You definitely moved my needle as a pro-life social conservative Christian. Maybe TMI, but it’s always nice to have context about the person commenting.
Saving human lives is not the main reason in the mind of the single-issue voter, even if they still don't know it. Why? Because abortion is eminently a matter of civil rights discrimination. Even if no abortions were being presently carried out, a principled citizen should not give support to those who want to perpetuate a legal system that protects not the life of an innocent victim, but the impunity of the one who intentionally takes it away. I would go even further: not voting for a pro-abortion candidate is not enough for a principled citizen. A principled citizen should actively raise their voice against any civil rights discrimination, including discrimination against the unborn. In a society ruled by perverse laws enacted by those whom the citizenry enabled with their vote, one must presume that silence is complicity. This was the moral force behind those in the abolitionist movement. For them, it wasn't enough that slavery was illegal in their state, or that they actively helped slaves to escape. The thorn in their conscience that spurred them into vocal opposition to an unjust law, and into single-issue voting, was the moral uneasiness caused by being citizens of a country whose laws not only allowed the aberration of slavery but actively protected the impunity of its perpetrators.
This is a fantastic treatment of body count reasoning and the embryo rescue case, thank you! As for the typical pro-life response to the embryo rescue case (emphasizing that there are good reasons to prioritize saving an already-born person over a number of embryos), I wonder how far one could take that. I could see using that reasoning to not only tolerate abortion, but to fully support broad abortion rights to allow for those cases where abortion prevents extreme suffering by already-born persons.
That thought experiment isn’t even a good one. The answer is that we don’t consider one or the other inhabitants of the burning building any *less* human, and so we don’t consider them any *less* valuable. In a case like that you try to save both, but if you cannot save both, you go for the one that is most likely to be a successful save. Now, of course, there are other factors which may, in the moment, emotionally sway you to one direction or the other. For example, if you can hear the developed child screaming, you may be inclined to save him. Or if the parents of that child are outside the building imploring you to save their child. The crucial thing though, is that neither choice should be considered “wrong”, because there is intrinsic human value within both buildings. In such a case, which is a forced emotional thought experiment, you make a split second decision, and pray to God you manage to save at least someone.
@@brando3342 I agree. The problem I have with this hypothetical situation is that it tries to use your instinctual human emotions to say that pro-lifer’s have a double standard if they try to save the boy. In such a hypothetical situation, one would be acting based on emotion and instinct rather than reason. Reason from a pro-life perspective would say that both the embryos and the boy have equal intrinsic value as human persons, however the immediate effects of rescuing the boy are more palpable, which is why in such a dire situation one might choose to rescue him.
Similarly, one could come up with a hypothetical situation where you have to choose between rescuing the boy and resucing an adult who you know is trapped behind a closed door. Since you can see the boy in the moment and hear him cry out, it is natural that you would instrinctually want to resuce the kid, even though the adult you cannot see at the moment has just as much value as a human being.
@@danter9934 "Reason from a pro-life perspective would say that both the embryos and the boy have equal intrinsic value as human persons, however the immediate effects of rescuing the boy are more palpable, which is why in such a dire situation one might choose to rescue him." Lucky for us, we now have the time to carefully plan who we would save if we were in that situation. Please take all the time you need and then let us know whether you think it's better to save the embryos or the child.
@@postpunkjustin As someone who believes that they both have the same intrinsic value, I would say that speaking on a purely logical level it would be better to save more human beings than just one. Therefore, if one assumes that the likelihood of success in saving the embryos is just as high as the likelihood of saving the boy, I believe that logically saving the embryos would save more human beings and would be the optimal choice.
This is assuming that the death of the embryos in the clinic fire is identical as a factor to the moral calculus of the death of embryos and fetuses in abortion. If one of the main reasons for saving the child in the fire is the factor of the suffering involved with the death, than that suffering also needs to be taken into account when it comes to abortions. The reason the clinic fire argument gains its strength is the confusion between killing and not killing vs not saving and saving, and because a child dying would be worse not due to the value of the life but the mode of the death. So I think one could consistently say saving a child from burning to death is better than saving 10 embryos from burning to death, while also saying that saving 1 million embryos and fetuses from needlessly being killed is more important than the tax rate, etc.
The hospital is on fire, you can save either: A) 1 fertilized egg B) a machine with 100 eggs and 100 sperms inside, that will automatically assemble the sperms and eggs if it doesn't burn
...Why is this a good objection? The one fertilized egg would be the only person in this scenario; if you're a religious person who believes life begins at conception, there isn't a dilemma here.
@@josephtnied I agree that if you believe a soul magically attaches to the egg when the sperm enters it and this is what gives it human rights, then this thought experiment isn't a dilemma, you just choose A. But many religious people think they can argue against abortion without appealing to that belief. However, the secular arguments they make for why a fertilized egg is valuable tend to also apply to the soon-to-be-fertilized egg, which commits them to choosing B.
@@warptens5652 Not really. They argue that, on scientific grounds, the fertilized egg is an individual human person because it has unique human DNA. The unfertilized eggs and the sperms don't have a unique human DNA so they wouldn't count as a unique person.
Consider these 2 possible worlds: 1) You save a 5yo child over the embryos. The embryos all die but the child lives. 5 years later we have one 10yo child. 2) You save the embryos over the 5yo child. Said child dies, but then the embryos all get actualized and grown into babies. 5 years later we have many 5yo children. Now imagine you could skip the actual difficult decision-making and instantly time-travel 5 years into the future, which world are you more likely to choose?-as in which one seems more preferable? So in one case you end up having more children saved than the other, namely when the embryos are saved. It may appear to be wrong to have not saved the child, but in hindsight it seems ok to have saved the embryos, and so this merely exposes a flaw in our intuitions, and how sometimes something may seem morally wrong in the moment but revealed to be morally right afterwards, and vice versa. In the same way you will virtually always instinctively value yourself above everyone else, but from this it doesn't follow that you indeed have more objective moral value than everyone else. Another thing is that this hypothetical, even if true, only tells us that we value being born over not being born yet, but not by how much. Intuitively we may feel the embryos could die, but also intuitively almost no one would support third-trimester abortion at 8-9 months when the baby is pretty much fully formed, as that also seems like we're killing a baby. So even if you just want to follow intuitions, this only lets you legalize abortion until maybe 20-24 weeks.
This is a typical utilitarianism dilemma that doesn't count for any value judgements. The petri dish potential of life still doesnt hold as high of a value as the 5 year old that is currently living because of how unreliable that prediction is. The option with higher probability will hold more moral weight. What if the boy you killed was going to be the scientist who cures all cancer? The answer is we don't know so we face the issue at hand without conjecture.
If we change it to a tray of micro machines about to release sperm into ova, does this still hold? Five years from now, we have many five year old children. Should we save unfertilized ova that are about to be fertilized? If we make it unfertilized ova that will be fertilized the next day if we save them, should we save those ova over the child? I'm not sure this line of thought undercuts the intuition to save the child.
This all or nothing approach to abortion is merely a function of the laws, court rulings, and cultural happenstance in the United States. In most of the developed world, people do not hold this position. Abortion is very easy obtain early in pregnancy and the conditions needed to qualify for an abortion increase and/or eventually become impossible as the pregnancy progresses. This aligns much more with natural intuitions. Either way, within the US the vast majority of abortions occur during this early period so the argument still addresses the body count argument.
I don't think a time travel hypothetical actually reveal the flaw in our moral intuition. Especially when you consider that it can give rise to some wild scenarios. Imagine if there was an innocent baby in front of you, and you have the option of either stabbing it to death, or not. Given a time travel 30 years later, you know that if you did not, there would be million and billions of additional human deaths - i.e. the baby would grow up to be a warmongering dictator! Would such a scenario reveal that our moral intuitions were flawed when we chose not to stab an innocent baby to death? Clearly not. The only thing time travel could reveal, might be that consequentialism isn't all morality is; and that time travel may reveal additional morally relevant information that isn't (and couldn't) be available at the time of decision making. Just like in the same way that one couldn't possibly know that some baby would become a warmongering dictator in the future, one also could not know that the 50 embyros would not all perish before they are born as they all fail to implant. Future knowledge is therefore additional morally significant information.
I think the reason that we ought to save the child over the embryos is not the higher moral value of born children over embryos per se, but the higher value of born children over frozen embryos. The vast majority of those embryos will end up discarded, and for those of us who also object to IVF itself, they could never morally be implanted. Thus, the act of allowing a frozen embryo to die and allowing an embryo in a mother’s womb to be aborted are not morally equivalent. I think a frozen embryo is morally equivalent to a patient in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery and who requires constant artificial life support. A better analogy would be, would you stop the murder of one 5 year old or 100 abortions? I think most pro-lifers would save the latter.
@@warptens5652 That would still be immoral by Catholic moral theology. The point is that there is no moral way to ever have those embryos fully grow to adulthood. The most moral thing would be to remove the artificial life support and baptize them before death. As a result there is no moral equivalence between a frozen embryo and an embryo in a mother’s womb. If you phrase the question as about embryos in mother’s wombs, most pro lifers will not concede anymore that they are less valuable than born children. It is like how an adult that needs artificial life support and has no hope of recovery would be of lower priority to save from a fire than a healthy adult.
@@thebyzantinescotist7081 The fire supplies a sauna with 100 women in the first trimester. If the sauna is allowed to continue, all 100 of those women will miscarry. They are indifferent to that (and will remain indifferent about it in retrospect too). Save the child or turn off the sauna?
Abortion is not an issue of numbers of human beings being saved or killed. Abortion is a legal matter about equality and the solution to conflicts between different human rights, it's the most urgent case of legally sanctioned civil rights discrimination against an entire group of human beings.
Saving human lives is not the main reason in the mind of the single-issue voter, even if they still don't know it. Why? Because abortion is eminently a matter of civil rights discrimination. Even if no abortions were being presently carried out, a principled citizen should not give support to those who want to perpetuate a legal system that protects not the life of an innocent victim, but the impunity of the one who intentionally takes it away. I would go even further: not voting for a pro-abortion candidate is not enough for a principled citizen. A principled citizen should actively raise their voice against any civil rights discrimination, including discrimination against the unborn. In a society ruled by perverse laws enacted by those whom the citizenry enabled with their vote, one must presume that silence is complicity. This was the moral force behind those in the abolitionist movement. For them, it wasn't enough that slavery was illegal in their state, or that they actively helped slaves to escape. The thorn in their conscience that spurred them into vocal opposition to an unjust law, and into single-issue voting, was the moral uneasiness caused by being citizens of a country whose laws not only allowed the aberration of slavery but actively protected the impunity of its perpetrators.
That is interesting. From my intuition, I would more likely save a child over an infant or adult. If the mother would have laid the fire with intention, the choice between the embryos and the child becomes harder for me. Does anybody feel similar?
Forget all the abortion talk for a second. I wanna know how hard it was for Joe to talk as slow as the rest of humanity for a video. Or if he juat slowed it down 25% for us before uploading.
what if you reject the apparent conclusion to the 100 embryos to 5 year old? I think if you just say 100 embryos are more value (and so would 2 by logical extension), wouldn't that negate the response? This remains consistent.
