The big thing the dead violinist argument skips over is that the "dead violinist" in real life would actually be your child, not some random stranger. So you’re compelled to look after them, just like in any real-life situation where you’re responsible for your own child. For instance, you’re obligated to feed and care for your baby, (People who don't feed their babies and allow them to starve are seen as monsters) but you’re not compelled to go across the world and feed babies in Africa.
If someone implanted an embryo into your uterus that wasn't related to you biologically, would it be permissable to terminate the pregnancy, as this parental obligation wouldn't apply here?
@@grovr7543 Its a fair point but yes I think you would have less of an obligation to look after it, similar to if someone dumped a random orphan at your doorstep, you wouldn't be morally obligated to care for it. It’s not that you shouldn’t care or that doing so wouldn't be an admiral act; it’s just that the obligation isn't there, much like how traveling to Africa to help feed starving children is a noble act, but not a legal duty.
More or less agree. But I think the distinction isn't (given the assumption we're talking about a child) that the child is yours, but that you were responsible for them being in that situation. I would say a rape victim has no moral obligation, because they are not responsible for the situation.
Each side quotes what they value most in this. The symmetry is this: Pro-life accepts forced birth for the mother and Pro-choice accepts death of the fetus, each as the lesser evil.
I don't think the violinist argument really works, except in the case of rape. It fails to recognise that the person was responsible for the situation. To make it more accurate, I think it would have to be: Imagine you cause a car accident, and wake up connected to a person from the other car, who you injured. Perhaps you would be permitted to disconnect them from you. But you would be held responsible for their death, if they died. I don't think the objection given to it in the video works either, though. Disconnecting yourself from the violinist would seem a pretty similar act to cutting an umbilical cord, to me. So if the abortion was started that way, it would parallel the situation with the violinist, I think. I don't think the Future Like Ours argument works either. Imagine you had an incubating machine, with an egg in one chamber, and sperm in another, and it was set up on a timer. Unplugging the machine, I think, would deprive the system as a whole of a future like ours, I think. [EDIT: I think there needs to be a present like ours before it becomes relevant whether or not a future like ours is prevented.] BTW, I'd guess when they're talking about whether there's an individual, they're talking about individuation (in the embryonic sense, not the psychological one). It's the point before which an embryo can split into identical twins (or partly split, forming conjoint/Siamese twins, I think?). It's about 14 days after fertilisation, I think.
As time has passed I have moved from pro-chiose to pro-life. My perspecive breaks into 3 main pillars: - I Think we (men and women) have a responsability to out children as they are the life we create. Keeping them alive is step 1. Due to our biology, women are the ones that can bear chldren, but if men coud, they would have that responsability too. I strongly disagree with the take that the life that is creted is so insignificant that can be killed/eliminated because someone has made that desition. - It creates legal inequalities between men and women. Not only do men have no capacity to decide over the future of his child, but I do not think there are legal course of action if a man wants to renounce to the child's responsabilities if he does not want to have the baby and the woman does. - Having kids has been presented under a more negative light that positive in recent time, and that has lead to a generation with the lowest birthrate ever recorded, creating many distinct problems for our society. Harvesting a positive perception on kids is important since it will help society on the long run, and I think having kids provides the individual with the chance to mature/grow in a specific way that cannot be achieved though other means.
@@blurka No, but it should be seen as a reprehensible act outside of medical necessity or severe exceptions like a girl that got pregnant because of abuse. I am not in favor of making it illegal, since it generally drives undesired consequences, like the prohibition. Rather creating social norms that can transform the perspective of people on this topic.
@blurka because not everything we go is solely guided by legality. Lots of things we do are social norms. For instance, it is not illegal to say bad words to others without reason, but we socially set the norm to be friendly and cordial towards others when we meet them. Similarly, we can present abortion as not acceptable. While this won't make a full stop from this to happen, it can greatly reduce the frequency. Furthermore, when there is legal intervention on things like this, it can backfire. A clear example was the prohibition.
The Violinist argument is flawed as he appears attached to you "magically" while a baby doesn't appear inside of you magically, it's there because you have chosen and agreed to do *something* - that's a huge difference. This argument's logic is only valid for non-rape scenarios but these are most common.
The violinist wouldn’t be attached to you “magically”, but rather through a physical & medical process that you did not consent to. Also, Consenting to sex is not consenting to being pregnant.
@@cubonefan3 Consenting to sex means you realize the potential outcome of it - which is pregnancy. Pregnancy doesn’t come about magically, it’s the consequence of sex, and if you’re not ready to bear that burden, it is advisable to take preventive measures or not have sex at all rather than end another person’s life
@@cubonefan3 consenting to shooting in the head someone Isn’t consenting to kill him. Your logic makes no sense. If you intentionally and without coercion agree to perform an action that you know has a natural chance of making another person’s life dependent on your body, then you are responsible for putting yourself and the other person in that condition. Which calls into question your right to take back your autonomy at the cost of the other person.
Let's expand that scenario, then. You don't just wake up one day attached to the violinist. Instead, you started out driving a car-an act that is your privilege to do as an adult, but which carries a non-zero risk of a collision, something which comes as a risk of driving whether you consciously consent to it or not-and you collide with the violinist. It doesn't matter whose fault it was or whether you were fully alert or drunk or in any other state. Regardless, you wake up after the accident finding yourself attached to the violinist because you are the only one capable of keeping him alive.
@@imagomonkei if driving was actually analogous to the pregnancy, and you were the only person that could save temporarily the other person life, and the accident was your fault, then yes, you still wouldn’t have a right to let the other person die, and it wouldn’t be in your interests to be charged with murder instead of spending some months attached to another person.
The argument Marquis poses for the “Future Like Ours” is reminiscent of Aristotle’s Potentiality Principle, which I know is quite prominent for many Pro-life ethical arguments in determining personhood. Loved the approach you took with this video, by the way.
Pro Life means saving life. Pro Choice means giving the choice. To be both you must give the choice to the mother to save her life. I have become both.
I lean on pro-life, but agreed that 08:11 remark does show a slippery slope from the statement "Life begins at conception". There's IVF nowadays, for people having difficulty conceiving (or people who want twins, triplets easier :D). As soon as the eggs (already taken outside the female) are fertilized, is it "murder" if one steps on them? If not, at what point is it NOT ok to do so? Please join me on this.
I've always found Thompson's pro-choice argument to be a rather compelling one but only in nonconsensual circumstances like rape. If you never consented to supporting this other life, then it would feel wrong to force you into doing that. But if you did consent to it, chose to start carrying a life with full knowledge of what it would mean, then it does seem pretty shameful to give up that commitment. I also really appreciate the argument in that it starts from the standpoint that the fetus is something valuable, with personhood. It makes the argument one that can appeal to whatever side you fall on in the personhood debate.
I think both arguments fail for different reasons: The first argument fails in part because of what you said there’s a difference between killing someone and letting someone die you might be okay with allowing a bystander to let someone drown in a river but you probably wouldn’t condone throwing them into the river but there’s actually another issue. The responsibilities a parent has to their children are completely different from those that a stranger has to another stranger. This is the reason child support exists for example. The other thing is that there’s a huge difference between being thrust into a situation where someone needs you and putting someone into that situation and then walking away. If you shoot someone do you not have a moral obligation to provide them life support? Sometimes you can compel people to preserve someone’s life The second argument fails because it just draws an arbitrary line. Yes the fetus has a potential future but so does every gamete. Drawing the line at conception and especially after it is arbitrary and contradictory. Furthermore I don’t agree that killing someone is wrong because it deprives them of a future. That’s just a negative side effect. If you see someone falling from a building and you shoot them you’re still a criminal even if you’re not depriving anyone of a future since that person was going to die anyway. Overall abortion arguments both for and against keep missing the mark because they keep insisting on analogies when pregnancy and therefore abortion is not analogous to anything
I disagree with yout take on the pro-life counter-argumentation. - First, I reject conception is an arbitraty point. it is a clear case of something that if let to its normal development, it wiil develop into a baby. a gamete does not have that inherent capacity. Just like a car pieces. They do not have the capacity to take you to places, but when they are put together, it becomes a new thing (car) that has the capacity of transportation. - Second, I understand your point of depriving someones future might not necessarily be a bad thing if you take for instante serial killers, or people with a terminal desease since it can even prevent that suffering. Yet, you did a somewhat easy and extreme case to support it. A more appropiate case would be to deprive of its future a regular child. That would be closer to the fetus scenatio rather than someone falling to his death. I think you would categorize depriving that kind of future to be a bad thing. Thanks for your post.
In the Unconscious Violinist thought experiment, it says nothing about the *duty of care* to the Violinist. A much better framing around this debate is 'for or against parental responsibility'. Do I have a duty of care to the Violinist? What if I signed up to this & was paid for it? Do I then have the right to change my mind and unplug him? What if I gave the money back? What if it's my fault that he's sick in the first place? Do I have a responsibility to help save him then? I'd personally say that the parents should have a default legal responsibility of guardianship (you break it, you buy it). That the legal guardian has certain duties to and regulations protecting the child. That the legal guardian has a right to give up guardianship at any time (a*ortion or a*option).
That is not how you should compare abortion. Abortion is a direct and intentional k*lling, how would it be framed as that tho'? Yes, you do not have an obligation to care for that violinist, BUT you do have an obligation to NOT to k'll that violinist. Letting it die and k"lling is completely different, if it equates therefore you have k*lled a person for not donating to charity? And plus the violanist argument completely obliterated the special obligation to care for that child. I think I could visualize this why you have a special obligation to care for that child in this analogy: Imagine we are in a horror movie, I am connected with you with an electrical wire in your body, you severing the connection would activate a bomb and would directly k-ll me, is it still "just" that you happen to k+ll me? Plus, you didn't let me die, I am not even dying here (like a fetus, like an embryo), you actually just activate the bomb knowing it will k;ll me, that is k-lling, that is not merely letting someone die. I could argue that it is just that you k*lled me here IF it isn't intentional, but abortion is most of the time is an INTERNATIONAL act. But for the sake of this argument and to visualize why you have a special obligation, you directly causing my death isn't intentional, if that is the case, I would argue, yes you do have a right to severe the connection (well this part is controversial, even if it's not intentional, you would still be at fault here, you still k-lled me here, but for the sake of the argument, it somehow works, it's not your fault), but who's at fault here? I think it's not the you who severe the connection, but rather the one who set up us here, the one who strap the bomb on us, and you know who set up the trap here, it is YOU, the reason why it is still your fault even if it isn't intentional because you are the one who created this scenario. Well, that means in consensual act in engaging in bed, EVEN IF you didn't consent to having a fetus, you are still the one who is at fault, because you are the one who did all of this, and you know what it entails? A special obligation. Don Marquis argument I think implies that the fetus has a right to not be killed, and it seems like you have a *special* obligation to not kill that fetus here or me even in the analogy.
Let's say you found yourself isolated in a forest during a blizzard. You stumble across a cabin. You let yourself in to escape the blizzard. There's heat, food, water, and communication. You radio for help, but they won't be able to get to you for 3 days. No worries, you have plenty of supplies. Then you discover that an infant is alone in the cabin, no sign of a parent. There's plenty of formula and water, diapers, etc. Are you obligated to care for the infant until help arrives in 3 days? I would say, yes, because the burden on you is minimal. Allowing them to die, because you may not feel like caring for them, is no different than outright killing due to the circumstances.
the argument of "not morally obligated to save her" or "not obligated to save her" is funny. im from denmark. its illegal to not try and save a person if its safe to do so but abortion is also legal
Critique for arugment 1. Given the uterus is solely designed to keep a fetus alive, its purpose is exterior not interior. Unlike a kidney, which purpose to to support the owners life no one else. Wouldn't this undermine the libertarian "it's mine" idea? It would be more similar to evicting a person from a house you rented out. Critique of arugement 2. Since we don't know the future of any person but we do know the future of the pregnant woman within reasonably, wouldn't the 8 months and damage to the body be worth more than the potential life someone else may have? It seems more like a gamble than a reason to deny someone automy
"Given the uterus is solely designed to keep a fetus alive, its purpose is exterior not interior." I don't buy this argument. The purpose of a vagina is to have a penis put in it. That doesn't mean a woman is morally obliged to have a penis put in there if she doesn't want it.
