that split into the two twins— was it one life or two? And if it was one, which twin’s life was it? Or was it a wholly separate human who was killed when the zygote split?”

    If you showed a video of these scenarios to any competent biologist – without letting them know that it was a human cell – the answers would be clear: the original zygote is one organism, it dies when it splits and two new organisms come into existence. Since I have the (evidently lunatic) view that human beings are biological organisms of the species homo sapiens sapiens, I think this biological answer is the correct one.

    “The alternative to questions like that is to stop worrying about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and start worrying about how women will be harmed by abortion restrictions.”

    Your idea is that since it is easy to see that we are limiting a woman’s rights by forbidding abortion, we should just bag the question of whether abortions violate other people’s rights? Is that what you think about banning sweat shops as well? Banning sweat shops certainly limits the rights of people to do what they want. And it is tricky so say how they violate other people’s rights – after all, in the relevant cases, the workers they employ are there voluntarily. So maybe we should stop fussing about whether there is some sense in which the workers aren’t being treated fairly and just focus on the abridgment of the rights of business owners that would occur if we ban sweat shop labor? (Mutatis mutandis with minimum wage laws.)

    “ a zygote is TOTALLY unrealized potential”

    I don’t know what you could mean. A zygote is a genetically distinct member – actual member – of our species. As such, I think it has basic human rights.

    “Say what you will about using cognitive abilities of some sort as the mark of moral personhood, but I can see no justification for seeing genetic make up or biological taxa as morally significant. We reject the conflation of biology and morality when it comes to race, but seem to readily accept it when it comes to animals. The properties we use to morally distinguish beings must themselves have moral significance — and DNA most certainly does not.”

    The claim isn’t that only humans are persons. The claim is that having a rational nature is what “gives” us a right to life. Super chimps and aliens have a rational nature, so they have a right to life as well. But fetuses have a rational nature as well – the actual facts are that a fetus has a radically different nature than a bird fetus or a fish fetus. (Immature birds and fish aren’t called fetuses, but you know what I mean.) The human fetus is HUMAN – it is the kind of thing that has the power of rationality, free choice, and moral responsibility. Likewise the bird fetus is avian – it is the kind of think that has the power of flight, feathers, etc. And likewise with the fish fetus.

    If you deny that having a rational nature is sufficient for having rights, then I want you to explain to me why a passed out drunk human has rights, or a human in a reversible coma. Neither is currently able to reason, so it seems like you must think that our rights supervene on some sort of capacity. But the fetus has the capacity for reason – you just have to wait if you want to see it exercised. But likewise with the passed out drunk human and the comatose human.

    — John 4 · Nov 12, 07:11 PM · #

23. <i>If you showed a video of these scenarios to any competent biologist – without letting them know that it was a human cell – the answers would be clear: the original zygote is one organism, it dies when it splits and two new organisms come into existence. Since I have the (evidently lunatic) view that human beings are biological organisms of the species homo sapiens sapiens, I think this biological answer is the correct one.</i>

    If this is correct, then under your ethical system, if a drug were invented that prevented embryos from splitting and twinning, women would be ethically obligated to take it to prevent the destruction of life 1 which creates life 2 and life 3.

    You are looking for too much simplicity in a complex world, John. And meanwhile, abortion restrictions are grievously harmful to women.

    — Dilan Esper · Nov 12, 07:58 PM · #

24. “You are looking for too much simplicity in a complex world, John. And meanwhile, abortion restrictions are grievously harmful to women.”

    You have an odd conception of what is grievous…if abortion restrictions are grievous, what word do you use to describe things like killing massive numbers of innocent human beings?

    “If this is correct, then under your ethical system, if a drug were invented that prevented embryos from splitting and twinning, women would be ethically obligated to take it to prevent the destruction of life 1 which creates life 2 and life 3.”

    If it were easy to take the drug, then I think women would be morally obligated to take it. What’s odd about this? We have a moral obligation to save lives if it doesn’t inconvenience us too much. Taking a pill doesn’t seem like a big inconvenience. Legal obligation is a different question.

    — John 4 · Nov 12, 08:26 PM · #

25. A human being is a human being, and human beings have a right to life.

    Under all conceivable circumstances? Can, for instance, this “right to life” be used to enjoin the death penalty and all military action that might carry a cost of human life? Do human beings have a right to life, for instance, when that life is being lived next door to a terrorist target in Pakistan? The position of our government, apparently, is that they do not.

