The Ethics of Abortion - Dr. Christopher Kaczor vs. Benjamin Watkins
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The purpose of Intellectual Conservatism is to defend the true, good and beautiful things of life that are jeopardized in mainstream academia and society. On this page, you will find artwork, music, satire, academic papers, lectures and my own projects defending the duty of conserving these true, good and beautiful things.
When you claim that infanticide is "morally permissible", you have lost your case. A suffering innocent human is still a Valuable human life worth to be respected. Murdering someone because he's suffering, isn't permissible, because assumes, human is not valuable, except if he is not suffering.
But that's the problem with the pro-abortion movement these days, atleast with the academic types. Instead of admitting that infanticide renders their position absurd, they just choose to justify both abortion and infanticide.
At one point, Ben said he didn't want to get into metaethics for this discussion, but it seems to me that in metaethics lies the real disagreement. I would especially like to hear Ben interact with an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher, like Edward Feser, about his view of the self. It seems to me that the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the self is the only view that can produce an objective answer to Ben's question about what is the self and how it can persist through time. In answering this question (in speaking of essentialism, viz. substatial form) will produce the consequent ideas of teleology and all the moral rights and duties that arise for human beings from the moment of conception. I fully realize Ben would take many issues with this Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical view of the world, but again, in here is where the best answers are to the metaphysical questions that Ben's intuition have lead him to ask and from what I have heard from Ben before, he likely has many gaps in knowledge in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.
@Twenty Faces Ben said over and over he thought the debate came down to over what personhood means. The Aristotelian-Thomistic framework, with form and matter, essences, and teleology, gives us a thorough and complete account of what the person is and from these principles derive our rights and duties. This type of metaphysical system completely sidesteps the is/ought problem that Ben also brought up over and again.
Ben's account of what a person is seems very fuzzy and ad hoc in that people can continue to disagree about what the inputs are that make up his set of qualifications for personhood.
I have seen Ben interact somewhat with Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy before, such as his debate with Fr. Gregory Pine (which he did very well in that debate, by the way). I think some of his objections he raised here about the is/ought problem and the question over how a person can persist through time can be best answered under the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical framework. If the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of the world is correct, then all the arguments for the pro-life position are just logical out-workings of the bigger metaphysical project. I would love to hear Ben interact with someone who is well versed in a Thomistic account the person to see how he would react to hearing a system that answers what seem to be some of his deepest metaphysical questions.
Ben seems like a very intelligent guy. I would very much like to hear how Ben would deal with these meta-ethical discussions and if he disagrees, I would very much like to hear why. Once one grasps the key areas of Aristotelian-Thomistic project, you can see how powerful the system is. It is the most robust ethical system I have ever heard and I have yet to see any moral question that causes any problems for the entire ethical system or larger metaphysical project.
@@Stormlight1234 I agree with you, the is/ought distinction isn't an issue for the AT philosopher because ethics is interwoven into the physical world via the essential nature of human beings. The issue is that arguing any contemporary issue through an AT lense is incredibly difficult because all your arguments are system dependent and your interlocutor no doubt will deny the AT system, usually opting for some sort of vague humanism or scientific materialism laced with a shallow teleology.
We really need a paradigm shift and a distancing from some of the Lockean ethical presumptions the West holds.
Just one of many reasons I think Thomistic metaphysics is the best view of metaphysics.
I think Ben Watkins gets his views from moral philosophers such as Jeff McMahan and other pro-choice philosophers who appeal to psychological accounts of personhood
"We cannot today just assume that our readers will accept that infanticide is beyond the pale. Some readers will admit that we have shown that abortion and infanticide are morally the same, but opt to permit both rather than prohibit both." - David B. Hershenov (in "If Abortion, then Infanticide").
It's not uncommon for abortion defenders to defend infanticide as well. Abortion is justifiable only by denying basic moral assumptions and by means of bizarre mental gymnastics.
Dr. Kaczor is to be applauded for his thoughtful patience in this discussion.
Lost a great amount of respect for Ben. Infanticide? Disgusting
His arguments were incoherent and confusing.