Damn super interesting video, when i usually hear about this topic on the internet i feel like the arguments aren't that interesting and that both sides are not well represented, i feel like pro choice is usually associated with social movements, like the empowerment of women, and pro life are more moral arguments that come mostly from religion. I ve seen some utilitarian arguments, where you consider the future quality of life of the baby and the mother compared to the cenario where she had an abortion. I feel like this is such a nuanced topic that is really determined by what you consider as a human and by how we measure the value of a life, this is a debate where philosophy has real life consequences, i think you did a great job at staying neutral and presenting both arguments. I love your channel, keep up the good work!
!!! What a great channel! This video showed up in my feed randomly and now I get the pleasure of binging through all this great content. Instantly subbed.
The FLO argument reminds me of a concept on public health called YLL (or Years of Life Lost), to measure the financial and societal efficacy of a negative health outcome. A childhood vaccine for measles, or NICUs are the ultimate most efficient way to prevent YLL since they occur so early in the life cycle. Even if a treatment is expensive, the financial and emotional/moral value to society that is potentially lost is greater for more expensive early-life interventions than for later life interventions. This to me is a good metaphor for the FLO argument.
is it morally permissible to kill someone, as long as they would die at that exact moment if you hadnt? you’re not quite depriving them of life, though it does seem intuitively bad. great video, i liked how the arguments didnt focus on the idea of personhood! (although, it was incorporated in the FLO paper)
Interesting question. If FLO was the only aspect to consider, that would have to mean it's okay. Though we do have to ask the question how certain we can be that the person is indeed going to die that second. Is it possible that we misjudge the situation or their condition, or that we've been lied to by others? Are we 99% sure? 99.99%? Should we rather err on the side of caution? What would be the payoff for killing a person who is dying the same moment anyway, and is that worth taking even the smallest risk? If taking zero hours off that persons life could save my own, or someone else, I probably would (I can already hear the trolley problem), otherwise it's still a no-go in my book.
I didn’t know there are still “actual” philosophers but I think phikosphy is still very much needed for moral delemas and in such political times, great video
At the start of this video, I was intrigued. “I’ve never heard a good argument for abortion, so this will be interesting.” Nothing changed. Not even a philosopher was able to make a good case for it. Maybe there are good ones out there though.
I have a different take on this: What if you were given the opportunity to visit the most beautiful place on the planet. You would get a free room, but there was a chance, 1 out of 100 that you would be given cancer. If you happened to be the one person who got cancer, taking care of your disease would be your responsibility forever, if you went into remission, if you sought treatment, all on you. Many people would not go on this vacation. it wouldn't be worth the risk. but enough people would go, and inevitably some of the people would be infected with the cancerous cells. Are the people who left to go on the trip responsible for their own situation? This debate has very little to do with life and death. It has to do with a social and biological contract that the participants sign when they engage in the pleasurable act. Sex is pleasurable, desirable, and a burning passion inside humans for one reason alone- it leads to the birth of more humans. If you partake in the act, but refuse to honor the commitment, you have committed a moral wrong. This is why Rape is the only permissible exception. You didn't agree to the contract, so you are not biologically or morally required to fulfill it.
Have you never heard of the Whitakers, the most inbred family found so far? Have you never had to deal with an ectopic pregnancy of a loved one? Have you never had a daughter who was only 12-13 who became pg? Have you never comforted a family where the fetus died?
This is true but, real life is messy. Sex education is lacking in many countries, what about people that think birth control never fails? What about guys who sabotaged birth control? People peer pressured into sex but not necessarily raped? It's also a hard choice for many women because men are very sex-centric and require it for intimacy, are the women supposed to be alone? Our emotions get the best of us.
To make the unconscious violinist more accurate. Say you're out driving and somehow you get into a crash with another driver. Maybe it was your, their, both or neither's fault... either way you hit a violinist who was just a pedestrian on the sidewalk. You wake up connected to this unconscious violinist. Refusing to wait 10 minutes to let them live has got to be morally wrong. I mean come on.
Okay, what would you do if the violinist was drunk driving and it was solely their fault. Would u still want to be attached? They just committed a crime against you and now you’re stuck with the punishment??
@@deeryme9374 maybe not, but that is completely disanalogous any case of a pregnancy. If a drunk driver slammed into me and pushed my car into a violinist pedestrian, I'd still be sympathetic to the violinist. He didn't have anything to do with it
@@gustavbruunkjr5123 very good and interesting point. I can’t come up with the exact reasoning, but to me that doesn’t feel entirely analogous to pregnancy via rape. Like the rapist just seems more solely responsible for it but I can’t come up with the reasoning. Good point it made me think a lot
@@deeryme9374 yeah. I don't know what to make of these arguments. I still support abortion-rights, maybe on utilitarian grounds, if not by denying the personhood of a fetus
@@gustavbruunkjr5123 Denying the personhood of a fetus is in the end, the ONLY way to morally justify abortion, which is why often the debate boils down to that.
While I think your criticism for the pro-life side is the best one, I would have to disagree with the one for the pro-choice side (even though I think it´s still good). I think the main critique on her argument would be something like "societal-and emotional dissimilarities". You do not have any emotional connection towards the violinist who was forcibly put into that situations, which is completely opposite to (consensual) intercourse and pregnancy where the fetus inside you will (if not aborted and not cared for) develop such a connection, which will also make you feel a kind of responsibility towards that fetus. I think the stronger pro-choice arguments would be to delve more into consciousness and explore more thoroughly how and when we determine when personhood begins and what makes us such persons. In my opinion that´s when we have the capacity to deploy a conscious experience, so like 20-28 weeks.
With the invention of artificial wombs, do you think 'maybe it should be the opposite'? A fetus is viable for artificial wombs after 26 weeks, so should be say 'hold of it'll then'? If we could safely remove the fetus and move it into an artificial womb, is that preferable?
I think Thomson addresses your argument. She says that there are better and worse kinds of abortion (or something like that) depending on how intentional a pregnancy was-for example, if you intentionally got pregnant and then decided to get an abortion, then Thomson would see that as morally worse than if you weren't intending to get pregnant. However, for me, I've always felt like even if you decided (yourself) to plug into the violinist, you always have the right to unplug yourself since it's your body.
@@humanperson8418 Thats not the argument Im making bro, I dont care about artificial wombs and I dont like bodily autonomy and viability arguments. With artificial wombs I still hold the position that they can be aborted within the first 20 weeks, doesnt change my position at all.
@@InaquiSantos oh okay, I didnt know that, I think thats nonesense tho and I dont understand how it can be "morally worse" but not immoral, especially if she was pro choice. And i would have to agree with your position, bodily autonomy is imo better than her criticism of the intentionality.
Here is what I find problematic with the Thompson argument. She’s ignoring the fundamental difference from the 2. Example a mother’s biological process welcomes this human by allowing them to exist. This is why she even has a uterus is to bare a human. Her own body adapts to pregnancy. This is who we exist. So the moral obligation would be to her young. Unlike the violenist. Who body never welcomed this other person. This would also be taking a extornary act to save this violinest. Pregnant is also not saving the life unlike the violinist. I think the moral obligation is going to be fundamentally different. Meaning yes she has a obligation to her young unlike someone else like a stranger.
The difference in the violinist and a fetus is the DNA. MOST (but not all) people tend to care more about people of their own DNA than a violinist that is a random stranger or friend. This is the difference between a mother hearing that their kid has been run over by a bus at their school versus a mother hearing that their kid’s best friend was run over by a bus. Both are tragic, but one is more likely to have a stronger effect on the mother than the other.
If there was only a 1% chance that abortion is actually the murdering of a human being, I still wouldn’t support the risk. I don’t believe in any killing, whatsoever. Of course, I’m talking about a typical abortion, not one where the mother’s life is also at risk.
Further intuition from stuff like the comatose argument point to human organisms being the entity from which we can confidently identify a future like ours. Abortion appears to be wrong at whatever point in conception the new organism (which is the same organism as I am in when I am conscious) exists.
@@Sue-xv8osI'm not so sure since abortion has been legal we've had more(per capita and raw number) fatherlessness, more single parent households, more broken families, more children in foster homes etc. If abortion is supposed to alleviate these issues then why have they only increased???
@@Sue-xv8os You tell me. I'm just telling you those things have gone up not down since abortion became legal even though it was and frankly still is used as an "solution" to "unwanted" children even though we have more foster children, not less.
My critique of the FLO argument is this; If the fetus is preventing a young person from a FLO, would it be morally right to say "Hey, i know your not ready for this baby, nor did you want it, but lets mess up your future to give the fetus a FLO" ? I believe that, if the fetus is preventing a FLO, it should be arborted rather than that young persons life to be ruined.
I would argue you can't know for sure having the baby would stop the person from having a FLO, but you know for sure killing the fetus will. Plenty of people have had babies that weren't planned at a young age and still live happy and fulfilling lives. This critique would only hold if you 100% know the baby being born will prevent the person from having a FLO to the same degree killing the fetus would do to it.
It's the type of experiences we will have in the future that flo values, not the quality of those experiences. A billionaire and a homeless person both have a flo, even if the quality of these people's future experiences aren't equivalent.
My problem with the FLO argument is this: Just because something **could potentially** happen doesn't mean it will, and this potentiality also doesn't imply any rights. Let's assume there was one person without a right to live, one really bad person that's going to commit a terrible crime. I am allowed, I am supposed, to k*ll that person in my thought experiment. Am I allowed to k*ll everyone I meet? They could potentially be the bad guy. From what our society commonly deems as moral, no. And as both arguments are making huge assumptions in the beginning and are by far not from first principle, I would say that potentiality, in this case, does not imply rights. Secondly, potentiality as used in the FLO argument necessitates both non action and action at the same time. If I eat my bread, I **could** solve world hunger. I **could** also worsen world hunger. With an unknown future, everything becomes possible. The tongue he just used could've been prevented from a FLO by his decision to speak. I know that some things are more likely to happen than others, I know that this kind of philosophy can't do without inductive reasoning. But even Marquise will have to accept that he doesn't actually knows what's going to happen. He's assuming knowledge of the future which he doesn't have. If no information is available, and every decision is thus random, every choice has the exact same likelihood of being the correct one. If the mother decided to abort, that would be fine. Because the fetus has no right to infringe on the mother's potential future either.
Yeah arguing from potential is really not solid because possibility is not the same as actuality however your counter has the flaw of probability. A random person is probably not going to be a murderer but a fetus will almost certainly develop into a human so it would be more like killing baby Hitler
@@truly_infinite your argumentation denied FLO. Hence, I challenged you to propose an alternate moral reasoning to explain why it is morally wrong to kill another person.
That pro choice argument is very odd to me. There's a huge difference between the violin player and the baby; you didn't tether the violin player to yourself. This is a huge distinction, because unless a conception happened due to rape, you actually DID tether yourself to the fetus.
One could argue the decision to have sex and the decision to be pregnant are two different choices. Condoms are effective 82% of the time in the real world (can be much higher in theory), which means that 18% of sexual interactions that are ostensibly protected are actually not, for example. That’s almost 1/5 sexual encounters. We don’t need to invoke rape for an example of pregnancy being against someone’s wishes.
A better version of that scenario is to assume you started off driving. Driving a car carries an inherent risk of getting into an accident, whether you want it to happen or not. So by choosing to drive, you must implicitly accept the risk of an outcome you don't want. After that, you collide with the violinist (let's say he was just a passenger, not the one driving the other car). It doesn't matter if you were at fault or not. It doesn't matter if you were aware or drunk or if your protection (i.e., brake) broke. Are you obligated to remain tethered to him for nine months until he recovers?