There is no stance-independent, non-circular, objective prescription for any entity to have any value, or do any duty. You can post-hoc rationalize any intuition you want, but I am not going to do that which is intolerable to my conscience. For me, I would not have wanted anyone to force my mother to have me against her own well-being.
The fertilization clinic example is preposterous: it compares the legal protection of the purposeful direct killing of an innocent human being with a failure to save them in a particularly stressful situation.
I would say this is because we are presuming the personhood of the embryo. Instead I think crux of the matter is determining when a fetus gains personhood. But that kind of question is subjective, so here we are. That being said, the best solution to the abortion issue, as many pro-choice agree, is to reduce the need for abortions in the first place via sex ed, maternity leave, and others I am not thinking of. Most women actually don't like to get abortions (many of them wanted to have children), and so they are usually forced to get it through unforeseen circumstances. I feel like most people forget that the woman may not even enjoy abortion, and it is not a convience thing, but rather something done out of necessity.
My challenge to premise 1 is that classifying embryos as people isn't sufficient for establishing that animals in factory farming ought not to be classified as people. One would have to deep dive into the specific arguments in favour of classifying embryos as people in order to determine whether conscious animals ought to be outside the reach of that classification
@iwersonsch5131 Fuck it, let's take the pro-choice route and work to develop immaculate birth control to avoid pregnancy to begin with, then celebrate that we simultaneously ended animal ag by giving animals rights like they deserve. On a serious note, that's definitely an interesting angle to throw at them. An embryo is by far less human than any animal in a farm in the areas that matter. All the areas that helped us decide humans should have rights, apply more to animals than they do to embryos is another way of saying that to help with clarity.
do you, really? because this has implications like, if a child dies and the parent could have avoided it by behaving differently, it's usually considered a crime so it seems you would be commited to criminalizing all behaviors that lead to a lower rate of egg attachment really, it seems we should straight up ban sex, because for every 1 egg that attaches, 0.3 to 0.5 die. You wouldn't be ok with me murdering someone just so i can have a kid.
@@Goblin-Nixon it's not normal to see extremely undeveloped embryos. Obviously empathy is going to mainly be based on things that look vaguely like something from evolutionary history, not something that wouldn't be seen.
20:30 Ironically, my first instinct was to predict that in this thought experiment, the pro lifer *would* save the petri dish. In other words, that the cause of the petri dish's destruction being intentional *would* increase the priority/importance of saving it.
As has always been the case with arguments on both sides of this issue, it’s difficult to create analogies that adequately represent pregnancy and abortion. The embryo rescue case is another example of an analogy that fails to capture what is happening in abortion. For, one is not deciding between two lives but rather directly killing one. This is the reason for the evil of abortion, we ought to teach people, using, among other things, the law, that directly killing a human being, except in extreme circumstances, is not to be permitted.
To combat the embryo rescue argument, you could take the embryos to a later point of development. What if instead of the petri dish, there was an artificial womb machine that had 100 babies that have developed for 9 months and were about to be born in an hour. I think the pro-life answer should be to save the petri dish, because in 5 years time you will have saved far more 5 year old than if you didn’t.
@moxie.6832 But a pro-lifer would value the embryos as much as a pro-choicer values the artificial womb babies, so it would still apply. The reason I gave the new hypothetical was to show why saving the embryos makes sense from a pro-life perspective.
@@gatuarhin at most this argument establishes that there is some point in development at which we should save 100 fetuses over a child (as discussed in the video). if there’s a reason why we should treat 100 embryos the same, it’s not clear how the argument gives one
Crummett grants this. He even makes this point with elderly people in the penultimate section of this video! He isn't using the embryo rescue case to argue against the pro-life view.
This reveals a fundamental issue*: any two moral concerns (differing in quality, not just quantity) are incommensurable. You cannot flatten the moral judgment on them down to a single measurement by which the course of action satisfying one moral concern at the expense of the other is better than vice versa. Saving two children is better than saving just one, but e.g. lying to save a child is not necessarily better than telling the truth. Utilitarians believe they could solve the problem by looking at the overall happiness or suffering caused, but this just kicks the can further down the road: different people will have different 'measuring sticks' for overall happiness and suffering (there are also more rigorous ways to show that utilitarian welfare calculus is impossible). In practice it comes down to case-by-case individual moral intuition, i.e. guesswork. (*) I would call it a flaw with realist moral theories.
@@warptens5652 Happily. For example, it's not clear how physical pain and psychological pain are to be prioritized. Some allege that psychological pain ought to be disregarded because it can be lessened through one's sheer willpower. Others say that it deserves at least equal consideration... if not more (physical pain being a form of suffering mainly insofar as it is perceived psychologically). Or, some might hold that life preservation (mere survival) is of utmost importance and will strive to save the largest number of lives regardless of survivors' living conditions, others might disagree and take into account a few losses so the survivors may have a good rest of their lives. More broadly, is it preferable for there to be few very happy people, or many barely happy ones? Further proving that the subject is not so obvious, it has spawned a whole branch of philosophy: _population axiology_ ("the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in question may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live"). To dig deeper have a look at the so-called 'repugnant conclusion' and the impossibility theorems in population axiology. @KaneB has enlightening videos about this topic, such as m.ruclips.net/video/w4tRgsHcXQU/видео.html
@@Elisha_the_bald_headed_prophet I don't think physical pain is a different kind of pain, it's only "physical" in that it's caused by physical damage to your body, but it's still a mind state. If it's true that someone wills their psychological pain away, well then they don't feel psychological pain. I don't see the problem? We're not disregarding psychological pain, because there's no psychological pain there to disregard. We would still count it for the people who don't use their willpower like that. The average hapiness is what counts, so 1000 happy people is better than 1000000 less happy people, and 1 very happy person is even better, and 0 person is neutral / undefined. Averagism, hedonism, utilitarianism Does that system manage to "flatten the moral judgment"?
Let's say there is a hypothetical deadly disease that can only be cured by subjecting the closest male relative to a medical procedure, that leads to his body growing some organic material, that can than be used to cure the disease. This procedure takes several months an might have several severe side effects e.g. sickness, changes in hormone balance, hair loss, wheight gain, depression... It even might alter his body forever in some undesireable ways incontinence, scars... At the end of this procedure he has to endure unimaginable pain for a few hours. Now the question: would you force the male relative to undego the process to rescue their relative? I personally would not but how do pro-lifers see this? Would they value the life of the patient more than the free choice of their relative? I know its a very hypothetical question but its hard to find an analogy for pregnancy and birth for men
This is sort of like the trolley problem, but instead of running one person over with a trolley to save more lives, you are extracting a cure in a violent way to save more lives. The only difference is that you feel more involved in the action with the cure example.
Did the man consent to something that he knew this was a very possible effect of? Because for 99% of abortions they knew they were risking pregnancy yet still had sex.
If we save the 5 year old and let the embryos die does that mean if someone murders their one year old child they get less time in prison than if they had murdered their 5 year old?
As someone who is anti-abortion, these are two quick comments: 1. I think one ought to prioritize saving the embryos from the fire because I think the death of an embryo is roughly equally bad as the death of a five-year-old child, so I don't think this argument works on me. 2. I don't think the revised embryo cases work because they do not correctly address the objections. The unjust killing objection does not say that we should prioritize saving people from unjust killing, but that we should prioritize stopping unjust killing. The fact that paramedics don't proritize victims of assault over accident victims (but instead treat them equally) does not mean that assault is not a more serious thing than being injured in an accident. Clearly society should prioritize preventing assaults over preventing injury-causing accidents.
If an embryo is morally equivalent to you and I, then should I be picturing a toddler dying when I think of a fertilized egg not implanting in the uterus and passing out of the body? Also, you said this - “ Clearly society should prioritize preventing assaults over preventing injury-causing accidents.” I do t think this is necessarily obvious. If roughly one out of every five people were dying of some sort of accident I think that would be a huge priority that would require the restructuring of society on a significant scale - in fact, we saw this just happen with COVID. We can absolutely argue about whether the lockdowns were necessary with how contagious COVID was eventually discovered to be,, but I think we’d all agree that if there were a pandemic going around that we knew killed (say) 25% of the people it infected and had a 2-week incubation period where it was super contagious we would probably prioritize getting a handle on the pandemic over stopping assaults, and we’d probably be right to do so.
W.r.t. point 2, the scenario can be further revised to the following: Imagine that no fires have been started yet. But you have been given the foreknowledge that a lightning strike will cause a fire in the left building with a child, and at the same time, the biological mother of the embryos will start an arson fire in the right building with 100 embryos. You have been given a button to stop one of the two fires from occuring, but you are unable to stop both fires. Given this scenario, which fire would you choose to stop. Also, given that you reject the "normal intuition" response for BCR, consider this additional revision. The left building has 100 children, while the right building has 99 embryos. Does this change your choice - i.e. does BCR outweigh preventing unjust killing from occuring here; are there any other ratios that might change your decision?
@@ecta9604I don't think you should necessarily picture toddlers dying anymore than you should picture middle-aged men dying. It's better to accurately picture what is actually happening. But yes, a human zygote, blastocyst or embryo dying due to natural causes is a tragedy and I hope medical advances will solve this problem, similar to how infant mortality has been reduced. I don't think we disagree about whether one instance of assault injuring one person is more serious than one accident inflicting similar injuries on another person. I certainly agree that if people are dying at a massive scale from accidents or a disease, then, assuming we can do something about it, dealing with non-lethal assaults is a much lower priority. But the fact that you invoke the specter of mass death indicates that you think that unjust violence is normally more serious than accidents.
@@shadowc5Good question! I think the answer depends on if all I can do is prevent deaths or if stopping the arsonist mother also involves bringing her to justice for her (attempted) crimes. If it's the former, I think saving 100 born children is somewhat better than saving 99 embryos. If it's the latter, then I think that the tragic loss of one extra life could be outweighed by bringing a homicidal arsonist to justice. That said, I think saving lives is very important, so my answer would probably change if the ratio was 100/90. I hope that clarifies things.
@@Paradoxarn.well, I’m asking about the toddler because I want to know if the death of a fertilized egg is morally equivalent to the death of something like you or I, and I’m invoking mass death because we are absolutely going through a mass death event if prenatal humans - especially very young ones - are as morally valuable as you and I. If I believed that a fertilized egg was morally equivalent to a toddler I wouldn’t be focusing on abortion in the same way that I wouldn’t be focusing on assaults during a deadly plague. Instead I would be trying to structure society in a completely different way because about a third to a fifth of all the people who ever exist are dying before even getting born. Often those deaths are fully preventable either by the woman avoiding things that are likely to cause a miscarriage such as working at night (there was a Danish study that confirmed that a solid fifth or so of miscarriages seem to be preventable in simple ways like avoiding night work or exercise), or by not getting pregnant in the first place when conditions that are likely to cause a miscarriage are present (such as obesity). If I believed that the fertilized egg was morally equivalent to you and I, doing those sorts of things would at the very least be morally equivalent to drunk driving, and would probably be closer to manslaughter or reckless endangerment resulting in the death of a child. Plus, if there’s a moral equivalence between that fertilized egg and you and I, I think it’s completely unavoidable to advocate for things like miscarriages to be at the very least investigated at a cursory level, just as we’d investigate the death of anyone else for obvious foul play. I’m not talking about crazy criminal-level investigations every time - just a quick glance to ensure that the egg which has been passed doesn’t have the equivalent of a knife sticking out of its back. Even in places where people are expected to die, like in old folks homes, we check to make sure that obvious foul play isn’t involved. We also check and keep records of deaths to establish a pattern - even in an old folks home, if the death rate increases sharply then that’s a sign that there is probably something wrong that we should try to fix, despite the fact that nobody is actively killing those people. The only way to observe that sort of pattern is to keep track of the deaths in the first place. If that fertilized egg is morally equivalent to a toddler, in the same way that an abortion or taking Plan B is apparently morally equivalent to killing a toddler, it would be abhorrent to not treat those deaths in roughly the same way. And from a moral standpoint it is bizarre that we’re focusing on abortion in the middle of the worst mass death that humanity has ever experienced.