@@leonardu6094 Really? I am a pro-life bioethics student and I thought his arguments were fairly straight forward and noncontroversial. The difference mainly comes down to personhood. Ben's disadvantage is that he is the only one actually subject to the term of moral philosophy. What they didn't discuss which is so relevant is the concept of negative responsibility. Ben could easily claim in that framework that allowing a fetus with spina bifida to come to term would be immoral because you could have stopped it. Instead you allowed the baby to be born and experience tremendous suffering with no chance of survival. Another point that he could have challenged Dr. Kaczor with would be if he is supportive of certain intention-based abortive practices (saving the life of the mother in uterine cancer or saving the other baby in the twin example), why would reframing any abortive practice in this way be different? For example, terminating a pregnancy vs. terminating a baby. Like end-of-life issues, the intention may not be to end the life, but simply to end the treatment or in this case, the pregnancy. If the goal is to end the pregnancy, can't the death of the fetus be an unfortunate side effect like Dr. Kaczor says? This came down to Dr. Kaczor be unwilling to interact with personhood and reject the concept altogether which is interesting and Ben not even responding to the majority of Dr. Kaczor's first points. It was a thought-provoking discussion but Ben's arguments, although I disagree with the main points were not at all incoherent or confusing. In fact, I think he very helpfully presented the issue without making false claims or misrepresenting the other side. I was especially appreciative that he conceded that the characteristic pro-life position needs to come to terms with forcing women to carry babies to term in the case of rape / disallow women's sexual autonomy and freedom and the characteristic pro-choice position must come to terms with infanticide.
@@tannerwhetzel My issue was Ben didn't really want to define what a person is even though he kept claiming it was the center of discussion. Just put forth a definition and be done with it. The closest he got was "here are some schools of thought of personhood" but never committed to any of them. (Although I could be be wrong it was a 2 hour debate). Interestingly he put forth the violist experiment as a way to say personhood wouldn't matter *even though he claim multiple times personhood was center of the discussion.* Like wtf? Does personhood matter or not?
The doctor essentially thinks all humans qualify as persons. I'm not sure if he said so specifically in this debate (again 2 hours) but I believe that is his position (or something to that affect)
@@tripkings547 , Ben needed to restate the purpose several times to correct Dr Kacsor on why the violinist thought experiment is relevant. It wasn't to display that personhood is irrelevant like you say, the purpose is to display that the right to life may sometimes be in competition with other rights, for example, your right to connote using your kidneys at your will and without medical restriction. Personhood is absolutely at the center of the discussion and I was very appreciative of his categorical overview of those schools of thought. Dr. Kascor evaded the question when pressed on this issue of personhood several times, which was disappointing. He first said it overcomplicates the situation which is irrelevant. Dr. Kascor's failure to interact with personhood as a pertinent topic is characteristic of his view ad for him to claim it is irrelevant is unfortunate given he is representing the pro-life position. Dr. Kascor certainly insinuates that if he were further pressed on the personhood issue, he would equate it with human existence.
@@tannerwhetzel A main goal of the violinist thought experiment is to show how personhood would not matter in a pregnancy/abortion situation. If Ben claims personhood is the deciding factor yet claims to have an argument/analogy that would *still justify abortion regardless of personhood* I don't see how you think these ideas don't run counter to eachother.
If Kascor ran around Bens question of personhood it's because Ben himself won't give an answer. And if Ben actually challenged Kascors apparent so-called avoidance of the personhood question, Ben would be a hypocrite. Kascors argument had nothing to do with pro-aborts idea of personhood, and for good reason. It's a term used by the pro-abortion side simply to muddy the waters of discussion. Which is why they don't define it because they need to present abortion as morally grey. The issue is if they are actually put into a situation where they are asked to define it then they quickly realize the deeply immoral implications of have a personhood definition that also justifies abortion would also justify infanticide. So Ben himself runs around the personhood question by claiming it's mostly opinionated. And if Ben had voiced his corncern that Kascor didn't answer it, again he'd be a hypocrite. That is whole reason why Thomas made violinist thoughts experiment in the first place. So pro-abortion doesn't have to define personhood, (at least that's the attempt of violinist experiment) Ben can't commit to personhood idea. He merely brings it up again to muddy the waters.