    Further – does this right to life imply the right to tenancy within another human being’s body? If we’re going to talk about rights, that strikes me as relevant.

    Immature birds and fish aren’t called fetuses, but you know what I mean.

    Immature birds and fish are called fetuses; immature plants are called fetuses as well. (Eggs and seeds are support systems for the respective fetuses they contain.)

    — Chet · Nov 12, 09:33 PM · #

26. “Immature birds and fish are called fetuses; immature plants are called fetuses as well.”

    According to my dictionary, and a second one I checked after reading this comment, this is false. But it would be silly to debate about it.

    “Under all conceivable circumstances? Can, for instance, this “right to life” be used to enjoin the death penalty and all military action that might carry a cost of human life? Do human beings have a right to life, for instance, when that life is being lived next door to a terrorist target in Pakistan?”

    It is my view – a view with a great many able defenders, at least historically – that it is always wrong to intend the destruction of the life of a human being or any other person. Hence, the death penalty is immoral. There can be just killing in self defense and in war, as long as one’s intention is merely to stop an aggressor rather than kill them. (i.e., if one can stop them without killing them then you are morally required to do that.) The details of this view have been fairly well worked out under the heading ‘Just War Theory’, for example here.

    “Further – does this right to life imply the right to tenancy within another human being’s body?”

    Not in general, of course. But the mother and child aren’t strangers, and parents have vastly stronger obligations to their children than they do to strangers. In particular, we are all letting kids we don’t know die across the world by not donating to charity and spending money on luxuries. This is bad, but not nearly so bad as letting your own child die because you spend your money on luxuries.

    In any case, the right to life of a human can only be plausibly be trumped by a right of equal magnitude. (I don’t think it can ever be trumped, but even if it could…) Since the burden placed on a woman by pregnancy is in almost all circumstances incomparable to the burden of losing one’s life, “balancing” the rights of the child and mother is in almost all cases trivial.

    — John 4 · Nov 12, 10:24 PM · #

27. According to my dictionary, and a second one I checked after reading this comment, this is false. But it would be silly to debate about it.

    After checking with a few biologists I know who work in evo-devo, and thus work with fetal fish (zebrafish) and fetal chickens, I can confirm that they refer to these organisms in that stage as “fetuses.” I can find a great deal of published journal articles that feature the phrases “zebrafish fetus” and “chicken fetus”, as well. Fetus is a stage of development that all chordates undergo. It’s common among agronomists, as well, to note that seeds contain an embryonic/fetal plant.

    It’s not the common usage – we have words like “egg” and “seed” to refer to these organisms in that stage – but it’s a proper usage. But yeah I expect you wouldn’t find it in your dictionary.

    There can be just killing in self defense and in war, as long as one’s intention is merely to stop an aggressor rather than kill them.

    I feel like basically no military action could possibly meet this standard. Surely the military is not under the impression that there’s any reliably safe way to drop a bomb on a person? Or that there’s a way to safely shoot someone? That swords can be applied to the body without the expected result of death?

    I feel like everybody understands that the military is in the killing business. We prefer it when they kill certain people instead of others, but killing people, and threatening to kill people, is what they do.

    But the mother and child aren’t strangers

    They would seem to be exactly strangers, having never met. They don’t even know each other’s name! :D

    In any case, the right to life of a human can only be plausibly be trumped by a right of equal magnitude.

    I would say that the right of body sovereignty, the right not to have foreign living things take up residency inside you, is a right of equal magnitude. To me it’s exactly identical in scope and importance to the right to life. Indeed, it’s essentially the same right, as to have a foreign interloper inside your body is a substantial threat to your life (as evidenced by pregnancy being a leading cause of death for women of a certain age, worldwide.)

    “balancing” the rights of the child and mother is in almost all cases trivial.

    I find it trivial, as well – the needs of an actual human being outweigh the needs of one who is only potentially human. The need of a person not to have their body inhabited against their will trivially trumps the need of another to inhabit their body to live. Sucks for them, I guess, but at least they don’t possess the requisite mental machinery to be aware of what’s happening. The suffering caused by abortion to the fetus is essentially zero, and thus I don’t care about it nearly as much as I care about the substantial suffering caused by forced birth.