The problem with Crummett's hypothetical is that it doesn't really say or imply much. Yes, most people's moral intuition would be to rescue a child over the embryos. However, In the final analysis, we don't use intuition when judging if something is wrong in a society. Any father who had their daughter wrapped will immediately want retribution against the perp. As a society, although we understand that father's intuition, we recognize that even people who are guilty of something so heinous deserve to go through the legal process like everyone else. So, in Crummett's hypothetical, a single-issue pro-lifer doesn't need to appeal to moral intuition. The idea is that embryos are human lives and thus deserve to live as much as anyone else. Another argument I want to tackle is that Crummett says that one can argue against single-issue pro-lifers by pointing to other problems in society. In the context of the USA, the only way for a citizen to legally kill an innocent person is through abortion. This isn't an accident like a crazy shooter or potential risks with a.i. This is something that is built into the law itself. That specific law was made to kill innocent people. So, single-issue pro-lifers can easily point to that problem and demand a solution before trying to solve problems that exist in the periphery. That seems to make the most sense.
How on Earth do you wanna determine that it's wrong not to have a legal process even for such people, if not through rational intuition? You can try to get around this all the way you want, ultimately you come down to some fundamental axiom that just *seems* obvious
At best, this shows that pro-life voters shouldn't be single-issue voters _on the basis of number_ of lives killed. As someone who is strongly pro-life, I found Crummett's argument against body-count reasoning compelling. It explains why severity can trump absolute numbers. However, body-count reasoning just isn't the kind of thinking that brings me (and likely others) to become single-issue voters. Some of the extended discussions touch on those reasons, but they were underdeveloped. What compels me to be a single-issue voter is highly related to the severity of the worst cases, and the fact that these still legally occur in high numbers. More specifically, it's the *combination* of: 1) incredibly severe later-term abortions being increasingly morally wrong (culminating in severity matching infanticide the later you go), 2) of these more severe abortions occurring in high enough numbers even in late stages to be extremely evil (it's effectively still mass infanticide + less severe cases in several orders of mangitude higher numbers still), 3) of the impact of pro-abortion candidates in shifting the Overton window to the point where even the born-alive bill is being popularly opposed (which to me is akin to opposing anti-infanticide laws), and 4) of the fact that most pro-abortion candidates are proud of their genocidal positions (and this is less acceptable than voting in favor of reluctant pro-choice politicians - for one, it ties back into the Overton window argument) so in effect you are supporting a pro-murder stance, which is different from a passive indifference to preventing deaths. The last point on intentionality was addressed, but not in combination with the large numbers of severe cases of late-term abortions that still legally take place every year, and the effect that continuing to endorse it will have in further increasing the counts of the most severe cases, which are the most important to prevent. When you take the combination of all these factors together, they are strong reasons for pro-life voters to consider it the most important issue that can surely trump all others combined (at least in the current environment) the more you reflect on how all of these reasons reinforce each other and how much worse it can become if we don't stop this moral abomination now.
Surely those reasons you give "trump" all others! Laughable Freudian use of Trump, who just suckered you in to voting for him while he does nothing for a net gain on sanctity of life!
You have it literally backwards. All abortion arguments are emotional in nature. Anti-abortion folks use logic and reason to express their position, and it is based on logic and reason that we vote against abortion. That’s not to say it isn’t an emotional subject, absolutely it is, and emotion isn’t entirely insignificant, but a case is stronger if it can be supported on both grounds.
@brando3342 But that's not "literally backwards". Both sides use emotion, reason, and logic. The OP is wrong to even say one side is more emotional, and you are wrong to say it's backwards.
@@Gruso57 I think he has it “literally backwards” because I think the pro-death camp use majority emotional arguments, and by “majority” I mean 99 percent. None of the pro-death logical arguments actually work though, so it may as well be entirely based on emotion.
Even for pro abortion peole isn't saving 100 furure people better than saving one. This is the trolley problem all over again. The only different is that the 100 peole are potentials.
12:43 Man always sneaks in a Patreon plug. OK Crummett makes good points but he's pro-choice. Nothing that's been said convinces me to be pro-choice or that someone can't be pro-life as well as otherwise ''progressive''. If he says you can't vote for someone solely because they're against abortion but really he means you should vote FOR someone BECAUSE they're pro-choice then he shoulkd cut straight ot the point and say that. It's this sort of thing that annoys me on both sides of the culture war. ''If x then y but if not x then y anyway'' so x doesn't matter. At all. So don't bother bringing up x.
Moral dillemss are kind of useless pertaining to the broader issue. Lets put it a different way. Lets say there's a dish full of embryos from the two most intelligent people on earth, vs a 102 yr old sick guy with a low IQ. Now which would you save? This reasoning is question begging bc it merely assumes that only WE assign value. This could open up a huge can of worms if ad-populum is our basis for human morality (thats right MORALITY, not "ethics"). I bet you theres some people whod probably save a sack of gold, before either of them. The question here, is "Should one be able to kill their embryonic offspring, up until or even past (depending on who you talk to) the point of birth, so they can have all the sex they want without consequences". This is not a hyperbolic representation of their position. If that is a partys position, and it is the official position of exactly one major political party, i will never under any circumstances, vote for a member of that party. Now, if the other party thought that you should be able to kill five year olds, at that point Im tracking with the moral dilemma.
So this is a very confusing issue as a woman. On the one hand I’m told by conservative men that I must cover up because men have a high sex drive bla bla and women invite rape when they don’t. But in the abortion debate everyone arguing it seems to present this illusory male who isn’t sexually attracted to females, doesn’t rape and only has 2.4 children on average. Which one is it because as a woman the rape issue is far more salient to me than many on the pro life side it seems. Women are raped routinely in India over 80 rapes a day on average. So you ban abortion in a poor country like India then what? You have massive child poverty. The ripple effect of abortion is so high that these test tube arguments seem completely devoid of the context in which we live where women have no rights compared to men in many places.
If you're working on the assumption that it involves killing a human person, then wouldn't saying "we must kill human children to avoid massive child poverty" sound pretty crazy? How is child poverty worse than child slaughter? Would you tell impoverished children that they'd better off being aborted/killed then being spared and living in poverty? Seems like a barbaric solution. Granted, this critique assumes that you agree with us that fetus' are just as human as we are
If you bring in a law that prevents women from removing a conception through rpe you will create child poverty. Either men get the snip or we have abortions. Men do the rapng because they have the anatomy to do that. All of this is on men.
It is obvious that democracy will never end abortion anyway and I hope more pro-lifers realize it. If murder was made legal and normalized, no candidate would ever do anything to undermine it. Abortion will only end by force.
I more think of it as a responsibility. If I would be held responsible for my vote on a candidate who supports killing the unborn, then I would be better off abstaining ore voting for a moral canidate with no chance of wining.
Fine but the issue might be whether or not to forgo your responsibility towards the unborn or the born. The pro life candidate might be for activily ending the lives of thousands of innocent born children and pregnant mothers. The pro choice candidate might be for activily protecting the lives of thousands of innocent born children and pregnant mothers from certain demise. It doesn't make much difference to a fetus if it dies from an abortion or dies from the malnutrition of the mother because a nation doesn't want her to get aid. And yeah, I am heavily eluding to the current mass extermination of innocent lives. Heck, you can even consider climate change and poverty. Climate change has contributed to increased miscarriages by hurting people's access to clean water and exposing expecting mothers to extreme heat. Not to mention all the born lives lost to climate change. Impoverished people don't necessarily have shelter from the heat, have the ability to move to a place with cleaner drinking water, or eat healthily. You might have a responsibility for the unborn at risk of abortion but don't you have more of a responsibility to everyone else's lives, the born and unborn.
@@jaskitstepkit7153 I was talking about the world generally and not specifically the US. The US has a malnutrition problem too though. Climate change causes extreme weather including extreme heat which does cause miscarriages. Climate change causes sea level rise and therefore ocean water contamination of underground fresh water. High sodium levels cause miscarriages. This just scratches the surface of the issue.
I actually kind of agree with the miscarriage objection that it would be a good thing to do more to prevent miscarriage. But the research required to prevent it would be of way higher than cost than preventing abortion which comes about by human choice.
@Decadent_Descent Spirm is a gamete, a body part, like a strand of hair, it is not a human organism, it is a part of the human organism, not a human organism itself.
I don't think anyone argues that life doesn't start there. Personhood and/or bodily autonomy are where the discussion around this subject take place. Someone who breaks into your home can be defended against, but they're undoubtedly alive too. So clearly being alive or a life isn't the end all point. Or considering we slaughter billions of animals every year, they're all lives as well, but I only see small groups advocate for them. You need to make a more comprehensive point.
I am pro-choice. You don't want to have an abortion because it goes against your religious beliefs, then don't have one. We won't force you to have an abortion. You do want to have an abortion or need one, then go ahead, have one. We won't force you to give birth. Either forcing someone to have an abortion like China's one child policy, or forcing someone to give birth, like Christian conservatives want would infringe on other people's rights. For me when it comes to the topic of abortion, the most important consideration is bodily autonomy. Without bodily autonomy then a lot of the rights that guarantee your right to life fall apart. We can simply harvest your blood and organs to sustain or save someone else's life. For someone who is pregnant this is no different. Their bodily autonomy is more important than sustaining the life of the fetus, regardless of if the fetus is granted personhood or not. If we strip women of their bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then corpses essentially have more rights than living women do. You have reduced women down to livestock. I'd like to avoid that. We agreed upon as a society that someone's body can't be used to sustain another person’s body without the consent of that someone. I simply believe pregnant women fall under this protection as well. Let's take this hypothetical as an example. I am hooked up to someone, giving them my blood. My blood is the only thing keeping them alive, without they will die. Due to my bodily autonomy rights, at any time, for an any reason, I can stop giving that person blood and let them die. This would not be seen as murder, and I would not face any legal repercussions. Now people could see me as a terrible person for doing so, but that's about it. That's how highly we value bodily autonomy in this society. This same logic applies to the pregnant woman. The woman's body is the only thing keeping the fetus alive, just as the person above was completely dependent upon my body, the fetus is completely dependent on the mother's body. It then follows that due to her bodily autonomy rights, at any time, for an any reason, she can stop the continuation of the pregnancy and let the fetus die. This should not be seen as murder, and she shouldn't face any legal repercussions. Now people could see that woman as a terrible person for doing so, but that's about it. We need to be consistent with how highly we value bodily autonomy in this society. I believe a woman should have total control of her body all throughout the pregnancy. Is my position the majority position of pro-choice people though, no it's not. It's a mix of positions, with the question of personhood being one of them. The most popular pro-choice position is usually to cut off abortion around the 24-week mark. This is due to the fetus finally having a fully formed nervous system, which means it can feel pain, it has rapid growth in the brain, which means you could argue that it now has a consciousness, and it now has the ability to be born pre-maturely and survive outside the womb. Plenty of people would argue that this is when personhood should be granted and therefore the fetus's right to life protected. Then the only exceptions for abortion after that would be due to medical complications which involve either the mother's health or the fetus's health or both. I would be willing to go with this compromise. If scientists are ever able to make ectogenesis (the growth of an organism in an artificial environment, outside the body in which it would normally be found, such as the growth of an embryo or fetus outside the mother's body) a reality for human embryos and fetuses then the whole bodily autonomy issue will become a moot point. That is my stance on the issue.