1:09:28 personhood
1:22:07 "evil people can put innocent people in situations where they are forced to choose between two choices: either be morally evil or morally heroic."
1:40:00 bookmark
Kaczor dismal of specism is not convincing. Why is there a moral difference between eating a hamburger and harlodburger? Perhaps there is but there is no reason to assume
He is appealing to moral intuitions (most people indeed do believe there’s a moral difference between eating a cow and eating a cognitively impaired human) and virtually all ethicists believe that intuitions have at least some presumptive authority. Climenhaga (2018) explains that intuitions are treated as evidence in moral philosophy.
In fact, the most powerful pro-choice arguments are direct appeals to intuitions (the violinist analogy is successful insofar people share the judgement/intuition that it’s wrong for the state to force the subject to remain connected to the violinist).
So skepticism about intuitions in general, damages both the pro-life and pro-choice positions and benefits nobody on either side of the debate.
Yeah, you could always call into question the reliability of this *specific* intuition that Kaczor appeals to (by employing a ‘debunking’ argument or something)... But simply refusing his contention because he appeals to one, is wrongheaded.
@@greeenwaters9125 most people's moral intuitions historically was that infanticide was cool. Most peoples intuitions 300 years ago was that black people were dumber than white. Moreover, the answer in violnjst argument is relying on our moral intuitions produced by western ideas of bodily autonomy, not a universal moral standard. It's very much plausible then that say people in uncontacted tribes who have had no exposure to western philosophy would think that it is intuitive to stay plugged in. So no I don't care about moral intuitions and no it doesn't have authority for me
At around 1:02:00, Ben Watkins states that a person in a persistent vegetative state is a corpse. This is medically false, and I don't know any doctors who would say that someone is a corpse at that point. And considering that people have rarely come out of a PVS, this idea would mean that people have returned from the dead, a position which I don't think Ben would want to affirm, as an atheist.
Thanks for that quick clarification.
@@onlygettinbetter You're welcome. I specialize in bioethics (though I'm not a philosopher), and end of life issues is one of those issues that requires a lot of understanding of nuance and yet people just don't have this nuanced understanding.
Ben absolutely failed.
Thank you for this interesting discussion. Here are a few remarks from my point of view. (Sorry for my English. I am from Germany and not a native speaker)
I think Christopher Kaczor gave good arguments in favour of the Pro-Life view and did well in pressing Ben on the question of infanticide. But I think he was too vague concerning questions about personhood. In my opinion it is not satisfying to rest the Pro-Life case on some form of speciesism. I think there is no doubt that species is relevant concerning many moral questions. But the important question - at least in my opinion - is why it is relevant. For example why is it immoral to have (consensual) sexual intercourse with a dog but may be not with a Vulcan, Klingon or some other imaginary or maybe real alien species? Why is it licit to kill a dog but not a Vulcan or a Klingon? It seems to me there has to be an interspecies fact of (biologic) organisms which ground their having basic protective rights. I think this is best explained by the substance or endowment view and although Kaczor clearly knows of this view it is interesting that he did not put in on the table. Here is how I would summarize it:
On this view, being a person is constituted by a specific disposition or endowment and thus by a specific active intrinsic potential. Fundamental to this view is that every potential must always belong to a substance or being with a specific nature. Furthermore, substances, including the human organism, are basically ontologically prior to their constituents. An organism as a whole therefore maintains absolute identity over time as it grows, develops and undergoes numerous changes in its parts. These changes are in turn largely determined by the nature of the organism, which directs these changes and also determines their limits.
The statement "Humans have five fingers on each hand" is obviously true, for example, in relation to the genus human as a whole. However, this statement can neither be adequately described with the existential quantifier and the statement "There is at least one human being who has five fingers". Nor can this fact be adequately described with the universal quantifier and the statement "All humans have five fingers". A human being with four fingers is no less a human being - not least because we recognize just this as a deviation or aberration with respect to the belonging to the genus human. Therefore, living beings can only be described in this form with a so-called "Aristotelian categorical".
