Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
(2/2)
Conclusion
Your views are incoherent
I’ve assumed throughout, that a fertilized egg has the same sort of moral weight as a child or an adult human being, for simplicity. I don’t actually believe this, however. You apparently do. Why? Because an egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”? Pluripotent stem cells, as you said, also meet this standard. If that’s the case, so do skin cells, with the appropriate technology. Fertilized eggs, as you also said, don’t always meet this standard- I assume because 40% of fertilized eggs fail to implant. So if the only rule you have for what “counts” (has the moral weight of a person) is that it has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”, and you’re specifically excluding eggs that are fertilized but don’t implant, and including stem cells that we have artificially coaxed into fertilization, then why is an aborted egg considered a violation of your morality, but stem cells thrown in the trash aren’t?
There’s no dividing line between one and the other, except the word “reasonable” in your “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” definition. By which you mean “reasonable to me”. A fertilized egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” to you, right up until it fails to implant- and then it doesn’t anymore. A fertilized egg that implants has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” right up until an abortion- and then it’s murder.
The only differentiator here is your opinion.
You claim that rescuing fertilized eggs from a burning IVF clinic is morally equal to rescuing children from the same burning building, but when I imagine a world in which everyone acts on this claim, it’s absurd. You yourself wouldn’t behave in the way you’re describing, but would leave the eggs to burn in order to rescue a single child- no matter how many eggs there were. You claim, further, that this is because there is a difference between the psychological weight we place on people that look like us (children), and not on people who don’t (fertilized eggs), but when asked how one might go about differentiating between a psychological impulse and a “true” moral intuition, your answer is that an intuition isn’t a moral intuition “if the basis for it is too complex”, which feels a lot like saying “you’ll know it when you see it.”
You don’t consider bodily autonomy to be a fundamental right, despite it’s simplicity, despite probably sharing the same moral intuitions that I do in many of the scenarios that I’ve discussed above. If someone were surgically connected to you, should you be able to say “no”, whether it would kill them or not, whether it’s the heroic thing to do or not? If you were drowning, and someone were using you as a life preserver, should you have the right to push them away, whether or not they would drown, whether or not it would haunt you afterward?
You fail to see that your dismissal of bodily autonomy, when taken to it’s conclusion, leads to even more absurdity. If you don’t have the fundamental right to reject someone’s use of your body, what gives you the right to deny society access to your organs? If it would save dozens of living, breathing people, and you have no right to deny the use of your body, what fundamental principle do you invoke to avoid getting used for parts? A vague claim that “forcing an action is stronger than denying an action”?
Without a fundamental principle of bodily autonomy, you’re forced to patch together ad-hoc and weak explanations like this in which you weigh different “types” of actions, try to estimate harm, or appeal to societal consequences in order to justify your right to deny other people the organs they need to survive.
The only conclusion that I can draw from this discussion is that you started with the belief that life begins at conception and should be preserved at all costs, likely for religious or social reasons, and are working backward in order to justify those beliefs.
Thanks for the conversation
It’s been interesting.
I’ve learned a lot about what you believe and why you believe it, and it’s given me the opportunity to clarify and refine some of the things that I believe. I think that, regardless of whatever credentials you do or don’t have on this topic in real life, your views are contradictory and confusing- but I appreciate your willingness to put them out there for discussion. I think that I’ve gotten all the use out of the discussion that I can, however, so I’m going to end it here.
I imagine that you’ll want to do a closing rebuttal sort of thing. I won’t be replying to whatever you have to say, so, if you celebrate-
Merry Christmas!
“Your views are incoherent”
That’s often what happens when you fabricate positions. For asking so many questions, you really had no problem jumping to conclusions when it suited you.
My reason for saying that not all fertilised eggs have moral relevance, was NOT based on implantation, it was based on the very same criteria that pluripotent stem cells could have moral relevance. This is only tangentially related to the really egregious lie…
“Then why is your aborted egg immoral but discarded stem cells aren’t”
It isn’t. I already said that pluripotent stem cells ordered towards development of a grow person are morally relevant. You are flat out lying here.
I was even the person who brought this up explicitly to point out that the fixation on fertilised eggs by you (and most lay philosophers especially the pro-life ones) was flawed. Do you even remember what I said about it? I brought it up to account for a very specific edge case that I think the fertilised eggs argument fails on. I don’t think you remember or even understand what I said.
“By which you mean reasonable to me”
No, I mean reasonable as in very likely to. I would say over 50 percent provided we do not intervene in lowering it, but arguing over the specifics of the amount is not a debate I was interested in getting into, and you are clearly unequipped to do so.
“IVF clinic … I imagine a world”
Again, nobody cares what YOU imagine.
“You would also save the baby”
This is indeterminate, you can’t actually know what my actions would be.
I already gave an argument about why one’s actions in this circumstance would not be morally relevant, and you just ignored it without any reasoning besides “I think it would be crazy!”
And yet again, this argument is presupposing that the baby is morally relevant but the embryos are not.
“Bodily autonomy…despite it’s simplicity”
So you have no idea how moral systems are constructed.
The simplicity of a moral principle is not relevant. Saying “killing is good” is a very simple moral principle, that does not make it a strong or good principle.
The importance of complexity is in situations where we derive a moral principle. Not the actual complexity of the moral principle
We derive moral principles from simple situations to evaluate more complex situations.
All of these arguments that you insist are only solved by a right to bodily autonomy, are better accounted for by minimisation of harm. You seem to try to reject it as “trying to estimate harm” or “societal consequences” but you give no reason as to why these should be rejected. I gave a very good reason why bodily autonomy should be rejected as a description (because it fails to account for many circumstances, and better descriptions already exist for the circumstances it does account for) and you have flat out refused to rebut it.
FYI, the fact that it can be hard to estimate risk of total harm, does not mean that it is not the basis because there are obvious cases that are permitted with minimum risk and prohibited with high risk. In other words your arbitrary rejection likely relies on the continuum fallacy, but that is indeterminate because you never elaborated on why.
“The only conclusion…for religious or social reasons”
Yet again fabricating nonsense to make an argument (in this case poisoning the well).
For your information my pro-life position is relatively recent (probably about the past year) and comes from trying to reason about my positions and actions more formally (since I already studied formal logic as part of my coursework). I used to be pro-choice and over time I realized that it involved carving out exceptions that we have no basis for (aka special pleading). I would also like to add as a centre-left atheist, I do not in anyway benefit socially or religiously from my positions. Infact I’m largely equally enemies with my political and religious compatriots based on their reasoning for positions even if I agree with the conclusion.
While I think your argumentation is better than most people, you fundamentally didn’t understand many topics and arbitrarily rejected arguments without ever addressing the basis for them. All in all, it was a complete waste of a conversation/debate, but hopefully some other people will benefit from it.