This is more or less my position. It's an important thing to note that bodily autonomy also applies to the choice to do with your body as you please, including sexual activities. The argument that you give consent by participation in sex holds no ground worth taking seriously despite it being a very common approach. My go to analogy to support this is transportation. By taking part in thst industry you risk causing harm to another human. If you happen to do this, can they take your bodily fluids and/or even organs to save the life you put in risk? If not, then getting into a car isn't consent to your bodily autonomy. I do think there's a window in the middle of pregnancy that could be up for discussion. That's after the fetus is developed it's systems and can suffer up to the point it's potentially viable via premature delivery. I am at least sympathetic to this range in pregnancy. Which I believe is essentially the 2nd trimester. At this stage the alterations to the woman's autonomy are still primarily hormonal and she's been through a significant portion of the pregnancy meaning there's at least some form of consent in consideration baring circumstances that prevent it against the their will. While it's a violation of autonomy to not allow abortion in this window, I can at least the argument for now allowing 2nd trimester abortions as plausible. If pressed, I think logic commands they're permissible at any time. But as far as policy goes, given the current landscape, I can see this being a promising compromise. Although the pro-life advocates often are unwilling to compromise at all.
"You don't want to have an abortion because it goes against your religious beliefs, then don't have one. We won't force you to have an abortion." I'm pro-choice, but this is literally the WORST possible thing to say on behalf of the pro-choice side. Remember that pro-lifers think abortion is literally *murder*. Imagine if someone said "You don't want to murder people because it goes against your religious beliefs, then don't commit one. I don't force you to murder someone, I just want it to be legal." You are presupposing that abortion isn't murder, which is the very thing that is up for debate! Because if it were murder, then you would never ever write something like that.
This take, in my estimation, is massively mistaken. It completely ignores pregnancies that are caused consensually (aka the vast majority of pregnancies). None of your analogies apply to that issue. The person sustaining another’s life with their blood did not engage in an activity knowing and consenting to the consequences that it would lead to, which is, all things being normal, a nine month long thing. As a rule, if you consent to something with certain consequences, you also consent to those consequences. For example, if I walk into a time machine - which, all things being normal, will send me forward or back in time - set the clocks to 2079, and press “start” and “go”, if and when I eventually end up in 2079, I cannot proclaim that I didn’t consent to it, even if I thought I covered the pipe of the other machine that powers the time machine. To make it analogous, the person giving blood would have to agree beforehand that, all things being normal, their stint of support would last nine months. As far as I can tell, this issue is not addressed in your comment.
@@TheOtherCaleb While the comment didn't address it, autonomy as a case for choice does. If someone has the right to bodily, this necessarily includes the ability to have sex. If we say you have autonomy, but you cant perform consensual acts, then it's not autonomy. Especially when we consider that consent is obviously not given in a majority of cases as they happen despite birth control.
@@TheOtherCaleb Perhaps I should have given more detail with the hypotheticals I gave, but they are analogous. You created a straw man by adding details that aren't apart of my scenario. Nowhere did I state the person giving blood had no active knowledge and had no consent prior to this situation happening to them. This is supposed to be analogous remember. While not stated outright, it is implied that the person giving blood would have both prior knowledge and did give consent to giving the blood. So, these added details don't change anything. We can even throw in the nine-month part. I know I'm giving blood to keeping someone alive. I give consent to give blood to this person for nine-months. Now let's say I keep this up but during the fifth month I change my mind. I am allowed to do that. That is my bodily autonomy rights at play. I can walk away, and that person passes away. I will not face any legal consequences. This same logic will and should apply to a pregnant woman.
Hot button topic for me. I'm adamantly against mandated birthers! They need to mind their own goddamn business. Are they concerned or will take care of "the life they supposedly saved"? how abot all those in foster care?
If the best objection to being a single issue voter on abortion is to posit some absolutely absurd philosopher’s hypothetical situations that NO politician would EVER run with, then I think we are on pretty dang good grounds to say in the case of abortion, we should be single issue voters. “But what about if a politician says he’s going to round up and kill all the black people?!”…. Really? That’s how far you have to push this to make the point? Seeing as how we won’t EVER be forced with that conundrum, yeah, I’m going to vote against abortion.
The video is examining the coherency of a set of beliefs, not trying to posit a personable take on abortion for the common man. If you're not interested in work of this kind, you're in the wrong place.
@@goclbert I am aware of what the video is trying to do. The problem is, it doesn’t work. The reason it doesn’t go through is because the very topic involves the creation of laws in politics. Being realistic is literally part of the philosophical evaluation of this topic. You can’t avoid it, putting your head in the clouds, and saying “yeah but that’s the point”… it’s actually NOT the point on this specific case.
Importantly, though, that hypothetical was not proffered as an objection to single-issue pro-life voting in itself. That hypothetical was posed as a *defeater* for Tom's belief B that abortion *must* be stopped even if it takes significant costs to do so. Tom's belief B implies that, in such a situation, one should vote for the far-right candidate. Since that is false, Tom's belief B is false. Also, this may be more relevant to everyday politics than one might think. For starters, you misdescribe the thought experiment. Bobby isn't rounding up and killing *all* black people. He is only doing it to many tens of thousands of black people. This is important. Why? Because there's good reason to think that some realistic policy decisions can, indeed, be the difference between many tens of thousands of born people dying or not. The combination of different approaches to pandemics, different approaches to drugs, different approaches to healthcare, different approaches to gun regulation, and different approaches to environmental issues can easily amount to a difference of many tens of thousands of born lives saved or killed. If one's non-abortion-related political views lead one to judge that the pro-choice candidate would save many tens of thousands of born lives with their policies that would otherwise be killed with the pro-life candidate's policies -- as many millions of people's views are like in the United States -- then the case is actually reasonably relevant to our actual political situation. Of course, the analogy isn't _perfect_ , since (i) the pro-life candidate certainly wouldn't be able to realistically reduce abortions from 900,000 to 900, and (ii) the pro-life candidate won't realistically round up tens of thousands of blacks and kill them; instead. But the analogy wasn't meant to be perfect in this respect; it was only meant to test out intuitions about Tom's belief B.
If you don't like hypotheticals, how about you answer the historical example presented later in the video? In 1989 The murderous communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu banned abortion. When he was overthrown Romania legalized abortion. Knowing this, do you support Ceaușescu's secret police in torturing and murdering civilians to prevent his overthrow?
@@danter9934 the status of personhood is socially constructed. A fetus in a vacuum has no personhood. So, it all boils down to how the broader society views them.
@@gabri41200 I may be misreading your point but it seems to me that by the same logic we could put any human individual in a vacuum and say they are devoid of personhood, which is a slippery slope. I and many other pro-lifer's would argue that human beingness and personhood are inseperable.
The only reason you should support an abortion ban is if you want to intentionally lower the quality of health care for pregnant people and their children
Or if you believe that all lives should be legally protected. I'm aware that there are double standards held by people on both sides, but if you truly believed that all lives should be legally protected, that's a valid reason.
@@danter9934 I don't want to hear a peep about the value of human life from any country that has an active military. Furthermore, banning abortion doesn't reduce abortions. If reducing the number of abortions is your goal, look elsewhere.
@@TheOtherCaleb If you're pro-life, I understand that you have a complicated relationship with evidence. I'm not sure how to communicate with people like that.
It's haunting to watch someone so resoundingly intelligent (Crummett) be so simultaneously boorish. He mouths standard neoliberal talking points like they were Platonic truths. Truly remarkable.
Bizarre take... If you genuinely believe that Crummett's comments in this video can be characterised as 'boorish' or 'neoliberal' then I'm afraid you either a) haven't watched it or b) have no idea what those words mean.
Uh oh. Can’t see how this is going to go well. Even if I weren’t a Christian, I would still believe we should not have laws that allow for the whole-sale slaughter of the most innocent human beings. THIS single issue is an absolute priority.
@@andresjimenez1724 I am, but my stance on abortion is equally based in science and logic, as it is in religious conviction. In this way, I can easily shift my reasoning from my religious stance, to a non religious one, given that “science and logic” would then take over as the most reliable forms of epistemology at my disposal.
We got Joe doing ethics before GTA 6.
Wdym
The hospital is on fire, you can save either:
a) child
b) elderly lady
Thought experiments though provoking does not prove nor disprove.
The hospital is on fire, you can’t save anyone, but you can choose whether or not to do a cool flip out of the window
You definitely moved my needle as a pro-life social conservative Christian. Maybe TMI, but it’s always nice to have context about the person commenting.
Saving human lives is not the main reason in the mind of the single-issue voter, even if they still don't know it.
Why? Because abortion is eminently a matter of civil rights discrimination. Even if no abortions were being presently carried out, a principled citizen should not give support to those who want to perpetuate a legal system that protects not the life of an innocent victim, but the impunity of the one who intentionally takes it away.
I would go even further: not voting for a pro-abortion candidate is not enough for a principled citizen. A principled citizen should actively raise their voice against any civil rights discrimination, including discrimination against the unborn. In a society ruled by perverse laws enacted by those whom the citizenry enabled with their vote, one must presume that silence is complicity. This was the moral force behind those in the abolitionist movement. For them, it wasn't enough that slavery was illegal in their state, or that they actively helped slaves to escape. The thorn in their conscience that spurred them into vocal opposition to an unjust law, and into single-issue voting, was the moral uneasiness caused by being citizens of a country whose laws not only allowed the aberration of slavery but actively protected the impunity of its perpetrators.
This is a fantastic treatment of body count reasoning and the embryo rescue case, thank you!
As for the typical pro-life response to the embryo rescue case (emphasizing that there are good reasons to prioritize saving an already-born person over a number of embryos), I wonder how far one could take that. I could see using that reasoning to not only tolerate abortion, but to fully support broad abortion rights to allow for those cases where abortion prevents extreme suffering by already-born persons.
That thought experiment isn’t even a good one.
The answer is that we don’t consider one or the other inhabitants of the burning building any *less* human, and so we don’t consider them any *less* valuable.
In a case like that you try to save both, but if you cannot save both, you go for the one that is most likely to be a successful save.
Now, of course, there are other factors which may, in the moment, emotionally sway you to one direction or the other. For example, if you can hear the developed child screaming, you may be inclined to save him. Or if the parents of that child are outside the building imploring you to save their child.
The crucial thing though, is that neither choice should be considered “wrong”, because there is intrinsic human value within both buildings.