But I feel like if you would let it pass if it happened “magically,” then I think it’s fine to let pass if it didn’t happen magically. If your only problem with it is the “magically” part, then I presume you agree with the core principle beyond that. We also need to consider that Judith granted the fetus a person; if the only problem is the “magically,” part, you are sort of downplaying the suddenness and, debatably, involuntary aspects of sex. Let us explore this. Sex, almost always, occurs because of hormones-the same hormones that can blind rational thought. Now, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be responsibility because of those hormones; we need that to function as a society, but responsibility and blame aren’t the same thing. I would argue the people are hardly to blame here so they get responsibility, the same way the person does in the violinist example, and they have the right to end it there. Obviously this doesn’t apply in all contexts, but in this one, especially with the grant as big as the fetus is a person, I think it works.
@@ollieb8738still , you'd expect a person of sound mind to understand that having intercourse has a risk of pregnancy. Even if they may have not liked it they were willing to accept the risk
@@SkepticalSkepticthis may come off as a bit prudish or aggressive but I don't buy the arguement that hormones somehow absolve blame and responsibility I mean if you have monks , communities where people still wait until marriage most of the time for the average person it shouldn't be difficult to control
2 women are pregnant. One of them wishes to keep the baby and the other one does not. In fact, the latter is on her way to the doctor to abort it. The two women however are attacked by another person who causes them to end their pregnancy. Should the the assailant be charged with both the attack against the women and for the death of the unborn baby in each case? The only logical answer is that he should be punished for both in both cases, but if we accept that idea, then this must certainly mean that life begins at conception! However, if the pro-abortion argument insists on that the end of pregnancy was not determined by the pro-abortion woman herself, but by a third party, then this leads us to the unprecedented and ludicrous belief that a person can determine whether and when life or not exists and not biology itself, which simply does not make any sense!
I am Pro-Choice, but I don't agree with the pro-choice argument presented here. If a person dies or gets hurt because you chose NOT to help, you should be punished. That's actually the law in my country and you can go to jail for up to one year for that. I also disagree with your personal take on it. Because I don't see a difference between "actively killing" and "letting someone die". In both cases, you actively decide about what is supposed to happen to a person. It may feel different, but it is the same thing. Also: "Compelling someone to do something against their will is slavery, isn't it?" No, it is not. Our entire society is built around compelling people to do things. You are forced to pay taxes. You are forced to follow traffic regulations. If you don't to those things, you are being forced to go to jail.
There's vague consent elements involved in taxation and traffic regulations in the sense that you're utilizing things that those rules are there for. So government wise it's kinda vague because of our active use of government services which some believe imply consent. Like yeah I hate waiting at a red light when there's no other cars but I'm still gonna do it cause I benefit by following those rules and want other people too. But I will admit it's kinda vague. As to the killing vs letting someone die, the philosopher Philippa Foot covered it in the video I did on her so maybe she's more convincing than me on this lol.
@@PhilosophyToons I think that compelling someone to do something is only slavery when they have to use their physical body for it, forcing someone to do something in the sense of giving up material things isn't slavery
@@Akari-og1lkI would argue that forcing someone to give something up would be thievery, which may not be as morally reprehensible as slavery but is still bad
I have one critique of the pro choice argument, and it's simply that... well, are you RESPONSIBLE for the violinist state? Let's shift the question a bit, you have fun with your friends and get falling down drunk, decide to drive recklessly on the road and boom you crash into someone hurting their liver. Now they are forced into a state, by YOUR negligence, in which they're forced to use your liver for toxin removal for 9 months. Are you obligated to sit there and offer your liver? In my opinion? YES. Obviously we don't have a system like this in real life for practical reasons, but you can carry over the logic for pregnancies. As for the vagueness of the pro life argument, my view on it would be 10 or so weeks. Before that youre not really depriving a future from any ONE because there is no "one", it's just a clump of cells. But when the first electrical signals start firing in the fetus brain waves i think we can safely determine we're taking a future away from a some"one"
This system doesn't exist, not for practical reasons but ethical ones. Do two wrongs make a right? Is it right to save someone's life even if it requires violating their fundamental rights? I say no.
@@thejabberwocky2819 But we already do take away fundamental rights. We can throw someone in jail for their wrongs, taking their fundamental right to bodily automony for 30 years.
@@rectaalborween8471 We take away fundamental rights in very specific circumstances for very specific reasons. Jail is meant to keep dangerous people separated from the general population. For instance, we don't take away the right to life because someone stole a loaf of bread. And since right to integrity is the most fundamental right, without which no other right is possible, you need a VERY strong justification to take it away.
@@rectaalborween8471 And no, jail takes the right to liberty, not the right to autonomy. You still get to make decisions about your body, just not where it goes.
@@thejabberwocky2819 And that is my point, you throwing out "muh rights" is absolutely meaningless to me because any right can be taken away with the right justification. And my justification is: If you did something bad to someone, prepare to pay the cost of fixing it.
6:21 where did the premise "human futures are the only ones that are immoral to deprive others from" come in? The morality of killing animals is a whole different can of worms and shouldn't even be brought up as a side remark
From what i can tell, It's meant to set apart a sapient life from a non-sapient. Like how the theory of evolution says humans are animals. To me It looks like its brought up to acknowledge the obvious difference between humans and animals without really getting into why. It feels like a natural line of thought if the conversation is 'if aborting a baby is murder'- then state if the same is okay with animals, why or why not, and so on.
@@lawty6249 you don't have to talk about animals at all, just because you're talking about delete a future/potential life of experiences. A massive problem with people's beliefs about animals, is that they just go "Uhm.. their experience is different from ours, so it doesn't matter." without justifying that or even thinking about it. An interjected remark like that, just fuels the THOUGHTLESS unjustified disregard of the value of non-human lives. So if you want to take yourself seriously philosophically, especially when we're on the topic of morality, just stick to making conclusions relevant to the topic
When it comes to firstly establishing whether a fetus a person or not, I think it's both. Human life starts at conception, but a human being would start at consciousness and experience. Either way, I'm pro life because the most essential part of nature is to reproduce. To live and thrive as a species. It's crucial in all animals.
Is forcing someone to not let a person die wrong? Is forcing someone not to kill a person inside of her wrong? Rather than robbing of a future, is there not such a thing as intrinsic worth? If someone was dying or in horrendous pain and thus thought they had no future, would killing him or her be wrong? These arguments miss some main points.
The issue I have with the FLO argument (besides the critique you gave in the video) is that it doesn't deliver a convincing explanation as to why the potential futures of other animal species are supposedly so different that they don't count as a FLO and are not worthy of the same treatment.
Should’ve given the responsibility objection to the Pc side. I also think you let Don Marquis off a little too easy. Would be interested in seeing another abortion video. Perhaps psychological continuity vs some pro life metaphysical approach to personhood like Aristotelian metaphysics
About your FLO critique, A women can only have a limited amount of pregnancies in their lifetime (lets say 10 for easy math) That means only ten out of a trillion sperms per man can be fertilized, and 10 out of a million eggs can be fertilized, and so their chance of FLO is only 10 in a trillion or ten in a million respectively. If there is only a 1/100,000 chance of occurrence, it's by detention not a future like ours, or a fertilized egg which have feasible chances to occur. An interesting follow up would be, at the very least, do we have a moral responsibility to have the 10 or so kids then? "Future like ours" the wording is critical, I would say someone living in 'heaven' has a different future as someone living in 'hell' theirs no "future like [each-others]" shared between them, likewise If everyone tried to have as many kids as possible, we would live in a different (and I'd argue a relatively hellish) world, at most we would only have a moral responsibility to has as many kids that is most likely to yield a future comparable to ours, if you take the premise that FLO means an embryo has life, but inconsequentially a sperm might. This is of course assuming that "Future like ours" is valid of course as it was assumed in the video, it might not be of course, I only intend to object the video's objection, (and that objection's, objection).
The implications for “right to use” are completely ignored. Is a mother not morally obliged to breastfeed her newborn? Can she exercise her bodily autonomy trumping the baby’s right to life? (The existence of alternative caregivers or formula is irrelevant given that we are questioning if the right to autonomy supersedes the right to life)
When the 'Personhood' topic is danced around so vehemently doesn't it make it pretty obvious why? He states at 1:10 that it gets "very complex". I disagree, Its very simple when you push this part of the argument, because ignoring this aspect is the only way to have a 'disscussion' like in the video. The only way to justify murdering an unborn or "abortion" is to deny it is a person at all, and that is because so few can truly speak aloud and say 'murdering an child is okay, good, or even encouraged' without sounding like a psychotic lunatic. So instead it is turned into strange semantics and utter denial. Being a human isn't defined by your consciousness, your personality, your ability to think, or how developed you are physically. Every single person who watched this video IS human and developed from the womb to be who they are. We all weren't aliens until a specific couple weeks of development, or when we were birthed, the second you were conceived you existed, a person, who developed into who they are today. Accepting that shows that abortion is wrong.
Nope, you're simply factually wrong. I don't need to deny personhood. I don't even need to deny giving the fetus rights (even though sane countries do not give rights to fetuses). It's very simple: no living, born person has a right to anyone else's body even to save their life. That's it. Period. That argument relies on a fetus being a person but recognizing that no person should have a right to anyone else's body.
@@thejabberwocky2819 Lets assume you are right. Then the next step is dealing with the consequences of that. That means ending the other person's life. This is the part where the personhood argument does matter. Even if nobody has the right to your body, is it morally okay to kill someone because of it?
@@thejabberwocky2819 "but recognizing that no person should have a right to anyone else's body." Why not if it can save life while sacrificing something sufficietly minimal? I'd argue that the right to life would supercede the right to do what i want with my body the moment that i find myself attached to another person body and have to stay attached to keep them alive. But i only have to stay attached 10 seconds and will have no psychological or physical concequences. In this case i'd argue that we have a moral duty to make this small sacrifice and failure to wait 10 seconds would be equivalent to intentionally killing another person without sufficient justification.
@@andrespolanco3182 Nope, again the personhood doesn't matter. Watch. If I'm dying and need your blood to live, can I take it against your will? I'm a person.
I have very valid arguments against the categories people make to convince themselves that these organisms have "souls" and that therefore they should. But when it comes to this argument where you suppose they are important because they have a future, i gotta for one ignore the fact that we don't know their future and they can possibly die, and ignore that your future is affected too and being robbed too, and ignore where ethics come from, since this means that killing a braindead person that his family want to stay alive, is totally okay, for there is no future, which is smth that automatically arised from the lack of understanding of how ethics work and how tied they are to our human emotional aspect. And then i gotta ask what makes the fusion of a sperm cell and an ovocyte so special, and id i can cut the junctions between cells, and make the result multiple twins (an argument previously used against the fact that a zygote suddenly gains this magical power called soul after fusion, then gives more souls by our own creation? But that's not the point here, we assume no one believes in spiritual magical souls in the first place), and therefore would you say that you would need to always do that since if you don't, you would also be stealing the future of those twins you created? If we were to genetically modify the human zygote and make him an ape zygote (argument made previously for the human zygote being so special cuz it has "human soul" powers cuz human power only comes from human power, -even if you want to word that differently-, when you could just modify it and make it having another organism's soul powers, which shows the misunderstanding about the molecular aspect of whatever people call life), the same argument works to show how a human zygote could show a couple of different amino acids, and that would be all the difference with other zygotes, and if you were to modify other zygotes, they would be able to become human, and therefore all animals would have a future, so all things that can have in one of its possible futures a human life, should be sacred, (nutrients themselves sacred?), which requires another post hoc rationalisation since the initial logic we started from was flawed in the first place and awaits many modifications each time to make it make more sense.