Organisms can thus lose and gain parts and still remain identical with themselves. The organs or the parts of the organism fulfil their purpose and function by being oriented towards the maintenance and perfection of the being as a whole and thus promote its development and wellbeing. Every human being thus remains identical with himself as long as he exists. This is true even if he does not currently possess all the appropriate qualities and abilities, or is unable to immediately carry out those activities that we normally attribute to adult and healthy rational moral subjects.
Thus, according to this conception, no non-rational being can ever develop rational abilities without undergoing a substantial change. Rather, a rational being, as long as it develops and matures, begins to exercise these abilities at some point in its life, precisely because they have always been latently present in its nature. To say that a certain substance has a potential to evolve in some way does not therefore mean to make a prediction about the future, but an assertion about the nature of that entity at the moment. Saying that a zygote is "potentially rational" therefore does not mean that a human being becomes a rational being and thus a person when he starts to exert these powers, but instead that his (latent) personal rational nature will (probably, but not necessarily) unfold and become realized when he develops into an adult human being.
Therefore, on the substance view, the universal and inalienable dignity and the right to life of a (biologic) homeostatic organism is constituted by the fact that it belongs to a species or genus whose healthy members by virtue of their nature are predisposed to develop, under conditions conducive to life, rational and moral capacities that are inherently present, and that the exercise of these capacities, such as rational, abstract, self-reflective and moral thinking as well as rational action which is based on it, contributes to the perfection of the individual and collective existence of these beings. This view is thus based on the thesis that every human being (born and unborn) actually (and not only potentially) possesses a rational and moral nature and, as such, deserves basic respect and protection as a rational and moral being.
Furthermore, the species- or genus-specific predisposition to the development of these inherent abilities is a binary or non-scalar good, which thus applies equally to all human organisms regardless of their stage of development and their actually existing abilities. Therefore, if life is taken from a human being, no matter in which stage of development, the individual intrinsic damage in every situation is the loss of the same good and it is this universal and fundamental good of human existence, which is protected by the right to life and which makes the killing of a human being inadmissible and thus an injustice.
Concerning the argument from bodily autonomy I think there are very strong objections to the arguments of Thomson and Boonin and by applying the principle of double effect, at least in my opinion, it becomes clear that and why it is even impermissible to disconnect from the violinist. Christopher Kaczor said that he is agnostic about the permissibility to disconnect from the violinist so it would be interesting to know what he thinks of the following argument.
First consider the following thought experiment, whose basic idea I owe to Francis Beckwith: Imagine, for example, that two girls, Lara and Lea, develop as conjoined twins, only in the body of Lea kidneys are formed and Lara's body does not accept a donated kidney. Lara is therefore dependent for her survival on the connection to Lea's body and, in contrast to Lea, would not survive a potentially possible separation. In this scenario we are therefore even faced with the extreme case described by Thomson, in which the connection between two people must be maintained for a lifetime. Suppose that through the connection between the two bodies, the girls suffer for a few months every few years from physical and psychological problems comparable to a pregnancy, in addition to the otherwise already stressful situation, until about the age of 40. Lara is a fighter and has come to terms with the situation, not least for lack of alternatives. However, Lea, who has all the vital organs in her body, does not want to accept this situation any longer. In this case, does Lea have the right to demand separation, even if it means her sister Lara's death? According to the argument of Thomson and Boonin, this would have to be affirmed in my understanding.
(P1): Every person has a right to life.
(P2): Conjoined twins are persons.
(C1): All conjoined twins have a right to life.
(P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity.
(P4): Lara has no legal claim to the use or even sustained use of the body or organs of Lea.
(C2): The right to life of Lara does not include the legal right to use or even continuous use of the body or organs of Lea.
(P6): The separation of Lara and Lea, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the body or organs of Lea, does not violate the right to life of Lara.
(C3): The separation of Lara and Lea, and thus the fatal deprivation of the use of the body of Lea, should not be prohibited by law.