In such a case, which is a forced emotional thought experiment, you make a split second decision, and pray to God you manage to save at least someone.
@@brando3342 I agree. The problem I have with this hypothetical situation is that it tries to use your instinctual human emotions to say that pro-lifer’s have a double standard if they try to save the boy. In such a hypothetical situation, one would be acting based on emotion and instinct rather than reason. Reason from a pro-life perspective would say that both the embryos and the boy have equal intrinsic value as human persons, however the immediate effects of rescuing the boy are more palpable, which is why in such a dire situation one might choose to rescue him.
Similarly, one could come up with a hypothetical situation where you have to choose between rescuing the boy and resucing an adult who you know is trapped behind a closed door. Since you can see the boy in the moment and hear him cry out, it is natural that you would instrinctually want to resuce the kid, even though the adult you cannot see at the moment has just as much value as a human being.
@@danter9934 "Reason from a pro-life perspective would say that both the embryos and the boy have equal intrinsic value as human persons, however the immediate effects of rescuing the boy are more palpable, which is why in such a dire situation one might choose to rescue him."
Lucky for us, we now have the time to carefully plan who we would save if we were in that situation. Please take all the time you need and then let us know whether you think it's better to save the embryos or the child.
@@postpunkjustin As someone who believes that they both have the same intrinsic value, I would say that speaking on a purely logical level it would be better to save more human beings than just one. Therefore, if one assumes that the likelihood of success in saving the embryos is just as high as the likelihood of saving the boy, I believe that logically saving the embryos would save more human beings and would be the optimal choice.
This is assuming that the death of the embryos in the clinic fire is identical as a factor to the moral calculus of the death of embryos and fetuses in abortion. If one of the main reasons for saving the child in the fire is the factor of the suffering involved with the death, than that suffering also needs to be taken into account when it comes to abortions.
The reason the clinic fire argument gains its strength is the confusion between killing and not killing vs not saving and saving, and because a child dying would be worse not due to the value of the life but the mode of the death.
So I think one could consistently say saving a child from burning to death is better than saving 10 embryos from burning to death, while also saying that saving 1 million embryos and fetuses from needlessly being killed is more important than the tax rate, etc.
The hospital is on fire, you can save either:
A) 1 fertilized egg
B) a machine with 100 eggs and 100 sperms inside, that will automatically assemble the sperms and eggs if it doesn't burn
...Why is this a good objection? The one fertilized egg would be the only person in this scenario; if you're a religious person who believes life begins at conception, there isn't a dilemma here.
@@josephtnied I agree that if you believe a soul magically attaches to the egg when the sperm enters it and this is what gives it human rights, then this thought experiment isn't a dilemma, you just choose A. But many religious people think they can argue against abortion without appealing to that belief. However, the secular arguments they make for why a fertilized egg is valuable tend to also apply to the soon-to-be-fertilized egg, which commits them to choosing B.
@@warptens5652 Not really. They argue that, on scientific grounds, the fertilized egg is an individual human person because it has unique human DNA. The unfertilized eggs and the sperms don't have a unique human DNA so they wouldn't count as a unique person.
@@josephtnied ah yes, this is the one and only argument pro-lifers make, they never say anything else
@@josephtnied I couldn't have said it better!
Consider these 2 possible worlds:
1) You save a 5yo child over the embryos. The embryos all die but the child lives. 5 years later we have one 10yo child.
2) You save the embryos over the 5yo child. Said child dies, but then the embryos all get actualized and grown into babies. 5 years later we have many 5yo children.
Now imagine you could skip the actual difficult decision-making and instantly time-travel 5 years into the future, which world are you more likely to choose?-as in which one seems more preferable?
So in one case you end up having more children saved than the other, namely when the embryos are saved. It may appear to be wrong to have not saved the child, but in hindsight it seems ok to have saved the embryos, and so this merely exposes a flaw in our intuitions, and how sometimes something may seem morally wrong in the moment but revealed to be morally right afterwards, and vice versa. In the same way you will virtually always instinctively value yourself above everyone else, but from this it doesn't follow that you indeed have more objective moral value than everyone else.
Another thing is that this hypothetical, even if true, only tells us that we value being born over not being born yet, but not by how much. Intuitively we may feel the embryos could die, but also intuitively almost no one would support third-trimester abortion at 8-9 months when the baby is pretty much fully formed, as that also seems like we're killing a baby. So even if you just want to follow intuitions, this only lets you legalize abortion until maybe 20-24 weeks.
This is a typical utilitarianism dilemma that doesn't count for any value judgements. The petri dish potential of life still doesnt hold as high of a value as the 5 year old that is currently living because of how unreliable that prediction is. The option with higher probability will hold more moral weight.
What if the boy you killed was going to be the scientist who cures all cancer?
The answer is we don't know so we face the issue at hand without conjecture.
If we change it to a tray of micro machines about to release sperm into ova, does this still hold? Five years from now, we have many five year old children. Should we save unfertilized ova that are about to be fertilized? If we make it unfertilized ova that will be fertilized the next day if we save them, should we save those ova over the child?
I'm not sure this line of thought undercuts the intuition to save the child.
This all or nothing approach to abortion is merely a function of the laws, court rulings, and cultural happenstance in the United States. In most of the developed world, people do not hold this position. Abortion is very easy obtain early in pregnancy and the conditions needed to qualify for an abortion increase and/or eventually become impossible as the pregnancy progresses. This aligns much more with natural intuitions. Either way, within the US the vast majority of abortions occur during this early period so the argument still addresses the body count argument.
Doesn't this presuppose contingentarianism
I don't think a time travel hypothetical actually reveal the flaw in our moral intuition. Especially when you consider that it can give rise to some wild scenarios.
Imagine if there was an innocent baby in front of you, and you have the option of either stabbing it to death, or not. Given a time travel 30 years later, you know that if you did not, there would be million and billions of additional human deaths - i.e. the baby would grow up to be a warmongering dictator!
Would such a scenario reveal that our moral intuitions were flawed when we chose not to stab an innocent baby to death? Clearly not.
The only thing time travel could reveal, might be that consequentialism isn't all morality is; and that time travel may reveal additional morally relevant information that isn't (and couldn't) be available at the time of decision making.
Just like in the same way that one couldn't possibly know that some baby would become a warmongering dictator in the future, one also could not know that the 50 embyros would not all perish before they are born as they all fail to implant. Future knowledge is therefore additional morally significant information.
The most complicated answer to "does body count matter".
I think the reason that we ought to save the child over the embryos is not the higher moral value of born children over embryos per se, but the higher value of born children over frozen embryos. The vast majority of those embryos will end up discarded, and for those of us who also object to IVF itself, they could never morally be implanted. Thus, the act of allowing a frozen embryo to die and allowing an embryo in a mother’s womb to be aborted are not morally equivalent. I think a frozen embryo is morally equivalent to a patient in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery and who requires constant artificial life support.
A better analogy would be, would you stop the murder of one 5 year old or 100 abortions? I think most pro-lifers would save the latter.
you can just add to the hypothetical that every fertilized egg will be implanted
"and for those of us who also object to IVF itself, they could never morally be implanted"
@@ldov6373 it's implanted by magic
boom
the idea that the morality of ivf has anything to do with the argument is silly
@@warptens5652 That would still be immoral by Catholic moral theology. The point is that there is no moral way to ever have those embryos fully grow to adulthood. The most moral thing would be to remove the artificial life support and baptize them before death. As a result there is no moral equivalence between a frozen embryo and an embryo in a mother’s womb. If you phrase the question as about embryos in mother’s wombs, most pro lifers will not concede anymore that they are less valuable than born children. It is like how an adult that needs artificial life support and has no hope of recovery would be of lower priority to save from a fire than a healthy adult.
@@thebyzantinescotist7081 The fire supplies a sauna with 100 women in the first trimester. If the sauna is allowed to continue, all 100 of those women will miscarry. They are indifferent to that (and will remain indifferent about it in retrospect too).
Save the child or turn off the sauna?
Abortion is not an issue of numbers of human beings being saved or killed. Abortion is a legal matter about equality and the solution to conflicts between different human rights, it's the most urgent case of legally sanctioned civil rights discrimination against an entire group of human beings.
Saving human lives is not the main reason in the mind of the single-issue voter, even if they still don't know it.
Why? Because abortion is eminently a matter of civil rights discrimination. Even if no abortions were being presently carried out, a principled citizen should not give support to those who want to perpetuate a legal system that protects not the life of an innocent victim, but the impunity of the one who intentionally takes it away.
I would go even further: not voting for a pro-abortion candidate is not enough for a principled citizen. A principled citizen should actively raise their voice against any civil rights discrimination, including discrimination against the unborn. In a society ruled by perverse laws enacted by those whom the citizenry enabled with their vote, one must presume that silence is complicity. This was the moral force behind those in the abolitionist movement. For them, it wasn't enough that slavery was illegal in their state, or that they actively helped slaves to escape. The thorn in their conscience that spurred them into vocal opposition to an unjust law, and into single-issue voting, was the moral uneasiness caused by being citizens of a country whose laws not only allowed the aberration of slavery but actively protected the impunity of its perpetrators.
That is interesting.
From my intuition, I would more likely save a child over an infant or adult.
If the mother would have laid the fire with intention, the choice between the embryos and the child becomes harder for me. Does anybody feel similar?
Forget all the abortion talk for a second. I wanna know how hard it was for Joe to talk as slow as the rest of humanity for a video. Or if he juat slowed it down 25% for us before uploading.
what if you reject the apparent conclusion to the 100 embryos to 5 year old? I think if you just say 100 embryos are more value (and so would 2 by logical extension), wouldn't that negate the response? This remains consistent.
There is no stance-independent, non-circular, objective prescription for any entity to have any value, or do any duty. You can post-hoc rationalize any intuition you want, but I am not going to do that which is intolerable to my conscience. For me, I would not have wanted anyone to force my mother to have me against her own well-being.
What if your mother didn't want to have you for her own well being when you were two months born?
The fertilization clinic example is preposterous: it compares the legal protection of the purposeful direct killing of an innocent human being with a failure to save them in a particularly stressful situation.
What do you do when a pro life person bites the bullet?
You look inwards and question why you spent your life being a sophist
I would say this is because we are presuming the personhood of the embryo. Instead I think crux of the matter is determining when a fetus gains personhood. But that kind of question is subjective, so here we are. That being said, the best solution to the abortion issue, as many pro-choice agree, is to reduce the need for abortions in the first place via sex ed, maternity leave, and others I am not thinking of. Most women actually don't like to get abortions (many of them wanted to have children), and so they are usually forced to get it through unforeseen circumstances. I feel like most people forget that the woman may not even enjoy abortion, and it is not a convience thing, but rather something done out of necessity.
My challenge to premise 1 is that classifying embryos as people isn't sufficient for establishing that animals in factory farming ought not to be classified as people. One would have to deep dive into the specific arguments in favour of classifying embryos as people in order to determine whether conscious animals ought to be outside the reach of that classification
@iwersonsch5131
Fuck it, let's take the pro-choice route and work to develop immaculate birth control to avoid pregnancy to begin with, then celebrate that we simultaneously ended animal ag by giving animals rights like they deserve.
