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
This is an incorrect phrasing of the situation. The actual question is what moral principles do we already accept? Which ones are more fundamental than others. Instead you are literally affirming the consequent by presupposing that bodily autonomy is morally relevant.(Otherwise,if that’s not what you are doing,your phraseology is just bizarre)
Laws force people to use their body regardless of how they feel about it. We agree that it is moral.
Prohibiting abortion is denying the ability to perform an action. We assert that this is immoral.
However, forcing an action is stronger than denying an action. So which premise is wrong? Is it the one that leads societal rules unenforceable, or the one that makes a quarter of the population temporarily unhappy?
There is also the extrinsic teleological argument that pregnancy isn’t a violation anymore than your pancreas producing insulin. A belief can be irrational if it contradicts a biological function.
“Would a fertilised egg be human”
As long as it is a separate entity that is living and functional with a probability of future conscious experience. Note, that I don’t make the unique DNA distinction because that would render killing clones permissible.
Now unlike some people I don’t think that all abortion is immoral, just one’s where we have a reasonable expectation of future human experience so long as we do not take action to reduce this expectation. Like how rendering someone brain-dead so you can kill them is just a more elaborate active killing , something like drinking alcohol to render your fetus brain dead is also active killing.
Why?
Do you consider a fertilized egg to have the same moral weight as a person?
Because denying an action is simply requiring that the existing circumstance continue, while forcing an action is to require that the person engage in a conscious action (to specify, it’s a stronger control over someone else’s body).
“Do you consider a fertilised egg to have the same moral weight as a person”
I already answered this more generally, fertilisation is not the revelant part it is that it is a distinct organism with a reasonable expectation of future conscious experience. Many fertilised eggs do meet this standard, but not all. Likewise fertilised eggs are not the only things that meet this standard. Things like pluripotent stem cells that are being created to form fetuses, also meet this standard.
(I strongly suspect that you are fishing for a specific response, which you find absurd despite ultimately accepting all the premises.)
I’m not. I thought you were pretty clear, but I wanted to check. I’m sort of exploring what you believe, rather than fishing for anything in particular.
So, in your view, if a building were burning, and inside was an artificial womb of some sort with twenty viable eggs that will eventually become people, then would there be a moral duty to save them over one five-year-old child?
Do you believe that it isn’t?
The “burning IVF clinic” is a poor instance of analogous reasoning. The reasons why one would save a 5-year old, are not fundamental moral principles but purely psychological. One would save friends or attractive people first as well, this does not grant them greater moral value.
Even if we don’t consider it to be purely emotional preference, the “triage” rebuttal can hold as well. I.e the fact that we choose a 5-year old is that their value is more immediately apparent, even if we have no reason to believe them to be more morally valuable.
“You don’t believe that it isn’t”
The problem here is that if you want to show that something is true, you can’t rely on premises being true that require the conclusion to be true. It just becomes a useless tautology that provided no additional information.
How do you identify when a moral rule is a fundamental principle versus a psychological preference?
In your view, is someone who saves twenty viable eggs over a five year old a more moral person than someone who does the reverse? (in some sort of ideal sense, regardless of whether anyone would do this or not)
I don’t think that I’m engaging in any circular reasoning. I’m not trying to argue that bodily autonomy is good- I’m making the base assumption that bodily autonomy is good and should be treated as a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of a lot of moral intuitions that I have. That’s not any more circular or arbitrary than any other moral principle.
EDIT: Also, I appreciate you getting back to me, and in case we don’t talk again until after the holidays, Merry Christmas!
“I’m making the base assumption”
Right, which is the problem… When you are trying to establish if something exists you don’t assume that it’s already true.
You have actually presented zero argument that bodily autonomy is a right, so we really have no basis for assuming it is. Even if you try to make personal rights arguments this can be refuted as a failed descriptivist argument. Are medical decisions being left to the individual due to a inherent right to bodily control, or the fact that people who are directly affected by a decision chose better outcomes? The bodily autonomy argument does not account for why we think it is good to deny people the ability to make poor medical decisions (i.e children, the mentally handicapped, ignorant people, or in the case of prescriptions anyone without sufficient knowledge). The latter argument does.
“A more moral person”
I think I already answered the question. Both individuals are acting morally by saving others, although saving more people is a better outcome.
“How do you determine when it’s a moral principle and a psychological preference”
This is a difficult question. Some cases are apparently obvious, like saving attractive people. In general the problem is searching for the answer that best satisfies our intuitions about morality and reasoning. The primary argument for when a feeling is insufficient, is if the basis for it is too complex. The purpose of a moral system is to provide a set of rules and methodology to determine if an action is morally good or not (otherwise we would just rely on spontaneous feelings, with all the problems of individualistic moral relativism), it does not make sense to rely on feelings about a morally complex action to override a more fundamental principle. At some point you have to say that your feelings about something are not morally relevant.
Where do rights come from, in your view?
Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life?
“Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life”
And just like that…the personhood argument. Remember what I said about every abortion argument boiling down to denying (or affirming) the moral value of a fetus?
Of course if I’m going to be rude, I’ll take your statement literally and point out that fetuses are categorically both humans AND existing life so your attempt at distinction fails.
Now what you probably mean is “why does an undeveloped human have the same right to life as a fully grown human”. It comes from a descriptivist argument of the wrongness of killing. If it is not permissible to kill adult people on the basis of future conscious experience, then this also applies to fetuses because they too have future conscious experiences.
Now the problem is showing that future conscious experience is the core reason for the wrongness of killing. It’s descriptively very powerful, it accounts for the permissibility of letting brain-dead individuals die (or even actively killing them), the impermissibility of killing temporarily unconscious persons, and the impermissibility of active killing of temporarily suicidal persons (the later problem is also fatal to Boonin’s cortical organisation argument, as it is not the current desires of an individual that we have a moral imperative to satisfy but rather an idealised person with desires considered rational. Boonin’s argument relies on fetuses not having desires to continue living, but this is simply special pleading; a person lacking desires would not permit them to be killed anyway because of the aforementioned idealised rational desires).
Now we have a moral principle that accounts for all of these clearly immoral acts. When we apply it to abortion, we find that it is also not permitted. So do we reject this principle in favor of all the other principles that allow abortion along with the other active killing that we agree is immoral?
Or do we consider that abortion is a complex decision that is clouded by personal preference, desire for convenience, and ignoring empirical facts in favor of prima facie evaluation? (i.e fetuses don’t look or act human, therefore they must not be, contrary to all deeper evaluation).
In other words, it seems highly plausible that our superficial feelings about abortion are NOT morally relevant, and the moral principle that does correctly describe the morality of other active killing is also correctly describing the morality of abortion as well.
Note that it is not necessary for the right to life of a fetus to be equal to an adults to make abortion immoral. It simply has to be sufficiently strong enough to prohibit in convenience cases. Just like how dogs don’t have to have the same moral value as humans to prohibit killing them for fun, it just needs to be sufficiently high to outweigh any moral value of the fun.
“Where do rights come from, in your view?”
I already addressed this when talking about determining moral principles. They come from our intuitions about what is wrong and what is logical reasoning.