We can also further modify this thought experiment to make it even more similar to the situation of a pregnancy. Let us assume that medical progress will at some point make it possible to extract stem cells from Lara's bone marrow, modify them and mature functioning kidneys for Lara within nine months. After that, a separation could take place in which both women could survive and then lead an independent life. However, this procedure and the subsequent operation are extremely time-consuming and associated with a significantly longer recovery time. Due to the current high psychological and physical strain Lara does not want to postpone the operation any longer and insists on an immediate separation. If Thomson, Boonin and their comrades-in-arms want to defend a right to abortion with the principles they have laid down, they would, in my opinion, not only in the previous situation but also in this one, have to agree unconditionally to the demand for immediate separation and even direct killing if separation is otherwise impossible (at least according to Boonin). If this conclusion is unacceptable then it seems to me there must be something fundamentally wrong with Thomson´s and Boonin´s argument.
What makes Thomson's argument seem so convincing to many people at first glance is, in my opinion, on the one hand the constructed apparent proximity to the situation of organ failure, where there is generally a justified conviction that one has no obligation to donate an organ, but on the other hand also the "distribution of roles". Imagine, for example, that you and the violinist wake up after nine months and you are told that the violinist is now cured, but that you will die if he does not stay with you for another nine months until you too have recovered. Does the violinist, who himself is obviously not responsible for the fact that you are connected with him, now have the right to separate from you? From this perspective, things suddenly look different for many people and intuition changes accordingly. Of course, I don't know what considerations led Thomson to this construction. But the argument seems to me to be as suggestively brilliant as it is perfidious.
It seems to me it is correct that the violinist has no positive right to use or even sustained use of your kidneys. You are therefore not obliged to make yourself available to the violinist as a living dialysis machine or to donate a kidney (you may even defend yourself and resist being plugged into him). It would be very kind of you if you would do so. Not doing so, however, is not a culpable omission. However, if - for whatever reason - a connection to the violinist already exists and the separation requires an action on your part or on the part of a third party which, under the given circumstances, causes the death of the violinist, then this can only be justified according to the principle of double effect without violating the negative right to life, if your own life is at stake by maintaining the connection (e.g. if your own body is poisoned by this and is damaged in such a way that you die in the end) and the separation does not involve a direct intended killing action.
Contrary to Boonin's argumentation, the refusal to donate an organ or bone marrow is thus ethically fundamentally different from the act of separation, which actually leads to death or other serious damage to the violinist's health. It seems it does not matter whether a natural or third-party event causing death was already present before your involvement, since in both situations it is now your action or that of third parties that causes the violinist's death. Therefore, in the case of the violinist at least condition four of DDE (there must be a proportionate reason to allow the bad effect) is violated and if we look at the case of abortion condition two (the good effect must not be achieved or caused by the bad effect.) and three (only the good effect may be intended) of DDE are always violated. Therefore, under the condition that the unborn human being is a person, abortion is never morally and legally permissible. This reasoning can thus be summed up by the following argument:
(P1): Every person has a right to life.
(P2): Unborn human beings are persons.
(C1): All unborn human beings have a right to life.
(P3): Every person has the right to bodily autonomy and integrity.
(P4): An unborn human being has no legal claim to the use of the woman's body or organs (granted for the sake of argument).
(C2): The right to life of an unborn human being does not include the legal claim to the use or even sustained use of the woman's body or organs (granted for the sake of argument by P4).
(P5) An act by which an innocent or incapacitated person is intentionally - i.e. either as a means to an end or as an end in itself - directly or indirectly killed, is without exception morally wrong and inadmissible. An act by which the death of an innocent person is caused unintentionally and indirectly can only be permissible if the criterion of proportionality is fulfilled (e. g. one's own life is at stake).
(P6): An abortion is an act by which an an innocent or incapacitated unborn human being is intentionally directly or indirectly killed, i.e. by a direct attack or the lethal deprivation of the use of the woman's body.
(C3): An abortion is, without exception, morally wrong and inadmissible.
I have some counterarguments.
Your points on speciesism only scratches the surface. We shouldn't be classifying life based on species, but rather their mental capabilities. This is why I divide life into three kinds: non-sentient, sentient, and rational. This way, we wouldn't be nitpicking what rights certain life has based on species. If aliens exist, then we would treat based on their possession of sentience and rationality. In fact, the term human life is very vague. Our organs are human life, but they don't have any rights because they don't possess sentience.