Btw the reason we have ethics is our human emotions. If we were to be rocks or plants, we wouldn't react accordingly and even have the corresponding positive and negative neural responses, and the complex emotions to interact with our environment and feel good and bad, therefore their existence in the first place. If we have an emotional attachment for smth, or that smth shows emotional reactions, as we and that smth are complex organisms that have emotions, then the affliction of pain would be what we would describe with the word unethical in our biased language to describe our agreement on how bad it makes us as a united social structure feel. If the action is agreed upon to engender pain, then it's unethical. R word is just a sexual act, but it's bad specifically because of the emotional traumatic response associated with it, no matter if other animals do it. Murder without suffering wouldn't be bad if we didn't have emotions to show about it. If all were to disappear pouf, there would be no emotional reaction, therefore the impossibility of establishing a moral comment on the event. If you pronounce the word shark and it causes the same traumatic response as the forceful sexual act, it is just as unethical. Unaliving someone causes deep emotional responses in him suffering and other beings feeling for him. Unaliving a brain-dead patient whose family considers to be alive, therefore holds the same emotional value for them as someone that is alive, is therefore unethical. Unaliving a tree that a tribe considers to be their mother, and actually believe in it, or even their god like entity, is unethical, as it holds the same emotional value. Unaliving an embryo, whose nervous system shows no cellular communication at the level of the establishment of what humans call by their linguistic categories, emotional responses, isn't unethical in the limits where no one would know of its existence for example, but unethical if the mother decides to keep him alive, therefore it holds the same emotional value as an alive embryo, and unaliving it is like hilling her child, because for her, it's actually her child, alive, and she's attached to him just as much. This is just a perspective on ethics, based on neuroscientific data. You might not believe in another person's religion, but killing his god is probably worse than killing a person in that society's moral code, which you might already agree with in most cases, dear reader. I did not mention actual arguments. I just established the moral framework approximated using our current knowledge. If you want further arguments about anything, feel free to ask.
does judith comment anything on the relationship of the violinist and the person he is attached to? it reminded me of that one if someone is invading your house argument some people use to justify their position.
I think the argument is more persuasive if it begins with you driving. Driving carries an inherent risk (similar to sex, assuming you are trying to avoid pregnancy). Also, the violinist is a passenger in another vehicle, not the driver. Your vehicles collide-the fault doesn't matter-and you wake up from the accident in the scenario of the thought experiment. This is a superior version of the argument because it accounts for consensual sex, drunk sex, date rape, and stochastic rape. You can tweak the variables of the initial premise, but the bottom line is that you got behind the wheel of the car knowing that driving carries a small risk of accident.
@@imagomonkeiI say fault does matter because it creates an obligation to the other person. If I crash into a person's car, and as a result they need a kidney, and it's found I am the only suitable donor, then yeah no one is going to strap me down and take my kidney, but if I don't give the kidney, and the other person dies, then I'll be held responsible for the death. The difference with children is we can incur responsibility to take care of them particularly and especially when no one else can. You don't have to directly wronged a child to be obligated to care for them, even if it is temporary.
The argument for abortion as healthcare treats pregnancy - an exclusively female domain - as a disease to be cured. Is that not misogynistic in some fashion?
I disagree with both arguments. For the first one, why should acively or passively depriving someone of their right to live ever be indecent but not immoral? Shouldn't indecency, by definition, be immoral in some sense? It seems like they try to create a zone of morality where one can be immoral yet not held accountable for it, which is a solution I do not like. As for the second one, Whereas you have half the puzzle pieces or the whole, you consciously know at any moment that contraceptive methods you may use have the consequence of preventing a FLO from manifesting, therefore you really are doing something wrong when you chose to do use them, given that you have the opportunity to generate an FLO. To me, this seems to imply that any time you're not generating an FLO when given the opportunity, you're acting immorally. Marquis clearly knows is absurd, but his argument as to why is simply not enough.
A problem I have with Marquis' argument is that, if a patient told their psychiatrist that they've been chronically depressed for years and doesn't think they'll get better, does that give the psychiatrist the right to shoot that person on sight? I don't think so but if the principle that makes it morally impermissible to kill is the FLO, then I think it would. Thank you for the video!
Well yeah but also the psychiatrist would be able to recognize that they COULD get better. A better example would be medically assisted suicide for terminally ill people. But that argument wouldn't help because most people agree it's that person's choice. But I hope I have pointed out the flaw in your argument.
To be clear the FLO argument would probably make it a moral responsibility on some level for a terminally ill person to kill themselves but not for us to kill them. Because the whole point is not to deprive anyone else of their future but he also doesn't go into detail on what makes that future valuable?
Very interesting video, even as a general lesson on logical argumentation. However there's an implicit transformation, or an implication, that being "pro" either cause is the same as considering such cause moral. This is not obvious to me. I don't think that morality is the criteria adopted by many people to choose their stance on this or any subject.
In my opinion, the attempt to draw an analogy between the famous violinist and a fetus is flawed, because the violinist uses organs intended for the woman, whereas the fetus uses organs intended for itself. The fetus is in its natural environment, while the violinist is not. As a mother, you are obligated to provide shelter and nourishment for your child, and if you refuse to do so, you will be held accountable. You do not have such an obligation towards the violinist.
I think consent is still a more important factor than what the organ is designed for. Sure a v is designed for a d yet without consent it is very illegal.
@@justapotato2434 Not only can a woman not give her consent, but she actually has an obligation to take care of the offspring. Both men and women have their responsibilities, to which they cannot disagree.
@@justapotato2434 Well, obviously. My original comment addresses a hypothetical situation, so I remained in the realm of hypotheses: how it should be. I do not deny that the law currently allows abortions.
I'm not a fan of either of the arguments presented in the video. Critique of the pro-choice argument: Pregnancy is almost always a choice. This argument only functions well in cases of r*pe, or other instances where pregnancy was completely involuntary. Critique of the pro-life argument: FLO is not well defined enough to convince me that contraception is moral on this view. While the sperm & egg may be artificially separated, removing the barrier would allow them to come together and produce a human with a FLO. I think focusing on personhood is a better approach, although I believe a personhood approach could be coupled with this argument to make it stronger. I find this argument stronger than the argument for the pro-choice side presented in the video. I truly think better arguments focus around personhood because it's so intuitive to us as adult humans. I think the best pro-choice argument is that our conscious experience is the most valuable aspect of personhood & that abortion before the conscious experience is possible can be morally permissible. The best pro-life argument is that personhood begins at the point of conception because genetically, a new human is in the process of forming at that point. Personally, I find that, ironically, the pro-life argument as I listed above functions better on a materialistic worldview. This strikes me as ironic because many of the most ardent pro-lifers are motivated by religious conviction. The pro-choice argument I listed also functions on a materialistic worldview (given the hard problem of consciousness is unsolved and consciousness is believed by some to be derivative of the prefrontal cortex), but it also functions on a dualist or even idealist view, where the very essence of who we are has an independent or codependent metaphysical mind or soul component.
Premise one of flo is that it is wrong to deprive an individual of a future like ours. Contraception would be preventing an individual who could have these experiences from ever existing.
The response to the sperm objection doesn’t hold. “They can only have a future like ours after conception, so we can only deprive them of said future after conception” well then ejaculating outside of intercourse would be depriving the sperm and egg of the chance to conceive, which then deprives them of the chance for a future like ours.
I think what he is arguing is that a sperm's future isn't set in stone like a fetuses is. A fetus WILL become a baby a sperm CAN become a baby. The difference is with a fetus you are inherently depriving a person that already exists of a future where as with sperm they don't exist yet. The idea is that a fetus is on the same track of life as we are but just on a different stage but a sperm isn't on a track of life at all ( yet ). Also I'm pro-abortion so don't make this into a big debate I just wanted to point out the flaw in this argument.
@patrickshaughnessyiii6154 Well that’s just factually incorrect. A fetus CAN become a person, but first it needs to implant onto the uterine wall after conception, it needs to undergo growth and cell division, it needs to gestate into a livable form. Ectopic pregnancies, stillbirths, miscarriages, etc etc etc are all proof that conception alone is not enough to say that a fetus will have a future. It is but one step of many that all need to be passed. Focusing on conception is as arbitrary as any other step in that process.
@@ollieb8738 They way I see it, a sperm cell doesn't meet the criteria of "Like us" yet. Only after conception a new human being is created and then it becomes "Like us" and capable of having a FLO.
@ollieb8738 I don't think it's arbitrary at all. Flo posits that it's prima face wrong to deprive an individual of a future like ours. before conception, there's no individual.
I am pro-choice from the standpoint of a conscious experience granting humans moral consideration, but the unconscious violinist argument is flawed in the aspect that you’ve just teleported in by random chance. A natural counter to this by pro-life advocates would be that you’ve choose to have sex and assume that risk of pregnancy when doing so. For me, a much more thought provoking angle to my worldview is the animals route. Why don’t animals get the same moral consideration in my mind? I’d feel bad if I killed them, but I don’t when I eat them.
Judith's argument is invalid. Its widely accepted that the value of a human life is only as valuable as another human life (Think Trolley Problem). This means that if you can save the violinist's life by sacrificing 10 minutes or 10 months of your life, you are morally obligated to do so provided that there are no other alternatives and the duration of the violinist's life would exceed the life you lost saving them. This truth, stacked on top of your point about Positive and Negative rights makes Judith's argument weak and gravely flawed. I do appreciate her intention to separate the topic of abortion from personhood, that argument is so overdone and subjective. Don makes a far better argument. A life is not valuable because of what it has done, but the potential of what it may do. Otherwise maintaining and caring for corpses of individuals who had died would take moral priority over individuals who are still alive. In our society, the promise of a future is what guides our moral compass and gives value to life. You/Don made an excellent point in the video about how young lives are seen as more valuable than older lives. Thus, abortion is immoral as you would be denying a future to an individual. However Don's writing is a little sloppy and leaves far too much open ended for what is supposed to be a sound argument with all bases covered. Great video! I do have one thing I'd suggest you consider down the line. Being unbiased is impossible. Hiding your beliefs does not make the video unbiased, it simply makes it harder for the audience to tell which argument you're presenting with slight favoritism. You ought to make your personal bias known so the audience can know which side has a bias towards it.
It's widely accepted? No, utilitarian ethics are not the only variety of ethics that exist, and this isn't the only way to evaluate utilitarian ethics. Pretending that it's a moral truth is even worse. Simply gibberish.
@@thejabberwocky2819 I didn't say that it was the only form of ethics I said its the widely accepted form of ethics. I'm sure there's a small minority that thinks you have a brain rattling around somewhere beneath that thick skull of yours, but look how ridiculous that idea is.
While it is true the personhood argument is overdone and subjective, it is really the only one that matters in the end, because the only way of morally justifying abortion is IF the fetus is not a person, the moment you concede it is a person, you lose the moral high ground.
@@andrespolanco3182 No, it isn't. The moment you proclaim a fetus is not a person you play right into the hands of the forced birther, who will compare you to nazis for dehumanizing what they see as a person no matter how you define personhood. You don't need tor remove personhood to justify abortion. No living person has a right to your body. End of subject.
I was anti-abortion for most of my life until the last couple of years. The thing that changed my mind was considering monozygotic twins and human chimeras. In the former case, a single blastocyst divides cleanly in half, becoming twin embryos. In the latter case, one twin absorbs the developing tissues of the other, and they continue growing into one person. Chimeras have both twins' DNA (each isolated to the portion of the body that grew from its original cells). The resulting person can even have a mixture of XX and XY chromosomes if one twin was male and the other female. So if personhood is an intrinsic quality of human animals from the moment of fertilization, then did the zygote that grew into twins have two persons in it originally? Is each resulting twin only half a person? And for chimeras, should they be tried for cannibalism since they “ate” their sibling in utero? The only answer that makes sense to me is concluding that personhood should be confered on a fetus when it begins to show signs of personality. This is the stage of development historically known as the quickening-when a fetus begins to move on its own. Beyond that point, if it is necessary to abort the pregnancy for any reason, every effort should be made by medical professionals to keep the fetus alive outside the womb.
That's an interesting perspective. I think if someone ate their twin in utero they are kind of a cannibal but it depends on your definition lol😂 but even if they are obviously we shouldn't charge them with murder either way cause they themselves weren't even conscious. But I don't think any of that equates to personhood or right to life? I also don't think right to life is dependant on personhood. But I respect your opinion.
I also have to ask whenever if the mother dies during pregnancy because of the baby if she’s responsible and should be charged, since she’s fully human and deliberately caused the mother to die since she has consciousness and awareness at birth.