On a serious note, that's definitely an interesting angle to throw at them. An embryo is by far less human than any animal in a farm in the areas that matter. All the areas that helped us decide humans should have rights, apply more to animals than they do to embryos is another way of saying that to help with clarity.
I think this is an area where you wouldn't expect your intuitions to be correct. I mostly just bite the bullet.
do you, really?
because this has implications
like, if a child dies and the parent could have avoided it by behaving differently, it's usually considered a crime
so it seems you would be commited to criminalizing all behaviors that lead to a lower rate of egg attachment
really, it seems we should straight up ban sex, because for every 1 egg that attaches, 0.3 to 0.5 die. You wouldn't be ok with me murdering someone just so i can have a kid.
How come?
@@Goblin-Nixon it's not normal to see extremely undeveloped embryos. Obviously empathy is going to mainly be based on things that look vaguely like something from evolutionary history, not something that wouldn't be seen.
20:30 Ironically, my first instinct was to predict that in this thought experiment, the pro lifer *would* save the petri dish. In other words, that the cause of the petri dish's destruction being intentional *would* increase the priority/importance of saving it.
exactly
As has always been the case with arguments on both sides of this issue, it’s difficult to create analogies that adequately represent pregnancy and abortion. The embryo rescue case is another example of an analogy that fails to capture what is happening in abortion. For, one is not deciding between two lives but rather directly killing one. This is the reason for the evil of abortion, we ought to teach people, using, among other things, the law, that directly killing a human being, except in extreme circumstances, is not to be permitted.
Great video!!
I'm here for the hot takes, that is all.
Excellent video. Glad I stumbled on it
To combat the embryo rescue argument, you could take the embryos to a later point of development.
What if instead of the petri dish, there was an artificial womb machine that had 100 babies that have developed for 9 months and were about to be born in an hour. I think the pro-life answer should be to save the petri dish, because in 5 years time you will have saved far more 5 year old than if you didn’t.
that wouldn't help with the body count argument for single-issue abortion voting, though, given how few abortions occur so late in pregnancy
@moxie.6832 But a pro-lifer would value the embryos as much as a pro-choicer values the artificial womb babies, so it would still apply. The reason I gave the new hypothetical was to show why saving the embryos makes sense from a pro-life perspective.
@@gatuarhin at most this argument establishes that there is some point in development at which we should save 100 fetuses over a child (as discussed in the video). if there’s a reason why we should treat 100 embryos the same, it’s not clear how the argument gives one
I would save my own child over someone else's too. Does that mean I think it's ok to kill someone else's child? Obviously not.
Crummett grants this. He even makes this point with elderly people in the penultimate section of this video! He isn't using the embryo rescue case to argue against the pro-life view.
Hi, can you give me beginner book recommendations.
This reveals a fundamental issue*: any two moral concerns (differing in quality, not just quantity) are incommensurable. You cannot flatten the moral judgment on them down to a single measurement by which the course of action satisfying one moral concern at the expense of the other is better than vice versa. Saving two children is better than saving just one, but e.g. lying to save a child is not necessarily better than telling the truth. Utilitarians believe they could solve the problem by looking at the overall happiness or suffering caused, but this just kicks the can further down the road: different people will have different 'measuring sticks' for overall happiness and suffering (there are also more rigorous ways to show that utilitarian welfare calculus is impossible). In practice it comes down to case-by-case individual moral intuition, i.e. guesswork.
(*) I would call it a flaw with realist moral theories.
"different people will have different 'measuring sticks' for overall happiness and suffering"
can you give an example of 2 different measuring sticks?
@@warptens5652 Happily.
For example, it's not clear how physical pain and psychological pain are to be prioritized. Some allege that psychological pain ought to be disregarded because it can be lessened through one's sheer willpower. Others say that it deserves at least equal consideration... if not more (physical pain being a form of suffering mainly insofar as it is perceived psychologically).
Or, some might hold that life preservation (mere survival) is of utmost importance and will strive to save the largest number of lives regardless of survivors' living conditions, others might disagree and take into account a few losses so the survivors may have a good rest of their lives. More broadly, is it preferable for there to be few very happy people, or many barely happy ones?
Further proving that the subject is not so obvious, it has spawned a whole branch of philosophy: _population axiology_ ("the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in question may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live").
To dig deeper have a look at the so-called 'repugnant conclusion' and the impossibility theorems in population axiology. @KaneB has enlightening videos about this topic, such as m.ruclips.net/video/w4tRgsHcXQU/видео.html
@@Elisha_the_bald_headed_prophet
I don't think physical pain is a different kind of pain, it's only "physical" in that it's caused by physical damage to your body, but it's still a mind state.
If it's true that someone wills their psychological pain away, well then they don't feel psychological pain. I don't see the problem? We're not disregarding psychological pain, because there's no psychological pain there to disregard. We would still count it for the people who don't use their willpower like that.
The average hapiness is what counts, so 1000 happy people is better than 1000000 less happy people, and 1 very happy person is even better, and 0 person is neutral / undefined.
Averagism, hedonism, utilitarianism
Does that system manage to "flatten the moral judgment"?
Asking for tips...jokes on you: I'm Australian!
Let's say there is a hypothetical deadly disease that can only be cured by subjecting the closest male relative to a medical procedure, that leads to his body growing some organic material, that can than be used to cure the disease. This procedure takes several months an might have several severe side effects e.g. sickness, changes in hormone balance, hair loss, wheight gain, depression... It even might alter his body forever in some undesireable ways incontinence, scars... At the end of this procedure he has to endure unimaginable pain for a few hours. Now the question: would you force the male relative to undego the process to rescue their relative? I personally would not but how do pro-lifers see this? Would they value the life of the patient more than the free choice of their relative? I know its a very hypothetical question but its hard to find an analogy for pregnancy and birth for men
This is sort of like the trolley problem, but instead of running one person over with a trolley to save more lives, you are extracting a cure in a violent way to save more lives. The only difference is that you feel more involved in the action with the cure example.
Did the man consent to something that he knew this was a very possible effect of? Because for 99% of abortions they knew they were risking pregnancy yet still had sex.
If we save the 5 year old and let the embryos die does that mean if someone murders their one year old child they get less time in prison than if they had murdered their 5 year old?
The body-count argument is the silliest straw man against the pro-life position!
Voting?! Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says what?
As someone who is anti-abortion, these are two quick comments:
1. I think one ought to prioritize saving the embryos from the fire because I think the death of an embryo is roughly equally bad as the death of a five-year-old child, so I don't think this argument works on me.
2. I don't think the revised embryo cases work because they do not correctly address the objections. The unjust killing objection does not say that we should prioritize saving people from unjust killing, but that we should prioritize stopping unjust killing. The fact that paramedics don't proritize victims of assault over accident victims (but instead treat them equally) does not mean that assault is not a more serious thing than being injured in an accident. Clearly society should prioritize preventing assaults over preventing injury-causing accidents.
If an embryo is morally equivalent to you and I, then should I be picturing a toddler dying when I think of a fertilized egg not implanting in the uterus and passing out of the body?
Also, you said this - “ Clearly society should prioritize preventing assaults over preventing injury-causing accidents.”
I do t think this is necessarily obvious. If roughly one out of every five people were dying of some sort of accident I think that would be a huge priority that would require the restructuring of society on a significant scale - in fact, we saw this just happen with COVID.
We can absolutely argue about whether the lockdowns were necessary with how contagious COVID was eventually discovered to be,, but I think we’d all agree that if there were a pandemic going around that we knew killed (say) 25% of the people it infected and had a 2-week incubation period where it was super contagious we would probably prioritize getting a handle on the pandemic over stopping assaults, and we’d probably be right to do so.
W.r.t. point 2, the scenario can be further revised to the following:
Imagine that no fires have been started yet. But you have been given the foreknowledge that a lightning strike will cause a fire in the left building with a child, and at the same time, the biological mother of the embryos will start an arson fire in the right building with 100 embryos. You have been given a button to stop one of the two fires from occuring, but you are unable to stop both fires.
Given this scenario, which fire would you choose to stop.
Also, given that you reject the "normal intuition" response for BCR, consider this additional revision. The left building has 100 children, while the right building has 99 embryos. Does this change your choice - i.e. does BCR outweigh preventing unjust killing from occuring here; are there any other ratios that might change your decision?
@@ecta9604I don't think you should necessarily picture toddlers dying anymore than you should picture middle-aged men dying. It's better to accurately picture what is actually happening. But yes, a human zygote, blastocyst or embryo dying due to natural causes is a tragedy and I hope medical advances will solve this problem, similar to how infant mortality has been reduced.
I don't think we disagree about whether one instance of assault injuring one person is more serious than one accident inflicting similar injuries on another person. I certainly agree that if people are dying at a massive scale from accidents or a disease, then, assuming we can do something about it, dealing with non-lethal assaults is a much lower priority. But the fact that you invoke the specter of mass death indicates that you think that unjust violence is normally more serious than accidents.
@@shadowc5Good question! I think the answer depends on if all I can do is prevent deaths or if stopping the arsonist mother also involves bringing her to justice for her (attempted) crimes. If it's the former, I think saving 100 born children is somewhat better than saving 99 embryos. If it's the latter, then I think that the tragic loss of one extra life could be outweighed by bringing a homicidal arsonist to justice. That said, I think saving lives is very important, so my answer would probably change if the ratio was 100/90. I hope that clarifies things.
@@Paradoxarn.well, I’m asking about the toddler because I want to know if the death of a fertilized egg is morally equivalent to the death of something like you or I, and I’m invoking mass death because we are absolutely going through a mass death event if prenatal humans - especially very young ones - are as morally valuable as you and I.
If I believed that a fertilized egg was morally equivalent to a toddler I wouldn’t be focusing on abortion in the same way that I wouldn’t be focusing on assaults during a deadly plague. Instead I would be trying to structure society in a completely different way because about a third to a fifth of all the people who ever exist are dying before even getting born.
Often those deaths are fully preventable either by the woman avoiding things that are likely to cause a miscarriage such as working at night (there was a Danish study that confirmed that a solid fifth or so of miscarriages seem to be preventable in simple ways like avoiding night work or exercise), or by not getting pregnant in the first place when conditions that are likely to cause a miscarriage are present (such as obesity). If I believed that the fertilized egg was morally equivalent to you and I, doing those sorts of things would at the very least be morally equivalent to drunk driving, and would probably be closer to manslaughter or reckless endangerment resulting in the death of a child.
Plus, if there’s a moral equivalence between that fertilized egg and you and I, I think it’s completely unavoidable to advocate for things like miscarriages to be at the very least investigated at a cursory level, just as we’d investigate the death of anyone else for obvious foul play. I’m not talking about crazy criminal-level investigations every time - just a quick glance to ensure that the egg which has been passed doesn’t have the equivalent of a knife sticking out of its back. Even in places where people are expected to die, like in old folks homes, we check to make sure that obvious foul play isn’t involved. We also check and keep records of deaths to establish a pattern - even in an old folks home, if the death rate increases sharply then that’s a sign that there is probably something wrong that we should try to fix, despite the fact that nobody is actively killing those people. The only way to observe that sort of pattern is to keep track of the deaths in the first place.
If that fertilized egg is morally equivalent to a toddler, in the same way that an abortion or taking Plan B is apparently morally equivalent to killing a toddler, it would be abhorrent to not treat those deaths in roughly the same way. And from a moral standpoint it is bizarre that we’re focusing on abortion in the middle of the worst mass death that humanity has ever experienced.