A mistake in your argument is that sentience and rationality are not based on conception, but rather on the development of the brain. We first gain sentience after a certain amount, and then we gain rationality after a long amount of time. Yes a zygote in the womb naturally gains sentience over time. However, if we fertilize an egg outside the body without placing it back in the mother's womb, it would never gain sentience since it can survive at most a few days if preserved properly.
The highest lifeform that we know of (rational) evolves from non-sentient (sperm and egg, zygote) to sentient (fetus, neonate) to rational (child, teen, adult). If a zygote has rights, then either one of these must be true
1. the sperm and/or egg has rights and passes over to the zygote by transitive property (we can agree that this is false)
2. the sperm and egg has no rights, but gains something upon conception that gives it the right to life (therefore a "line" exists)
We can draw a line on when conception exists. Similarly, there exists a line on where sentience begins, but is still being discussed on and is way more complex then conception. However, we know that gamete cells and embryos (and earlier) are not sentient, while middle-late stage fetuses (and later) are sentient.
If A leads to B leads to C leads to an x amount of processes, then we can acknowledge that there is a line that separates A, B, C, and the rest of the processes. This is true for the development of a person from non-sentient to sentient to rational, for the seasons of the earth, for rational numbers, etc. Even if it is difficult, if not impossible to determine where the exact line is, we know that it occurs somewhere between two stages. For sentience, we know that it occurs between the embryo and middle-late stage fetus stage, so the early fetal stages becomes the gray area. For rational numbers, we know that the line between a negative number and zero is between -1 and 0, but we can never react the exact number just right before zero (-0.000...0001).
But let's say you are right. There are still some flaws with your argument. Here is a parallel situation of using your argument (a rational being, as long as it develops and matures, begins to exercise these abilities at some point in its life, precisely because it has been latently present in its nature) in another situation.
An old or extremely sick person, as long as it ages and decays, begins to show signs of death at some point in its life because death is inherently in our nature once we reach a specific stage. Should we treat old and sick people as dead following your logic of treating embryos as sentient because they would eventually exhibit those qualities? Or is there a specific line in that separates them?
Some people may argue that this is a different case because it involves decaying, not maturing. It's not a relevant point since the argument is "some quality Q (whether it be sentience, rationality or death) is latently present in our nature, and we begin to exhibit this quality as we develop", but fine let me use a better example.
Some children have the ability to experience romantic and sexual attraction. Can they have sex and marry people? After all, the desire to reproduce and form relationships is in our nature, and as long we develop and mature, would only exhibit those qualities more in life. We can agree that physical and mental maturity is needed to have sex and marry. Physical maturity is when we have achieved n% our growth (what that n% is is up to biologists). Mental maturity is more difficult to measure but it exists and is being debated by pscyhologists. This is why some countries have different age of consent. There is a line, which is even more complex than the sentience line, but we know that it is somewhere within the teenage/early adult years.
If you are treating zygotes as sentient, then it must be ok to treat dying people as dead or children as matured since they would eventually exhibit those qualities over time. And if you disagree with the sentience line, what NEW and UNIQUE arguments SPECIFIC TO ZYGOTES (and later stages) should it possess for it to have the same rights as a newborn baby? I believe that no sentient life should be killed for no reason or petty reasons like hunting or convenience. I also oppose harming of sentient beings for no reason. This applies to fetuses and most animals. You won't find any contradictions in my beliefs.
PS: For semantics sake, when you say rationality in your comment, I would call it sentience in mine because sentience is the minimum standard for something to have the right to life. Rationality is for other rights like bodily autonomy, property, or freedom, which animals and even fetuses don't have.
Kaczor is scary smart.
I'm just at the 1 hour and 14 minute-mark of the debate and Ben Watkins is saying that psychological connectedness/mental contents is what makes someone a person. I think he has to be clearer than that or else his view amounts to absurdity. Suppose I talked to someone who had a mental disorder in the past and has no memory of what he did before he was healed (he was healed today and the healing is just starting to take effect now). Let's say I remember all my past experiences and told them to this person. It seems to me that it is fine to say that my mental contents are now in that person and that his only mental contents are mine. Does that mean we are the same person? If I died now, does that mean he also dies?