    — Chet · Nov 15, 09:09 AM · #

28. Chet, thanks for the reply. I’m not really going to respond to the just war stuff, since info on it is pretty easily available and I don’t have anything new to add. But yeah, it would mean pretty radically rethinking acceptable military strategies. (This seems like a good thing to me.) In any case, I feel like we’re making progress toward mutual understanding if not agreement, but I do have a couple of responses to what you last said.

    “I find it trivial, as well – the needs of an actual human being outweigh the needs of one who is only potentially human.”

    The fetus is fully human – it is an actual member of our species. (I linked to something discussing the relevant science above.) It’s debatable whether it’s a person (thing with serious rights) – you and many others do not think that all members of our species are persons. I demur. I can see why you take your position – I agree that one wants to tie personhood to rationality in some way. I just think that the only plausible way to do it is by identifying persons as things with rational natures, which fetuses have. (For reasons spelled out above.) And hence I think that all members of our species are persons. Even if you don’t agree with this, I hope you can see that it isn’t a crazy position.

    “I would say that the right of body sovereignty, the right not to have foreign living things take up residency inside you, is a right of equal magnitude. To me it’s exactly identical in scope and importance to the right to life.”

    I don’t agree about this equivalence, but I’ll grant it for the sake of argument. What follows? I don’t think it follows that society should condone abortion. If two “equal” rights come into conflict one important factor in determining a just outcome is to look at the ways in which individuals can and cannot be reimbursed for the infringement of their rights. Killing the fetus is final and total: there is no way to “make up for it”. But there are ways to “make up” the loss to the mother. (Compare getting $20K stolen from you and someone killing you.) Hence, from a societal standpoint, if we want to address this conflict of rights we should simply reimburse the mother but let the fetus live. (This kind of reasoning is what supposedly justifies eminent domain seizures, etc.)

    Now, I take it that you really don’t think the fetus does have a right to life. But it looked like you thought that if it did that would not matter since the mother’s rights would trump the fetuses. And that is what I am here contesting. (And, just to be clear, in doing so I have granted you more than what I actually believe. I’m only making this explicit since if this goes on I don’t want to be accused of waffling.)

    Hope your weekend is going well, John.

    — John 4 · Nov 15, 07:25 PM · #

29. But there are ways to “make up” the loss to the mother.

    I don’t think that there are. (And, no offense, but I notice that abortion opponents have put absolutely no effort into doing so.)

    Look, I appreciate that your arguments are cogent, and I appreciate that you’ve not called me a “baby-killer”. So already we’re having probably the best discussion on this subject I’ve ever had.

    But your arguments simply don’t seem to disabuse me of the really basic and, to me, self-evident moral intuition that abortion is nowhere near as bad as forced birth. (I hope you’ll grant me that term, I don’t know what else to call it when a woman who wants an abortion, who wants to not give birth, is prevented from having that abortion.)

    If you’ll permit me I’ll even “prime the intuition pump” (to borrow a phrase from Dan Dennett) with a hypothetical situation calculated to lean most heavily in your favor: the most entitled, irresponsible sort of “abortion as birth control” young woman seeks an abortion because she’d rather spend the money on Twilight books and new clothes. But, the fetus she’s pregnant with will one day develop the cure for cancer.

    Even in this situation, which to me seems among the least justifiable abortions I could conceive of, my natural moral intuition is that the outcome of her getting the abortion merits at best an eyeroll, but the outcome where we – as a society in which I’m a part – force her to gestate and give birth is monstrous. It’s, like, Nazi medical experiment monstrous. Stomach-turning.

    I can’t shake that intuition, and believe me, I tried all night last night to see if I could feel it from your perspective. And I just can’t. My natural moral apparatus refuses to see abortion as anything but a net good when a woman has an unwanted pregnancy. But I appreciate it that the exact opposite must be true for you.

    Have a better weekend than I did – don’t go see 2012.

    — Chet · Nov 15, 11:35 PM · #

30. Argh…I long reply was just eaten by the system. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to write another one soon. Cheerio…J

    — John 4 · Nov 17, 05:07 PM · #

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