@32:00 That Michael DeVito dude is a quack! Not sure how he passes for a philosopher....
@@michaeldevito5035 Mike! You’re an absolute legend!!! Love you man
@@MajestyofReasonlove you, brother! Thank you so much for talking about our work! It means so much, young Kripke! Truly
Sorry, I wrote that comment on my son’s account lol. And this one.
What do you think of David Bentley Hart?
The problem with Crummett's hypothetical is that it doesn't really say or imply much. Yes, most people's moral intuition would be to rescue a child over the embryos. However, In the final analysis, we don't use intuition when judging if something is wrong in a society. Any father who had their daughter wrapped will immediately want retribution against the perp. As a society, although we understand that father's intuition, we recognize that even people who are guilty of something so heinous deserve to go through the legal process like everyone else. So, in Crummett's hypothetical, a single-issue pro-lifer doesn't need to appeal to moral intuition. The idea is that embryos are human lives and thus deserve to live as much as anyone else.
Another argument I want to tackle is that Crummett says that one can argue against single-issue pro-lifers by pointing to other problems in society. In the context of the USA, the only way for a citizen to legally kill an innocent person is through abortion. This isn't an accident like a crazy shooter or potential risks with a.i. This is something that is built into the law itself. That specific law was made to kill innocent people. So, single-issue pro-lifers can easily point to that problem and demand a solution before trying to solve problems that exist in the periphery. That seems to make the most sense.
Very well put
That seems to be pretty clearly false. Our intuitions are the basis of saying sexual assault and murder are wrong to begin with.
@@blamtasticful No, the outcome is the basis. However, intuition does help.
@@danter9934 Thanks!
How on Earth do you wanna determine that it's wrong not to have a legal process even for such people, if not through rational intuition? You can try to get around this all the way you want, ultimately you come down to some fundamental axiom that just *seems* obvious
At best, this shows that pro-life voters shouldn't be single-issue voters _on the basis of number_ of lives killed.
As someone who is strongly pro-life, I found Crummett's argument against body-count reasoning compelling. It explains why severity can trump absolute numbers.
However, body-count reasoning just isn't the kind of thinking that brings me (and likely others) to become single-issue voters. Some of the extended discussions touch on those reasons, but they were underdeveloped.
What compels me to be a single-issue voter is highly related to the severity of the worst cases, and the fact that these still legally occur in high numbers.
More specifically, it's the *combination* of: 1) incredibly severe later-term abortions being increasingly morally wrong (culminating in severity matching infanticide the later you go), 2) of these more severe abortions occurring in high enough numbers even in late stages to be extremely evil (it's effectively still mass infanticide + less severe cases in several orders of mangitude higher numbers still), 3) of the impact of pro-abortion candidates in shifting the Overton window to the point where even the born-alive bill is being popularly opposed (which to me is akin to opposing anti-infanticide laws), and 4) of the fact that most pro-abortion candidates are proud of their genocidal positions (and this is less acceptable than voting in favor of reluctant pro-choice politicians - for one, it ties back into the Overton window argument) so in effect you are supporting a pro-murder stance, which is different from a passive indifference to preventing deaths.
The last point on intentionality was addressed, but not in combination with the large numbers of severe cases of late-term abortions that still legally take place every year, and the effect that continuing to endorse it will have in further increasing the counts of the most severe cases, which are the most important to prevent.
When you take the combination of all these factors together, they are strong reasons for pro-life voters to consider it the most important issue that can surely trump all others combined (at least in the current environment) the more you reflect on how all of these reasons reinforce each other and how much worse it can become if we don't stop this moral abomination now.
Surely those reasons you give "trump" all others! Laughable Freudian use of Trump, who just suckered you in to voting for him while he does nothing for a net gain on sanctity of life!
are you kidding? like this is some sort of Hobson's Choice dilemma!⚛
Single-issue pro-life voting is almost a purely emotional thing. Not sure reason is going to work.
You have it literally backwards. All abortion arguments are emotional in nature. Anti-abortion folks use logic and reason to express their position, and it is based on logic and reason that we vote against abortion. That’s not to say it isn’t an emotional subject, absolutely it is, and emotion isn’t entirely insignificant, but a case is stronger if it can be supported on both grounds.
Completely false.
@brando3342
But that's not "literally backwards". Both sides use emotion, reason, and logic. The OP is wrong to even say one side is more emotional, and you are wrong to say it's backwards.
@@Gruso57 I think he has it “literally backwards” because I think the pro-death camp use majority emotional arguments, and by “majority” I mean 99 percent. None of the pro-death logical arguments actually work though, so it may as well be entirely based on emotion.
@@brando3342 And use of pro-death is targeting emotion as well. I'm not disagreeing, just challenging.
Even for pro abortion peole isn't saving 100 furure people better than saving one. This is the trolley problem all over again. The only different is that the 100 peole are potentials.
12:43 Man always sneaks in a Patreon plug.
OK Crummett makes good points but he's pro-choice. Nothing that's been said convinces me to be pro-choice or that someone can't be pro-life as well as otherwise ''progressive''. If he says you can't vote for someone solely because they're against abortion but really he means you should vote FOR someone BECAUSE they're pro-choice then he shoulkd cut straight ot the point and say that. It's this sort of thing that annoys me on both sides of the culture war. ''If x then y but if not x then y anyway'' so x doesn't matter. At all. So don't bother bringing up x.
Moral dillemss are kind of useless pertaining to the broader issue. Lets put it a different way. Lets say there's a dish full of embryos from the two most intelligent people on earth, vs a 102 yr old sick guy with a low IQ. Now which would you save?
This reasoning is question begging bc it merely assumes that only WE assign value. This could open up a huge can of worms if ad-populum is our basis for human morality (thats right MORALITY, not "ethics"). I bet you theres some people whod probably save a sack of gold, before either of them.
The question here, is "Should one be able to kill their embryonic offspring, up until or even past (depending on who you talk to) the point of birth, so they can have all the sex they want without consequences". This is not a hyperbolic representation of their position. If that is a partys position, and it is the official position of exactly one major political party, i will never under any circumstances, vote for a member of that party.
Now, if the other party thought that you should be able to kill five year olds, at that point Im tracking with the moral dilemma.
Based!
So this is a very confusing issue as a woman. On the one hand I’m told by conservative men that I must cover up because men have a high sex drive bla bla and women invite rape when they don’t. But in the abortion debate everyone arguing it seems to present this illusory male who isn’t sexually attracted to females, doesn’t rape and only has 2.4 children on average. Which one is it because as a woman the rape issue is far more salient to me than many on the pro life side it seems. Women are raped routinely in India over 80 rapes a day on average. So you ban abortion in a poor country like India then what? You have massive child poverty. The ripple effect of abortion is so high that these test tube arguments seem completely devoid of the context in which we live where women have no rights compared to men in many places.
I believe he was only speaking in the context of America.
It doesn't make sense what you said. Are you a utilitarian? Abortion is not right or wrong because of a country's social circumstances
I’m pro choice because banning abortion is wrong imo because of these social circumstances. If that’s utilitarian then yes I’m that
If you're working on the assumption that it involves killing a human person, then wouldn't saying "we must kill human children to avoid massive child poverty" sound pretty crazy? How is child poverty worse than child slaughter? Would you tell impoverished children that they'd better off being aborted/killed then being spared and living in poverty? Seems like a barbaric solution.
Granted, this critique assumes that you agree with us that fetus' are just as human as we are
If you bring in a law that prevents women from removing a conception through rpe you will create child poverty. Either men get the snip or we have abortions. Men do the rapng because they have the anatomy to do that. All of this is on men.
wooooo!
Not a bad video but I bet you won’t post a video that could upset the left. Have some courage Joe, I’ll wait.
12:52 this seems plausible
Joe, you're funny and smart, but you are using your intelligence only to be counted among the best sophists of our time.
It is obvious that democracy will never end abortion anyway and I hope more pro-lifers realize it. If murder was made legal and normalized, no candidate would ever do anything to undermine it. Abortion will only end by force.
I more think of it as a responsibility. If I would be held responsible for my vote on a candidate who supports killing the unborn, then I would be better off abstaining ore voting for a moral canidate with no chance of wining.
Fine but the issue might be whether or not to forgo your responsibility towards the unborn or the born. The pro life candidate might be for activily ending the lives of thousands of innocent born children and pregnant mothers. The pro choice candidate might be for activily protecting the lives of thousands of innocent born children and pregnant mothers from certain demise. It doesn't make much difference to a fetus if it dies from an abortion or dies from the malnutrition of the mother because a nation doesn't want her to get aid. And yeah, I am heavily eluding to the current mass extermination of innocent lives. Heck, you can even consider climate change and poverty. Climate change has contributed to increased miscarriages by hurting people's access to clean water and exposing expecting mothers to extreme heat. Not to mention all the born lives lost to climate change. Impoverished people don't necessarily have shelter from the heat, have the ability to move to a place with cleaner drinking water, or eat healthily. You might have a responsibility for the unborn at risk of abortion but don't you have more of a responsibility to everyone else's lives, the born and unborn.
What the hell are you talking about. USA has no starvation problem and climate change doesn't cause miscarriages.
@@jaskitstepkit7153 I was talking about the world generally and not specifically the US. The US has a malnutrition problem too though. Climate change causes extreme weather including extreme heat which does cause miscarriages. Climate change causes sea level rise and therefore ocean water contamination of underground fresh water. High sodium levels cause miscarriages. This just scratches the surface of the issue.
I actually kind of agree with the miscarriage objection that it would be a good thing to do more to prevent miscarriage. But the research required to prevent it would be of way higher than cost than preventing abortion which comes about by human choice.
Life begins at unfertilized egg.
Then what is sperm? It's not dead or inanimate.
@Decadent_Descent Spirm is a gamete, a body part, like a strand of hair, it is not a human organism, it is a part of the human organism, not a human organism itself.
I don't think anyone argues that life doesn't start there. Personhood and/or bodily autonomy are where the discussion around this subject take place. Someone who breaks into your home can be defended against, but they're undoubtedly alive too. So clearly being alive or a life isn't the end all point. Or considering we slaughter billions of animals every year, they're all lives as well, but I only see small groups advocate for them. You need to make a more comprehensive point.
@@Decadent_Descent so life begins at the time where both the egg and the sperm were created?
@@YuGiOhDuelChannelthe undertakings egg is also a gamete
I am pro-choice. You don't want to have an abortion because it goes against your religious beliefs, then don't have one. We won't force you to have an abortion.
You do want to have an abortion or need one, then go ahead, have one. We won't force you to give birth.
Either forcing someone to have an abortion like China's one child policy, or forcing someone to give birth, like Christian conservatives want would infringe on other people's rights.
For me when it comes to the topic of abortion, the most important consideration is bodily autonomy. Without bodily autonomy then a lot of the rights that guarantee your right to life fall apart. We can simply harvest your blood and organs to sustain or save someone else's life. For someone who is pregnant this is no different. Their bodily autonomy is more important than sustaining the life of the fetus, regardless of if the fetus is granted personhood or not. If we strip women of their bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then corpses essentially have more rights than living women do. You have reduced women down to livestock. I'd like to avoid that.