@@Look-seegooro I draw the line with personhood just because it makes utilitarian sense to me. Until it reaches a point of development where it starts to become aware that it's alive, it doesn't make sense to prioritize its potential personhood over the actual personhood of its mother. I realized in my own reflection on the subject that it doesn't make sense to assume personhood begins with fertilization. I will say I don't _like_ abortion. Ideally, it wouldn't be necessary except in extreme medical situations. But we as a society* fail pregnant people and young parents already, so we should at least allow pregnant people to make decisions that are in their best interest. *I'm American, so I'm just speaking of the USA. Other countries do better, and others worse.
On your two questions, if a zygote is inherently that problematic because there is no distinguishable person then therefore shouldn't be that when something has a distinguishable "characteristics" then therefore that's when the continuous starts? Tbh, I don't think it's really that problematic, if a zygote has two people, then give it that way, it's a *unique* situation. If that's how fantastic life is, where we can have 2 persons in one body, go with it. I don't understand the full science behind it, but even then there is an *inherent* two persons in the zygote *metaphysically* , then yes, that zygote is that valuable. On chimeras, no one can be held accountable for that so called natural cannibalism, there's really nothing we can do, I don't think it's problematic either way, it's only problematic if we don't treat it with dignity, with respect. It's unsatisfactory at its best, but could we hold that zygote accountable when it grows up? No, just imagine if two unconscious zombie-like humans fight each other to the death and cannibalize it, then one wins now wakes up because of that, how could we really say he cannibalize that one especially if it isn't his control? There is no *him* in this case, that is his biology doings. Those are unique cases really, but I don't think they are inconsistentsy here, especially if there is no problem metaphysically or biologically even.
@@voidakolimbodagan8794How could we say that the baby is at fault? The baby is *innocent* here. Deontologically speaking the baby didn't even do anything, it isn't her fault. Plus, how did the baby deliberately cause the mother's death when it is the *natural* act of the baby (in cases of labor)?
@@babyshadowandicereamlover5315 That leaves about 20 million still languishing in the foster care system, waiting for homes, world-wide. Have you adopted? I haven't, but I have my reasons. What about you?
@@Sue-xv8os Well first i still go to school so i can’t legally own a kid until I’m an adult. Overall there are 8 or 9 billion people in this earth who will adopt a kid. If the kids don’t get adopted the social workers will take care of them till a parent adopts them 😇. There are catholic schools which house and educate the unwanted children. There are orphanages. Foster cares.
The unconscious violinist is a terrible argument. It is not a morally equivalent situation to the relationship between a mother and a fetus. A women willingly partaking in actions that could result in pregnancy means she took an informed risk. The unconscious violinist argument assumes the mother had no choice in the first place. It could only be the moral equivalent to a pregnancy resulting from grape, but those are rare exceptions and an argument that only applies to rare exceptions can not justify the whole.
Why does choice to engage in the act matter? If someone involuntarily becomes pregnant, does that mean they can terminate at any time? 10 weeks, 20 weeks, 5 years?
@@sonicpsycho13 My only point was that the argument being presented was not equivalent to most abortions, and that point is true. If you want to argue about a specific small percentage of abortions then you should clarify that.
@@brendancoulter5761 then you missed what I was pointing out. The personhood and morality argument is ambivalent to the circumstances leading to the situation.
The proboem i see with morquis isn't his argument but his inconsistency when it comes to abortion. A logical conclusion of his argument would simply lead us to accepting that no sbortion what so ever is premissable only in cases where the child is already dead.
tell me, honestly, how you know the will of God? On that specific matter, I don't think God actually gave humanity clear instructions on what we are to do... and no, I'm not trying to mock you, I'm trying to have a discussion in good faith
You can use abortion if your life was actually end of the line. But you can’t use abortion just because you made bad decisions with your own body or have been assaulted and blame on a innocent child who had nothing to do with the situation. Period.
@@Sue-xv8os Do you think that abortion would bring the rape survivor peace? No it increases their mental health and worsens it. Why should a baby die just because of the father’s crime? Alot of rape survivors chose to keep their kid and never regretted their decision it actually helped their mental health be cured. Do you think woman would be relieved knowing that their rapist is alived but they just have taken an innocent baby life away.
So, if the fetus isn't viable? Can't abort. How about twins where one is killing the other? How about you're not on death's door, but 100% will be of allowed to continue (ectopic)? How about a high risk to health or life (e.g. cancer)? Moderate risk? They'll die within 1 year of birth (trisomy 18)?
@@sonicpsycho13 Claiming that a non-viable fetus justifies abortion is flawed logic. Every life has value, and even in difficult situations like ectopic pregnancies, there are medical interventions that can be pursued to save the mother’s life without resorting to abortion. When it comes to conditions like trisomy 18, it’s crucial to remember that every child, no matter how long they may live, deserves a chance at life. Instead of eliminating a life because of potential challenges, we should focus on providing support and care for both mother and child, emphasizing the importance of protecting life at all stages.
I’m a selfish person and don’t believe in morals. I don’t think abortion is bad because I don’t value a baby’s life, especially considering that it takes 2-3 years for a human baby to become as intellectually capable as a pig. However, if I were president, I would ban abortion. If I forbid people from killing a child, an adult human, a cat, etc., then I should also forbid them from killing a human fetus. Every life is equally worthless, so they should all be treated equally before the law. Also, babies don’t just fall from trees; they’re the consequence of one’s actions. People always have choices, though not too many. By choosing to have sex without sufficient protection, they’ve already made their choice. Personally, I would get an abortion if I wanted to, so I won’t tell others what to do. Killing a human fetus isn’t a big enough issue for me to protest, as long as it doesn’t directly affect me (and obviously hasn’t 😄). Do whatever you want with the undeserved freedom you’ve been given-as long as I’m not president 🙃. What do you think?
@@tori2380-g2g You’ve done a great job turning my own argument back on me, but I think your counterpoint feels a bit forced. The key difference is that someone receiving insulin injections doesn’t harm anyone else. In both cases, the individual engages in behavior that may negatively affect their own life, and in both cases, there’s a treatment available. However, in one scenario-abortion-a potential life is terminated, while in the other-diabetes treatment-the person simply becomes healthier. If we delve a bit deeper, I’d even argue that in a social welfare state, I support providing insulin to individuals with diabetes, but only for a limited period. I don’t think the long-term consequences of someone’s poor life choices should be continually funded by others.
@@tori2380-g2g I will answer you in much narrower pieces one by one. *Your Statements:* -Life's value is contingent on the ability to perceive the environment and gain experiences. -A fetus is non-sentient and thus holds no intrinsic moral value or rights to life. -Since a fetus cannot feel pain or have experiences before approximately 22 weeks, it has no claim to life during that time. *Counterpoint:* _Statement:_ The ability to feel pain does not inherently make a life more valuable. _Anology:_ -(I realize you may find these analogies unconvincing, but I think they’re worth considering.)- There are people who isn't capable of feeling any *physical* pain (congenital analgesia), there are people who isn't capable of feeling any *emotional* pain (Emotional Numbness or Sociopathy) and there are people who isn't capable of feeling anything (Deep Coma -not brain-dead, not brain-dead, temporarily unable to perceive anything) _Question:_ Are they okay to kill? Should these individuals be considered expendable? Can they be sacrificed to improve someone else’s life, even if they’ve done nothing wrong? _Note:_ While I personally believe that terminating a fetus is acceptable, I don’t think the absence of pain perception is a valid justification for it. *Your statement:* Society inherently values individuals differently based on subjective qualities like intelligence, discipline, and contribution to society. _Your Analogy:_ A lawyer with two small children is valued more than a homeless alcoholic due to their societal role and responsibilities. *Counterpoint:* _Statement:_ -I agree everything with this statement, but...- It’s important to distinguish between societal norms and legal principles. Laws are typically built around the principle of equal protection to ensure fairness, regardless of subjective societal values. The idea of legal equality stems from the need to protect against the very kind of subjective biases that lead to unequal treatment. Applying this principle universally ensures that no life is devalued purely based on societal judgment. _Anology:_ In a criminal trial or healthcare setting, both the lawyer and the homeless individual are entitled to equal protection and care under the law, regardless of their social standing. (Every life is equally worthless) _Note:_ As I’ve mentioned, (even though I would ban abortion if I were the president) "I don’t think abortion is bad because I don’t value a baby’s life, especially considering that it takes 2-3 years for a human baby to become as intellectually capable as a pig." *Clarification:* I did not say "I don’t believe that humans deserve life". In fact, I don't think that life is something that can be deserved. But let's say I do think that life is something that can be deserved or not deserved, then I would still not claim that all humans are undeserving. I would argue that some deserve life and others do not, based on my personal criteria.
@@RickofUniverseC-137 I personally believe brain dead people are not deserving of life if they have a very low possibility of becoming conscious again. As for those that struggle with empathy or pain, they can still choose to be cognitively empathetic and experience the world around them. I recognize that my personal morals may differ from those of the government and that laws must aim for consistency. However, if we allow the killing of animals like octopuses, elephants, and dolphins-creatures with more nerve endings than humans and often higher intelligence than some humans-this reveals a deep inconsistency. This practice relies on the unfounded belief that human life is inherently more valuable than other forms of life, which is a logical and moral contradiction. It really comes down to humans believing (mainly due to religious reasons) that our life is somehow more valuable. That our existence itself has value.
Average IQ is double digits, chances are your and my IQ are both double digits. I believe the term you were looking for is "Room temperature IQ argument".
I don’t see why the merging of sperm and egg gives it some magic “future like ours” potential that the egg and the sperm didn’t also have separately. Sperm is a necessary, but not sufficient part of making a human. An ovum, likewise, is a necessary, but NOT sufficient part of making a human. An ovum alone does not a human make, as there are millions and millions of cells added to make a human. So why does one cell (sperm) plus one more cell (egg) equal some magical potential being when it requires 99.999999999% more Cell additions to make a human. Sperm and egg also have future like ours potential, and therefore every time you spank the monkey it’s a small holocaust in a tissue 😂 Pretty silly argument to me 🤷♂️
Respectfully, I think you might be missing the crux of the argument. You are probably right to say that a single sperm cell does not constitute a human as that sperm cell left on it's own won't ever become human by itself. It is through insemination of an ovum that that sperm cell is given a FLO as from then on, the cell, left to its own devices will multiply and inevitably become a baby.
I think the distinction is in the "track of life" a fetus is on the same track of life we are physically but a sperm isn't ( or at least doesn't have to be ). It's not about potential but about what's set in stone. A fetus will become a baby but a sperm CAN become a baby ( if it meets an egg ). I think the distinction you're trying to make is that we were all at one point sperm but no we were at one point nonexistent until a sperm and egg met and that's what started us on our "track of life" ( aging ).
It's not "potential life", the egg is part of the women, the sperm is part of the man, these are not separate things from their host, but when they merge, they no longer are "just apart of the mom" or "just apart of the dad"
The allegory of the violinist seems very precarious to me, the problem does not last just 9 months, it is something for life because now you will have to take care of the baby, leaving all your dreams behind and giving it up for adoption is not the moral option either.
Pro choice: flawed analogy Pro life: why does depriving a future like ours is wrong? The best argument is Pro life based on property rights (The libertarian Pro life argument) Is is completely rational
The future like ours argument is solid if you apply it at Conception you just need to be strong enough to do so. He basically won the abortion debate. It will be banned someday💪💪💪
I wouldn't say so even if you assume behaviour is 100% genetic , in that case you'd want controlled abortions decided not by the mother but by rather committee
Relief The results of studies exploring emotions after abortion consistently suggest the most common feeling after abortion is one of relief. Whether you knew right away you wanted to have an abortion or needed some time to decide, you knew continuing the pregnancy wasn’t the right choice for you in that moment. The ability to end the pregnancy with a safe abortion gave you the option to continue with life as you planned. There’s nothing wrong with feeling relief after an abortion. This feeling is very normal. It reinforces your knowledge that you made the best decision for yourself going forward.
A feeling of relief afterwards doesn't mean an action was good. Imagine how a mobster feels if he manages to kill a witness to a crime he's committed, a day before he can testify.
No fires yet? It's been 10 seconds and there aren't any slurs yet. Incredible for RUclips.