Kaczor is great!
Watching this coming off the Trent Horn and Watkins debate in light of recent events popping up in the US - quite fascinating and illuminating to see people of different views willing to come together and make sure we get things right.
Ben in this debate was a masterclass in philosophical rigor, personal warmth and truly thinking things through from a multitude of perspectives. Kaczor emanated deep empathy and concern for the rights and wellbeing of others, a truly admirable trait. The debate was well moderated also - if you never knew anything about this channel, you'd be hard pressed to figure out where Sonna stood on this issue, and that contributed to the clarity of the dialogue.
And yet it's understandable that people in this comment section seem to be uneasy or unsettled about the debate - judging by the trouble that Kaczor had in to responding to a lot of Watkins' argumentation (especially toward the end), it very may well be one of their first exposures to the nuts and bolts of applied ethics, beyond superficial readings about comatose violinists or expanding children. Gut emotional reactions are *not* the be all and end all, natural facts or legislation alone just *aren't* sufficient to establish moral truth, and surface similarity is *not enough* to establish moral equivalence.
That's what makes uncomfortable thinking like "arbitrary" thought experiments questions and stretching these moral theories to their maximal consequences so crucial - it's hard work finding out the answers to these issues, and the vagueness and complexity of human being and personhood *only highlights* the importance of getting things right.
Benjamin Watkins makes me ill frankly.
ed.
He’s a smart guy
Popcorn is ready
Thanks for all these wonderful debates. Note: The Patreon, Podcast and other links aren't showing fully
I thought the sequence starting around 51:38 was devestating for the Pro-Choice justifications. That said, I am glad Ben provided context to what Dr. Kaczor outlined. Very cordial discussion throughout for both speakers!
You can sum up the entire conversation with the fact that Dr. Kaczor denied to acknowledge that personhood is even a relevant term. Ben spent his time trying to convince Dr. Kaczor that personhood was pertinent to the debate.
Does anybody else too think that when Ben talks it sounds almost as if his connection was freezing continuously? :)
44:39
If the question is between coming to terms with saying it's moral to kill infants and saying a woman who is raped cannot have an abortion, I think the clear choice is the pro-life position, the position that argues we ought to preserve human life. Rape is a horrible crime and any woman is raped needs proper counseling and sympathy, but saying it's permissible to kill infants is barbarity.
I’ve always wondered why people want to make it easier for female victims (who are probably not in the most rational state of mind) to destroy evidence of their being raped. Carrying the child to term makes it harder to hide the fact that a woman is raped, which could lead to more prosecutions and more counseling for women. The idea that women will only struggle with being raped for the duration of their pregnancy is ludicrous. It is something they will deal with their entire life. As such, we want to provide a framework in which they can get real help. The pro-life framework does that. The pro-choice framework does not.
That's a big straw man though, please note carefully what has been said. Ben agreed that is in principle permissible to kill an infant. Not "moral". In any real world scenario, an infant would be protected by the state and desired by adoption families. More importantly, the conflict of interests between the infant's life and its mother's bodily autonomy would be over by that time so killing it could in that case be judged wrong on other grounds not strictly pertaining to considerations of personhood.
@@naparzanieklawiatury4908 Permissible means moral.
@@clintonwilcox4690, I think it depends on what you mean by "permissible". At least from a legal point of view I think there are actions which are immoral but still permissible (like many forms of name calling) Apart from that I think it is indisputable that if infanticide is immoral because a newborn has the same serious right to life like you and me, it clearly should be impermissible.
@@jogo5660 it is a faith statement to say that it would necessarily be protected by the state. The state has sanctioned infanticide before. in fact infanticide was common prior to Christianity in many regions and is still common in some parts of the world today.
Ben's volume seems kinda low
Lol Ben Watkins went through some mental gymnastics in this debate and it really starts to show after the 1 hour mark.
He says "The right to continued existence" is something that only a person would have and he defines a person as someone who has a desire to continued existence. Very circular and question begging. His one good point in this entire 2 hour debate was almost at the end when he says "We can't answer the question on who has rights without appealing to personhood"