We agreed upon as a society that someone's body can't be used to sustain another person’s body without the consent of that someone. I simply believe pregnant women fall under this protection as well.
Let's take this hypothetical as an example. I am hooked up to someone, giving them my blood. My blood is the only thing keeping them alive, without they will die. Due to my bodily autonomy rights, at any time, for an any reason, I can stop giving that person blood and let them die. This would not be seen as murder, and I would not face any legal repercussions. Now people could see me as a terrible person for doing so, but that's about it. That's how highly we value bodily autonomy in this society.
This same logic applies to the pregnant woman. The woman's body is the only thing keeping the fetus alive, just as the person above was completely dependent upon my body, the fetus is completely dependent on the mother's body. It then follows that due to her bodily autonomy rights, at any time, for an any reason, she can stop the continuation of the pregnancy and let the fetus die. This should not be seen as murder, and she shouldn't face any legal repercussions. Now people could see that woman as a terrible person for doing so, but that's about it. We need to be consistent with how highly we value bodily autonomy in this society.
I believe a woman should have total control of her body all throughout the pregnancy. Is my position the majority position of pro-choice people though, no it's not. It's a mix of positions, with the question of personhood being one of them. The most popular pro-choice position is usually to cut off abortion around the 24-week mark. This is due to the fetus finally having a fully formed nervous system, which means it can feel pain, it has rapid growth in the brain, which means you could argue that it now has a consciousness, and it now has the ability to be born pre-maturely and survive outside the womb. Plenty of people would argue that this is when personhood should be granted and therefore the fetus's right to life protected. Then the only exceptions for abortion after that would be due to medical complications which involve either the mother's health or the fetus's health or both. I would be willing to go with this compromise.
If scientists are ever able to make ectogenesis (the growth of an organism in an artificial environment, outside the body in which it would normally be found, such as the growth of an embryo or fetus outside the mother's body) a reality for human embryos and fetuses then the whole bodily autonomy issue will become a moot point.
That is my stance on the issue.
This is more or less my position. It's an important thing to note that bodily autonomy also applies to the choice to do with your body as you please, including sexual activities. The argument that you give consent by participation in sex holds no ground worth taking seriously despite it being a very common approach.
My go to analogy to support this is transportation. By taking part in thst industry you risk causing harm to another human. If you happen to do this, can they take your bodily fluids and/or even organs to save the life you put in risk? If not, then getting into a car isn't consent to your bodily autonomy.
I do think there's a window in the middle of pregnancy that could be up for discussion. That's after the fetus is developed it's systems and can suffer up to the point it's potentially viable via premature delivery. I am at least sympathetic to this range in pregnancy. Which I believe is essentially the 2nd trimester. At this stage the alterations to the woman's autonomy are still primarily hormonal and she's been through a significant portion of the pregnancy meaning there's at least some form of consent in consideration baring circumstances that prevent it against the their will. While it's a violation of autonomy to not allow abortion in this window, I can at least the argument for now allowing 2nd trimester abortions as plausible. If pressed, I think logic commands they're permissible at any time. But as far as policy goes, given the current landscape, I can see this being a promising compromise. Although the pro-life advocates often are unwilling to compromise at all.
"You don't want to have an abortion because it goes against your religious beliefs, then don't have one. We won't force you to have an abortion."
I'm pro-choice, but this is literally the WORST possible thing to say on behalf of the pro-choice side. Remember that pro-lifers think abortion is literally *murder*. Imagine if someone said "You don't want to murder people because it goes against your religious beliefs, then don't commit one. I don't force you to murder someone, I just want it to be legal."
You are presupposing that abortion isn't murder, which is the very thing that is up for debate! Because if it were murder, then you would never ever write something like that.
This take, in my estimation, is massively mistaken. It completely ignores pregnancies that are caused consensually (aka the vast majority of pregnancies). None of your analogies apply to that issue.
The person sustaining another’s life with their blood did not engage in an activity knowing and consenting to the consequences that it would lead to, which is, all things being normal, a nine month long thing. As a rule, if you consent to something with certain consequences, you also consent to those consequences.
For example, if I walk into a time machine - which, all things being normal, will send me forward or back in time - set the clocks to 2079, and press “start” and “go”, if and when I eventually end up in 2079, I cannot proclaim that I didn’t consent to it, even if I thought I covered the pipe of the other machine that powers the time machine.
To make it analogous, the person giving blood would have to agree beforehand that, all things being normal, their stint of support would last nine months.
As far as I can tell, this issue is not addressed in your comment.
@@TheOtherCaleb While the comment didn't address it, autonomy as a case for choice does. If someone has the right to bodily, this necessarily includes the ability to have sex. If we say you have autonomy, but you cant perform consensual acts, then it's not autonomy. Especially when we consider that consent is obviously not given in a majority of cases as they happen despite birth control.
@@TheOtherCaleb Perhaps I should have given more detail with the hypotheticals I gave, but they are analogous. You created a straw man by adding details that aren't apart of my scenario. Nowhere did I state the person giving blood had no active knowledge and had no consent prior to this situation happening to them. This is supposed to be analogous remember. While not stated outright, it is implied that the person giving blood would have both prior knowledge and did give consent to giving the blood. So, these added details don't change anything. We can even throw in the nine-month part. I know I'm giving blood to keeping someone alive. I give consent to give blood to this person for nine-months. Now let's say I keep this up but during the fifth month I change my mind. I am allowed to do that. That is my bodily autonomy rights at play. I can walk away, and that person passes away. I will not face any legal consequences.
This same logic will and should apply to a pregnant woman.
Hot button topic for me. I'm adamantly against mandated birthers! They need to mind their own goddamn business. Are they concerned or will take care of "the life they supposedly saved"? how abot all those in foster care?
@@michaelbell3181 With that faulty reasoning, you’re right at home. Pick up Joe’s book, it will teach you how to avoid such bad reasoning.
@@TheOtherCaleb WTF are you talking about? Plz copy/pasta it seeing as I can't see it here. btw, I'd put my reasoning up against yours any day!
@@michaelbell3181 I’m comedically pointing out that “mind your own business” is a horrendous argument.
If the best objection to being a single issue voter on abortion is to posit some absolutely absurd philosopher’s hypothetical situations that NO politician would EVER run with, then I think we are on pretty dang good grounds to say in the case of abortion, we should be single issue voters.
“But what about if a politician says he’s going to round up and kill all the black people?!”…. Really? That’s how far you have to push this to make the point? Seeing as how we won’t EVER be forced with that conundrum, yeah, I’m going to vote against abortion.
The video is examining the coherency of a set of beliefs, not trying to posit a personable take on abortion for the common man. If you're not interested in work of this kind, you're in the wrong place.
@@goclbert I am aware of what the video is trying to do. The problem is, it doesn’t work. The reason it doesn’t go through is because the very topic involves the creation of laws in politics. Being realistic is literally part of the philosophical evaluation of this topic. You can’t avoid it, putting your head in the clouds, and saying “yeah but that’s the point”… it’s actually NOT the point on this specific case.
Importantly, though, that hypothetical was not proffered as an objection to single-issue pro-life voting in itself. That hypothetical was posed as a *defeater* for Tom's belief B that abortion *must* be stopped even if it takes significant costs to do so. Tom's belief B implies that, in such a situation, one should vote for the far-right candidate. Since that is false, Tom's belief B is false.
Also, this may be more relevant to everyday politics than one might think. For starters, you misdescribe the thought experiment. Bobby isn't rounding up and killing *all* black people. He is only doing it to many tens of thousands of black people.
This is important. Why? Because there's good reason to think that some realistic policy decisions can, indeed, be the difference between many tens of thousands of born people dying or not. The combination of different approaches to pandemics, different approaches to drugs, different approaches to healthcare, different approaches to gun regulation, and different approaches to environmental issues can easily amount to a difference of many tens of thousands of born lives saved or killed. If one's non-abortion-related political views lead one to judge that the pro-choice candidate would save many tens of thousands of born lives with their policies that would otherwise be killed with the pro-life candidate's policies -- as many millions of people's views are like in the United States -- then the case is actually reasonably relevant to our actual political situation.
Of course, the analogy isn't _perfect_ , since (i) the pro-life candidate certainly wouldn't be able to realistically reduce abortions from 900,000 to 900, and (ii) the pro-life candidate won't realistically round up tens of thousands of blacks and kill them; instead. But the analogy wasn't meant to be perfect in this respect; it was only meant to test out intuitions about Tom's belief B.
"you proved i'm wrong but i don't care"
ok
If you don't like hypotheticals, how about you answer the historical example presented later in the video?
In 1989 The murderous communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu banned abortion. When he was overthrown Romania legalized abortion. Knowing this, do you support Ceaușescu's secret police in torturing and murdering civilians to prevent his overthrow?
Religion SHOULDN'T interfere with legal matters.
The legality of abortion is merely a matter of social contract.
And moral realism is false.
kkkkkkkkkkk
It more boils down to a question of what constitutes a human person and whether or not the lives of certain human persons should be legally protected.
@@danter9934 the status of personhood is socially constructed. A fetus in a vacuum has no personhood. So, it all boils down to how the broader society views them.
@@gabri41200 I may be misreading your point but it seems to me that by the same logic we could put any human individual in a vacuum and say they are devoid of personhood, which is a slippery slope. I and many other pro-lifer's would argue that human beingness and personhood are inseperable.
@danter9934 no, you are right. Any human in a vacuum is not a person. What's the matter with that?
The only reason you should support an abortion ban is if you want to intentionally lower the quality of health care for pregnant people and their children
Or if you believe that all lives should be legally protected. I'm aware that there are double standards held by people on both sides, but if you truly believed that all lives should be legally protected, that's a valid reason.
@@danter9934 I don't want to hear a peep about the value of human life from any country that has an active military.
Furthermore, banning abortion doesn't reduce abortions. If reducing the number of abortions is your goal, look elsewhere.
Murdering children is not health care.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
@@TheOtherCaleb If you're pro-life, I understand that you have a complicated relationship with evidence. I'm not sure how to communicate with people like that.
It's haunting to watch someone so resoundingly intelligent (Crummett) be so simultaneously boorish. He mouths standard neoliberal talking points like they were Platonic truths. Truly remarkable.
Bizarre take... If you genuinely believe that Crummett's comments in this video can be characterised as 'boorish' or 'neoliberal' then I'm afraid you either a) haven't watched it or b) have no idea what those words mean.
Which goes to show that intelligence doesn't necessarily make one immune to cognitive biases (distortion of reason by emotions).
Uh oh. Can’t see how this is going to go well. Even if I weren’t a Christian, I would still believe we should not have laws that allow for the whole-sale slaughter of the most innocent human beings.
THIS single issue is an absolute priority.
i see someone didnt watch the vid lol
But you are and that is an influence on your response.
@@logicalliberty132 Not yet, no. I read the title though. Is the title click bait, or can I take it for what it is?
@@andresjimenez1724 I am, but my stance on abortion is equally based in science and logic, as it is in religious conviction. In this way, I can easily shift my reasoning from my religious stance, to a non religious one, given that “science and logic” would then take over as the most reliable forms of epistemology at my disposal.
@@brando3342Please show me a single reputable scientist who claims that a first-trimester fetus has personhood.