No fires lol
well it's been 4 weeks now
The big thing the dead violinist argument skips over is that the "dead violinist" in real life would actually be your child, not some random stranger. So you’re compelled to look after them, just like in any real-life situation where you’re responsible for your own child. For instance, you’re obligated to feed and care for your baby, (People who don't feed their babies and allow them to starve are seen as monsters) but you’re not compelled to go across the world and feed babies in Africa.
If someone implanted an embryo into your uterus that wasn't related to you biologically, would it be permissable to terminate the pregnancy, as this parental obligation wouldn't apply here?
@@grovr7543 Its a fair point but yes I think you would have less of an obligation to look after it, similar to if someone dumped a random orphan at your doorstep, you wouldn't be morally obligated to care for it. It’s not that you shouldn’t care or that doing so wouldn't be an admiral act; it’s just that the obligation isn't there, much like how traveling to Africa to help feed starving children is a noble act, but not a legal duty.
Plus, this is a wild hypothetical scenario.
More or less agree. But I think the distinction isn't (given the assumption we're talking about a child) that the child is yours, but that you were responsible for them being in that situation. I would say a rape victim has no moral obligation, because they are not responsible for the situation.
It's not life vs choice, it's life vs death. The only possible opposite of life.
Stop. You kill anything that isn’t a person everytime you eat or smash a bug unless you’re a vegan. And btw, a phetus isn’t a human
@@CODlogist a fetus is clearly a human
@@sababugs1125 A human embryo/fetus is definitely a human. But it is not a child.
@@sababugs1125define human
Each side quotes what they value most in this. The symmetry is this: Pro-life accepts forced birth for the mother and Pro-choice accepts death of the fetus, each as the lesser evil.
Wait, *actual* philosophy content on RUclips? Sign me up
I don't think the violinist argument really works, except in the case of rape. It fails to recognise that the person was responsible for the situation. To make it more accurate, I think it would have to be: Imagine you cause a car accident, and wake up connected to a person from the other car, who you injured. Perhaps you would be permitted to disconnect them from you. But you would be held responsible for their death, if they died.
I don't think the objection given to it in the video works either, though. Disconnecting yourself from the violinist would seem a pretty similar act to cutting an umbilical cord, to me. So if the abortion was started that way, it would parallel the situation with the violinist, I think.
I don't think the Future Like Ours argument works either. Imagine you had an incubating machine, with an egg in one chamber, and sperm in another, and it was set up on a timer. Unplugging the machine, I think, would deprive the system as a whole of a future like ours, I think. [EDIT: I think there needs to be a present like ours before it becomes relevant whether or not a future like ours is prevented.]
BTW, I'd guess when they're talking about whether there's an individual, they're talking about individuation (in the embryonic sense, not the psychological one). It's the point before which an embryo can split into identical twins (or partly split, forming conjoint/Siamese twins, I think?). It's about 14 days after fertilisation, I think.
As time has passed I have moved from pro-chiose to pro-life. My perspecive breaks into 3 main pillars:
- I Think we (men and women) have a responsability to out children as they are the life we create. Keeping them alive is step 1. Due to our biology, women are the ones that can bear chldren, but if men coud, they would have that responsability too. I strongly disagree with the take that the life that is creted is so insignificant that can be killed/eliminated because someone has made that desition.
- It creates legal inequalities between men and women. Not only do men have no capacity to decide over the future of his child, but I do not think there are legal course of action if a man wants to renounce to the child's responsabilities if he does not want to have the baby and the woman does.
- Having kids has been presented under a more negative light that positive in recent time, and that has lead to a generation with the lowest birthrate ever recorded, creating many distinct problems for our society. Harvesting a positive perception on kids is important since it will help society on the long run, and I think having kids provides the individual with the chance to mature/grow in a specific way that cannot be achieved though other means.
Do you think that women should go to jail for having an abortion?
@@blurka No, but it should be seen as a reprehensible act outside of medical necessity or severe exceptions like a girl that got pregnant because of abuse. I am not in favor of making it illegal, since it generally drives undesired consequences, like the prohibition. Rather creating social norms that can transform the perspective of people on this topic.
@@gilbertoperalta2172 Why would they listen to you if you don't think there should be legal consequences for abortions?🤷♂
@blurka because not everything we go is solely guided by legality. Lots of things we do are social norms. For instance, it is not illegal to say bad words to others without reason, but we socially set the norm to be friendly and cordial towards others when we meet them. Similarly, we can present abortion as not acceptable. While this won't make a full stop from this to happen, it can greatly reduce the frequency. Furthermore, when there is legal intervention on things like this, it can backfire. A clear example was the prohibition.
@@gilbertoperalta2172 why not let her abort and thats it! what are you some kind of a pro natalist? just live your life and thats it!
The Violinist argument is flawed as he appears attached to you "magically" while a baby doesn't appear inside of you magically, it's there because you have chosen and agreed to do *something* - that's a huge difference. This argument's logic is only valid for non-rape scenarios but these are most common.
The violinist wouldn’t be attached to you “magically”, but rather through a physical & medical process that you did not consent to.
Also, Consenting to sex is not consenting to being pregnant.
@@cubonefan3
Consenting to sex means you realize the potential outcome of it - which is pregnancy.
Pregnancy doesn’t come about magically, it’s the consequence of sex, and if you’re not ready to bear that burden, it is advisable to take preventive measures or not have sex at all rather than end another person’s life
@@cubonefan3 consenting to shooting in the head someone Isn’t consenting to kill him. Your logic makes no sense. If you intentionally and without coercion agree to perform an action that you know has a natural chance of making another person’s life dependent on your body, then you are responsible for putting yourself and the other person in that condition. Which calls into question your right to take back your autonomy at the cost of the other person.
Let's expand that scenario, then. You don't just wake up one day attached to the violinist. Instead, you started out driving a car-an act that is your privilege to do as an adult, but which carries a non-zero risk of a collision, something which comes as a risk of driving whether you consciously consent to it or not-and you collide with the violinist. It doesn't matter whose fault it was or whether you were fully alert or drunk or in any other state. Regardless, you wake up after the accident finding yourself attached to the violinist because you are the only one capable of keeping him alive.
@@imagomonkei if driving was actually analogous to the pregnancy, and you were the only person that could save temporarily the other person life, and the accident was your fault, then yes, you still wouldn’t have a right to let the other person die, and it wouldn’t be in your interests to be charged with murder instead of spending some months attached to another person.
The argument Marquis poses for the “Future Like Ours” is reminiscent of Aristotle’s Potentiality Principle, which I know is quite prominent for many Pro-life ethical arguments in determining personhood. Loved the approach you took with this video, by the way.
Thank you!
What about being both anti-life AND anti-choice 😈
The benevolent world exploder has entered the chat
Force everyone to have abortions
bro is the extinctionist representative
My actual position
The CCP has entered the chat.
Pro Life means saving life. Pro Choice means giving the choice. To be both you must give the choice to the mother to save her life. I have become both.
Unless abortion is never medically necessary.
I am pro choice. The choices I support are abstinence, adoption, contraception or parenthood. 4 really good choices that don’t involve killing babies.
I lean on pro-life, but agreed that 08:11 remark does show a slippery slope from the statement "Life begins at conception".
There's IVF nowadays, for people having difficulty conceiving (or people who want twins, triplets easier :D). As soon as the eggs (already taken outside the female) are fertilized, is it "murder" if one steps on them? If not, at what point is it NOT ok to do so?
Please join me on this.
It would only be murder if the stepping was intentional, otherwise it would be manslaughter.
I've always found Thompson's pro-choice argument to be a rather compelling one but only in nonconsensual circumstances like rape. If you never consented to supporting this other life, then it would feel wrong to force you into doing that. But if you did consent to it, chose to start carrying a life with full knowledge of what it would mean, then it does seem pretty shameful to give up that commitment.
I also really appreciate the argument in that it starts from the standpoint that the fetus is something valuable, with personhood. It makes the argument one that can appeal to whatever side you fall on in the personhood debate.
I think both arguments fail for different reasons:
The first argument fails in part because of what you said there’s a difference between killing someone and letting someone die you might be okay with allowing a bystander to let someone drown in a river but you probably wouldn’t condone throwing them into the river but there’s actually another issue. The responsibilities a parent has to their children are completely different from those that a stranger has to another stranger. This is the reason child support exists for example. The other thing is that there’s a huge difference between being thrust into a situation where someone needs you and putting someone into that situation and then walking away. If you shoot someone do you not have a moral obligation to provide them life support? Sometimes you can compel people to preserve someone’s life
The second argument fails because it just draws an arbitrary line. Yes the fetus has a potential future but so does every gamete. Drawing the line at conception and especially after it is arbitrary and contradictory. Furthermore I don’t agree that killing someone is wrong because it deprives them of a future. That’s just a negative side effect. If you see someone falling from a building and you shoot them you’re still a criminal even if you’re not depriving anyone of a future since that person was going to die anyway.
Overall abortion arguments both for and against keep missing the mark because they keep insisting on analogies when pregnancy and therefore abortion is not analogous to anything
I disagree with yout take on the pro-life counter-argumentation.
- First, I reject conception is an arbitraty point. it is a clear case of something that if let to its normal development, it wiil develop into a baby. a gamete does not have that inherent capacity. Just like a car pieces. They do not have the capacity to take you to places, but when they are put together, it becomes a new thing (car) that has the capacity of transportation.
- Second, I understand your point of depriving someones future might not necessarily be a bad thing if you take for instante serial killers, or people with a terminal desease since it can even prevent that suffering. Yet, you did a somewhat easy and extreme case to support it. A more appropiate case would be to deprive of its future a regular child. That would be closer to the fetus scenatio rather than someone falling to his death. I think you would categorize depriving that kind of future to be a bad thing.
Thanks for your post.
@@gilbertoperalta2172 I actually agree with your argument that conception is not an arbitrary point. I don’t know how you got the idea I do
If i drunk and drive and hit a pregnant woman. The woman is perfectly fine but the baby dies. Should i only be sentenced for drunk driving or worse?
In the Unconscious Violinist thought experiment, it says nothing about the *duty of care* to the Violinist.
A much better framing around this debate is 'for or against parental responsibility'. Do I have a duty of care to the Violinist?
What if I signed up to this & was paid for it? Do I then have the right to change my mind and unplug him? What if I gave the money back? What if it's my fault that he's sick in the first place? Do I have a responsibility to help save him then?
I'd personally say that the parents should have a default legal responsibility of guardianship (you break it, you buy it). That the legal guardian has certain duties to and regulations protecting the child. That the legal guardian has a right to give up guardianship at any time (a*ortion or a*option).
That is not how you should compare abortion. Abortion is a direct and intentional k*lling, how would it be framed as that tho'?
Yes, you do not have an obligation to care for that violinist, BUT you do have an obligation to NOT to k'll that violinist. Letting it die and k"lling is completely different, if it equates therefore you have k*lled a person for not donating to charity?
And plus the violanist argument completely obliterated the special obligation to care for that child. I think I could visualize this why you have a special obligation to care for that child in this analogy:
Imagine we are in a horror movie, I am connected with you with an electrical wire in your body, you severing the connection would activate a bomb and would directly k-ll me, is it still "just" that you happen to k+ll me? Plus, you didn't let me die, I am not even dying here (like a fetus, like an embryo), you actually just activate the bomb knowing it will k;ll me, that is k-lling, that is not merely letting someone die. I could argue that it is just that you k*lled me here IF it isn't intentional, but abortion is most of the time is an INTERNATIONAL act. But for the sake of this argument and to visualize why you have a special obligation, you directly causing my death isn't intentional, if that is the case, I would argue, yes you do have a right to severe the connection (well this part is controversial, even if it's not intentional, you would still be at fault here, you still k-lled me here, but for the sake of the argument, it somehow works, it's not your fault), but who's at fault here? I think it's not the you who severe the connection, but rather the one who set up us here, the one who strap the bomb on us, and you know who set up the trap here, it is YOU, the reason why it is still your fault even if it isn't intentional because you are the one who created this scenario. Well, that means in consensual act in engaging in bed, EVEN IF you didn't consent to having a fetus, you are still the one who is at fault, because you are the one who did all of this, and you know what it entails? A special obligation.
Don Marquis argument I think implies that the fetus has a right to not be killed, and it seems like you have a *special* obligation to not kill that fetus here or me even in the analogy.
UClaim isn't justified though
Let's say you found yourself isolated in a forest during a blizzard. You stumble across a cabin. You let yourself in to escape the blizzard. There's heat, food, water, and communication. You radio for help, but they won't be able to get to you for 3 days. No worries, you have plenty of supplies. Then you discover that an infant is alone in the cabin, no sign of a parent. There's plenty of formula and water, diapers, etc. Are you obligated to care for the infant until help arrives in 3 days?
I would say, yes, because the burden on you is minimal. Allowing them to die, because you may not feel like caring for them, is no different than outright killing due to the circumstances.
the argument of "not morally obligated to save her" or "not obligated to save her" is funny. im from denmark. its illegal to not try and save a person if its safe to do so but abortion is also legal
Critique for arugment 1.
Given the uterus is solely designed to keep a fetus alive, its purpose is exterior not interior. Unlike a kidney, which purpose to to support the owners life no one else. Wouldn't this undermine the libertarian "it's mine" idea? It would be more similar to evicting a person from a house you rented out.
Critique of arugement 2. Since we don't know the future of any person but we do know the future of the pregnant woman within reasonably, wouldn't the 8 months and damage to the body be worth more than the potential life someone else may have?
It seems more like a gamble than a reason to deny someone automy
"Given the uterus is solely designed to keep a fetus alive, its purpose is exterior not interior."
I don't buy this argument. The purpose of a vagina is to have a penis put in it. That doesn't mean a woman is morally obliged to have a penis put in there if she doesn't want it.
Damn super interesting video, when i usually hear about this topic on the internet i feel like the arguments aren't that interesting and that both sides are not well represented, i feel like pro choice is usually associated with social movements, like the empowerment of women, and pro life are more moral arguments that come mostly from religion.
I ve seen some utilitarian arguments, where you consider the future quality of life of the baby and the mother compared to the cenario where she had an abortion.
I feel like this is such a nuanced topic that is really determined by what you consider as a human and by how we measure the value of a life, this is a debate where philosophy has real life consequences, i think you did a great job at staying neutral and presenting both arguments. I love your channel, keep up the good work!
Thank you so much!
!!! What a great channel! This video showed up in my feed randomly and now I get the pleasure of binging through all this great content. Instantly subbed.
Thank you so much!
The FLO argument reminds me of a concept on public health called YLL (or Years of Life Lost), to measure the financial and societal efficacy of a negative health outcome. A childhood vaccine for measles, or NICUs are the ultimate most efficient way to prevent YLL since they occur so early in the life cycle. Even if a treatment is expensive, the financial and emotional/moral value to society that is potentially lost is greater for more expensive early-life interventions than for later life interventions. This to me is a good metaphor for the FLO argument.
Ah man that's interesting
As a pro life person i think it was an awsome vidoe i hope your coffe tastes good for the next week
Thank you but I'm a tea drinker lol
is it morally permissible to kill someone, as long as they would die at that exact moment if you hadnt? you’re not quite depriving them of life, though it does seem intuitively bad.
great video, i liked how the arguments didnt focus on the idea of personhood! (although, it was incorporated in the FLO paper)
Interesting question. If FLO was the only aspect to consider, that would have to mean it's okay. Though we do have to ask the question how certain we can be that the person is indeed going to die that second. Is it possible that we misjudge the situation or their condition, or that we've been lied to by others? Are we 99% sure? 99.99%? Should we rather err on the side of caution?
What would be the payoff for killing a person who is dying the same moment anyway, and is that worth taking even the smallest risk?
If taking zero hours off that persons life could save my own, or someone else, I probably would (I can already hear the trolley problem), otherwise it's still a no-go in my book.
Screw u a fetus is a bunch of cell abortion is healthcare
I didn’t know there are still “actual” philosophers but I think phikosphy is still very much needed for moral delemas and in such political times, great video
At the start of this video, I was intrigued. “I’ve never heard a good argument for abortion, so this will be interesting.” Nothing changed. Not even a philosopher was able to make a good case for it. Maybe there are good ones out there though.
I have a different take on this: What if you were given the opportunity to visit the most beautiful place on the planet. You would get a free room, but there was a chance, 1 out of 100 that you would be given cancer. If you happened to be the one person who got cancer, taking care of your disease would be your responsibility forever, if you went into remission, if you sought treatment, all on you.
Many people would not go on this vacation. it wouldn't be worth the risk. but enough people would go, and inevitably some of the people would be infected with the cancerous cells.
Are the people who left to go on the trip responsible for their own situation?
This debate has very little to do with life and death. It has to do with a social and biological contract that the participants sign when they engage in the pleasurable act. Sex is pleasurable, desirable, and a burning passion inside humans for one reason alone- it leads to the birth of more humans. If you partake in the act, but refuse to honor the commitment, you have committed a moral wrong. This is why Rape is the only permissible exception. You didn't agree to the contract, so you are not biologically or morally required to fulfill it.
Have you never heard of the Whitakers, the most inbred family found so far?
Have you never had to deal with an ectopic pregnancy of a loved one?
Have you never had a daughter who was only 12-13 who became pg?
Have you never comforted a family where the fetus died?
This is true but, real life is messy. Sex education is lacking in many countries, what about people that think birth control never fails? What about guys who sabotaged birth control? People peer pressured into sex but not necessarily raped? It's also a hard choice for many women because men are very sex-centric and require it for intimacy, are the women supposed to be alone? Our emotions get the best of us.
To make the unconscious violinist more accurate. Say you're out driving and somehow you get into a crash with another driver. Maybe it was your, their, both or neither's fault... either way you hit a violinist who was just a pedestrian on the sidewalk. You wake up connected to this unconscious violinist.
Refusing to wait 10 minutes to let them live has got to be morally wrong. I mean come on.
Okay, what would you do if the violinist was drunk driving and it was solely their fault. Would u still want to be attached? They just committed a crime against you and now you’re stuck with the punishment??
@@deeryme9374 maybe not, but that is completely disanalogous any case of a pregnancy. If a drunk driver slammed into me and pushed my car into a violinist pedestrian, I'd still be sympathetic to the violinist. He didn't have anything to do with it
@@gustavbruunkjr5123 very good and interesting point.
I can’t come up with the exact reasoning, but to me that doesn’t feel entirely analogous to pregnancy via rape. Like the rapist just seems more solely responsible for it but I can’t come up with the reasoning.
Good point it made me think a lot
@@deeryme9374 yeah. I don't know what to make of these arguments. I still support abortion-rights, maybe on utilitarian grounds, if not by denying the personhood of a fetus
@@gustavbruunkjr5123 Denying the personhood of a fetus is in the end, the ONLY way to morally justify abortion, which is why often the debate boils down to that.
While I think your criticism for the pro-life side is the best one, I would have to disagree with the one for the pro-choice side (even though I think it´s still good). I think the main critique on her argument would be something like "societal-and emotional dissimilarities". You do not have any emotional connection towards the violinist who was forcibly put into that situations, which is completely opposite to (consensual) intercourse and pregnancy where the fetus inside you will (if not aborted and not cared for) develop such a connection, which will also make you feel a kind of responsibility towards that fetus.
I think the stronger pro-choice arguments would be to delve more into consciousness and explore more thoroughly how and when we determine when personhood begins and what makes us such persons. In my opinion that´s when we have the capacity to deploy a conscious experience, so like 20-28 weeks.
That's interesting, I'm honestly not too knowledgeable when it comes to anything medical so I didn't know consciousness shows up in 20-28 weeks.
With the invention of artificial wombs, do you think 'maybe it should be the opposite'?
A fetus is viable for artificial wombs after 26 weeks, so should be say 'hold of it'll then'?
If we could safely remove the fetus and move it into an artificial womb, is that preferable?
I think Thomson addresses your argument. She says that there are better and worse kinds of abortion (or something like that) depending on how intentional a pregnancy was-for example, if you intentionally got pregnant and then decided to get an abortion, then Thomson would see that as morally worse than if you weren't intending to get pregnant. However, for me, I've always felt like even if you decided (yourself) to plug into the violinist, you always have the right to unplug yourself since it's your body.
@@humanperson8418 Thats not the argument Im making bro, I dont care about artificial wombs and I dont like bodily autonomy and viability arguments. With artificial wombs I still hold the position that they can be aborted within the first 20 weeks, doesnt change my position at all.
@@InaquiSantos oh okay, I didnt know that, I think thats nonesense tho and I dont understand how it can be "morally worse" but not immoral, especially if she was pro choice. And i would have to agree with your position, bodily autonomy is imo better than her criticism of the intentionality.
Here is what I find problematic with the Thompson argument. She’s ignoring the fundamental difference from the 2. Example a mother’s biological process welcomes this human by allowing them to exist. This is why she even has a uterus is to bare a human. Her own body adapts to pregnancy. This is who we exist. So the moral obligation would be to her young.
Unlike the violenist. Who body never welcomed this other person. This would also be taking a extornary act to save this violinest. Pregnant is also not saving the life unlike the violinist. I think the moral obligation is going to be fundamentally different. Meaning yes she has a obligation to her young unlike someone else like a stranger.
The difference in the violinist and a fetus is the DNA. MOST (but not all) people tend to care more about people of their own DNA than a violinist that is a random stranger or friend.
This is the difference between a mother hearing that their kid has been run over by a bus at their school versus a mother hearing that their kid’s best friend was run over by a bus. Both are tragic, but one is more likely to have a stronger effect on the mother than the other.
Judis Jarvis Thomson needed her moral compass fixed. She argued for abortion by making up her own moral standards.
If there was only a 1% chance that abortion is actually the murdering of a human being, I still wouldn’t support the risk. I don’t believe in any killing, whatsoever. Of course, I’m talking about a typical abortion, not one where the mother’s life is also at risk.
and let her get throught he pregrency ? fuck this !
Further intuition from stuff like the comatose argument point to human organisms being the entity from which we can confidently identify a future like ours.
Abortion appears to be wrong at whatever point in conception the new organism (which is the same organism as I am in when I am conscious) exists.
A rather grim future inhabited by unstable humans who were unwanted and either given away or abused or neglected or worse.
@@Sue-xv8osI'm not so sure since abortion has been legal we've had more(per capita and raw number) fatherlessness, more single parent households, more broken families, more children in foster homes etc. If abortion is supposed to alleviate these issues then why have they only increased???
@@michaelmerchant9870 All your statements lead to an assumption of a child. How could a legal medical abortion lead to more children in foster homes?
@@Sue-xv8os You tell me. I'm just telling you those things have gone up not down since abortion became legal even though it was and frankly still is used as an "solution" to "unwanted" children even though we have more foster children, not less.
My critique of the FLO argument is this;
If the fetus is preventing a young person from a FLO, would it be morally right to say "Hey, i know your not ready for this baby, nor did you want it, but lets mess up your future to give the fetus a FLO" ?
I believe that, if the fetus is preventing a FLO, it should be arborted rather than that young persons life to be ruined.
I would argue you can't know for sure having the baby would stop the person from having a FLO, but you know for sure killing the fetus will. Plenty of people have had babies that weren't planned at a young age and still live happy and fulfilling lives. This critique would only hold if you 100% know the baby being born will prevent the person from having a FLO to the same degree killing the fetus would do to it.
It's the type of experiences we will have in the future that flo values, not the quality of those experiences. A billionaire and a homeless person both have a flo, even if the quality of these people's future experiences aren't equivalent.
My problem with the FLO argument is this: Just because something **could potentially** happen doesn't mean it will, and this potentiality also doesn't imply any rights.
Let's assume there was one person without a right to live, one really bad person that's going to commit a terrible crime. I am allowed, I am supposed, to k*ll that person in my thought experiment. Am I allowed to k*ll everyone I meet? They could potentially be the bad guy. From what our society commonly deems as moral, no. And as both arguments are making huge assumptions in the beginning and are by far not from first principle, I would say that potentiality, in this case, does not imply rights.
Secondly, potentiality as used in the FLO argument necessitates both non action and action at the same time. If I eat my bread, I **could** solve world hunger. I **could** also worsen world hunger. With an unknown future, everything becomes possible. The tongue he just used could've been prevented from a FLO by his decision to speak.
I know that some things are more likely to happen than others, I know that this kind of philosophy can't do without inductive reasoning. But even Marquise will have to accept that he doesn't actually knows what's going to happen. He's assuming knowledge of the future which he doesn't have. If no information is available, and every decision is thus random, every choice has the exact same likelihood of being the correct one.
If the mother decided to abort, that would be fine. Because the fetus has no right to infringe on the mother's potential future either.
Very well thought out argument.
Yeah arguing from potential is really not solid because possibility is not the same as actuality however your counter has the flaw of probability. A random person is probably not going to be a murderer but a fetus will almost certainly develop into a human so it would be more like killing baby Hitler
Go back to the premiss then. Why is morally wrong to kill another person?
@@Eng_Simoes i don't understand what you want me to do, sorry.
Could you elaborate?
@@truly_infinite your argumentation denied FLO. Hence, I challenged you to propose an alternate moral reasoning to explain why it is morally wrong to kill another person.
That pro choice argument is very odd to me. There's a huge difference between the violin player and the baby; you didn't tether the violin player to yourself. This is a huge distinction, because unless a conception happened due to rape, you actually DID tether yourself to the fetus.
One could argue the decision to have sex and the decision to be pregnant are two different choices. Condoms are effective 82% of the time in the real world (can be much higher in theory), which means that 18% of sexual interactions that are ostensibly protected are actually not, for example. That’s almost 1/5 sexual encounters.
We don’t need to invoke rape for an example of pregnancy being against someone’s wishes.
A better version of that scenario is to assume you started off driving. Driving a car carries an inherent risk of getting into an accident, whether you want it to happen or not. So by choosing to drive, you must implicitly accept the risk of an outcome you don't want.
After that, you collide with the violinist (let's say he was just a passenger, not the one driving the other car). It doesn't matter if you were at fault or not. It doesn't matter if you were aware or drunk or if your protection (i.e., brake) broke. Are you obligated to remain tethered to him for nine months until he recovers?
But I feel like if you would let it pass if it happened “magically,” then I think it’s fine to let pass if it didn’t happen magically. If your only problem with it is the “magically” part, then I presume you agree with the core principle beyond that. We also need to consider that Judith granted the fetus a person; if the only problem is the “magically,” part, you are sort of downplaying the suddenness and, debatably, involuntary aspects of sex. Let us explore this.
Sex, almost always, occurs because of hormones-the same hormones that can blind rational thought. Now, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be responsibility because of those hormones; we need that to function as a society, but responsibility and blame aren’t the same thing. I would argue the people are hardly to blame here so they get responsibility, the same way the person does in the violinist example, and they have the right to end it there. Obviously this doesn’t apply in all contexts, but in this one, especially with the grant as big as the fetus is a person, I think it works.
@@ollieb8738still , you'd expect a person of sound mind to understand that having intercourse has a risk of pregnancy.
Even if they may have not liked it they were willing to accept the risk
@@SkepticalSkepticthis may come off as a bit prudish or aggressive but I don't buy the arguement that hormones somehow absolve blame and responsibility
I mean if you have monks , communities where people still wait until marriage most of the time for the average person it shouldn't be difficult to control
2 women are pregnant. One of them wishes to keep the baby and the other one does not. In fact, the latter is on her way to the doctor to abort it. The two women however are attacked by another person who causes them to end their pregnancy. Should the the assailant be charged with both the attack against the women and for the death of the unborn baby in each case? The only logical answer is that he should be punished for both in both cases, but if we accept that idea, then this must certainly mean that life begins at conception! However, if the pro-abortion argument insists on that the end of pregnancy was not determined by the pro-abortion woman herself, but by a third party, then this leads us to the unprecedented and ludicrous belief that a person can determine whether and when life or not exists and not biology itself, which simply does not make any sense!
I am Pro-Choice, but I don't agree with the pro-choice argument presented here. If a person dies or gets hurt because you chose NOT to help, you should be punished. That's actually the law in my country and you can go to jail for up to one year for that.
I also disagree with your personal take on it. Because I don't see a difference between "actively killing" and "letting someone die". In both cases, you actively decide about what is supposed to happen to a person. It may feel different, but it is the same thing.
Also:
"Compelling someone to do something against their will is slavery, isn't it?"
No, it is not. Our entire society is built around compelling people to do things. You are forced to pay taxes. You are forced to follow traffic regulations. If you don't to those things, you are being forced to go to jail.
There's vague consent elements involved in taxation and traffic regulations in the sense that you're utilizing things that those rules are there for. So government wise it's kinda vague because of our active use of government services which some believe imply consent. Like yeah I hate waiting at a red light when there's no other cars but I'm still gonna do it cause I benefit by following those rules and want other people too. But I will admit it's kinda vague.
As to the killing vs letting someone die, the philosopher Philippa Foot covered it in the video I did on her so maybe she's more convincing than me on this lol.
@@PhilosophyToons I think that compelling someone to do something is only slavery when they have to use their physical body for it, forcing someone to do something in the sense of giving up material things isn't slavery
@@Akari-og1lkI would argue that forcing someone to give something up would be thievery, which may not be as morally reprehensible as slavery but is still bad
@@connorbossong5773But this is only true if they're giving up something which is "rightfully" theirs, how do you determine that?
I would guess you're European, probably Dutch or Scandinavian.
I have one critique of the pro choice argument, and it's simply that... well, are you RESPONSIBLE for the violinist state?
Let's shift the question a bit, you have fun with your friends and get falling down drunk, decide to drive recklessly on the road and boom you crash into someone hurting their liver.
Now they are forced into a state, by YOUR negligence, in which they're forced to use your liver for toxin removal for 9 months.
Are you obligated to sit there and offer your liver? In my opinion? YES.
Obviously we don't have a system like this in real life for practical reasons, but you can carry over the logic for pregnancies.
As for the vagueness of the pro life argument, my view on it would be 10 or so weeks. Before that youre not really depriving a future from any ONE because there is no "one", it's just a clump of cells. But when the first electrical signals start firing in the fetus brain waves i think we can safely determine we're taking a future away from a some"one"
This system doesn't exist, not for practical reasons but ethical ones. Do two wrongs make a right? Is it right to save someone's life even if it requires violating their fundamental rights? I say no.
@@thejabberwocky2819
But we already do take away fundamental rights. We can throw someone in jail for their wrongs, taking their fundamental right to bodily automony for 30 years.
@@rectaalborween8471 We take away fundamental rights in very specific circumstances for very specific reasons. Jail is meant to keep dangerous people separated from the general population. For instance, we don't take away the right to life because someone stole a loaf of bread. And since right to integrity is the most fundamental right, without which no other right is possible, you need a VERY strong justification to take it away.
@@rectaalborween8471 And no, jail takes the right to liberty, not the right to autonomy. You still get to make decisions about your body, just not where it goes.
@@thejabberwocky2819
And that is my point, you throwing out "muh rights" is absolutely meaningless to me because any right can be taken away with the right justification.
And my justification is: If you did something bad to someone, prepare to pay the cost of fixing it.
6:21 where did the premise "human futures are the only ones that are immoral to deprive others from" come in? The morality of killing animals is a whole different can of worms and shouldn't even be brought up as a side remark
From what i can tell, It's meant to set apart a sapient life from a non-sapient. Like how the theory of evolution says humans are animals. To me It looks like its brought up to acknowledge the obvious difference between humans and animals without really getting into why. It feels like a natural line of thought if the conversation is 'if aborting a baby is murder'- then state if the same is okay with animals, why or why not, and so on.
@@lawty6249 you don't have to talk about animals at all, just because you're talking about delete a future/potential life of experiences.
A massive problem with people's beliefs about animals, is that they just go "Uhm.. their experience is different from ours, so it doesn't matter." without justifying that or even thinking about it. An interjected remark like that, just fuels the THOUGHTLESS unjustified disregard of the value of non-human lives. So if you want to take yourself seriously philosophically, especially when we're on the topic of morality, just stick to making conclusions relevant to the topic
When it comes to firstly establishing whether a fetus a person or not, I think it's both. Human life starts at conception, but a human being would start at consciousness and experience.
Either way, I'm pro life because the most essential part of nature is to reproduce. To live and thrive as a species. It's crucial in all animals.
Is forcing someone to not let a person die wrong? Is forcing someone not to kill a person inside of her wrong? Rather than robbing of a future, is there not such a thing as intrinsic worth? If someone was dying or in horrendous pain and thus thought they had no future, would killing him or her be wrong? These arguments miss some main points.
The issue I have with the FLO argument (besides the critique you gave in the video) is that it doesn't deliver a convincing explanation as to why the potential futures of other animal species are supposedly so different that they don't count as a FLO and are not worthy of the same treatment.
Because their future is not like ours.
So excited i found this channel man, cant believe i hadn't already. Have you done anything on kantian ethics?
I have a video summarizing the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
Should’ve given the responsibility objection to the Pc side. I also think you let Don Marquis off a little too easy. Would be interested in seeing another abortion video. Perhaps psychological continuity vs some pro life metaphysical approach to personhood like Aristotelian metaphysics
About your FLO critique, A women can only have a limited amount of pregnancies in their lifetime (lets say 10 for easy math) That means only ten out of a trillion sperms per man can be fertilized, and 10 out of a million eggs can be fertilized, and so their chance of FLO is only 10 in a trillion or ten in a million respectively. If there is only a 1/100,000 chance of occurrence, it's by detention not a future like ours, or a fertilized egg which have feasible chances to occur.
An interesting follow up would be, at the very least, do we have a moral responsibility to have the 10 or so kids then? "Future like ours" the wording is critical, I would say someone living in 'heaven' has a different future as someone living in 'hell' theirs no "future like [each-others]" shared between them, likewise If everyone tried to have as many kids as possible, we would live in a different (and I'd argue a relatively hellish) world, at most we would only have a moral responsibility to has as many kids that is most likely to yield a future comparable to ours, if you take the premise that FLO means an embryo has life, but inconsequentially a sperm might.
This is of course assuming that "Future like ours" is valid of course as it was assumed in the video, it might not be of course, I only intend to object the video's objection, (and that objection's, objection).
The implications for “right to use” are completely ignored.
Is a mother not morally obliged to breastfeed her newborn? Can she exercise her bodily autonomy trumping the baby’s right to life? (The existence of alternative caregivers or formula is irrelevant given that we are questioning if the right to autonomy supersedes the right to life)
When the 'Personhood' topic is danced around so vehemently doesn't it make it pretty obvious why? He states at 1:10 that it gets "very complex". I disagree, Its very simple when you push this part of the argument, because ignoring this aspect is the only way to have a 'disscussion' like in the video.
The only way to justify murdering an unborn or "abortion" is to deny it is a person at all, and that is because so few can truly speak aloud and say 'murdering an child is okay, good, or even encouraged' without sounding like a psychotic lunatic.
So instead it is turned into strange semantics and utter denial.
Being a human isn't defined by your consciousness, your personality, your ability to think, or how developed you are physically.
Every single person who watched this video IS human and developed from the womb to be who they are. We all weren't aliens until a specific couple weeks of development, or when we were birthed, the second you were conceived you existed, a person, who developed into who they are today. Accepting that shows that abortion is wrong.
Nope, you're simply factually wrong. I don't need to deny personhood. I don't even need to deny giving the fetus rights (even though sane countries do not give rights to fetuses).
It's very simple: no living, born person has a right to anyone else's body even to save their life. That's it. Period. That argument relies on a fetus being a person but recognizing that no person should have a right to anyone else's body.
@@thejabberwocky2819 Lets assume you are right. Then the next step is dealing with the consequences of that. That means ending the other person's life. This is the part where the personhood argument does matter. Even if nobody has the right to your body, is it morally okay to kill someone because of it?
@@thejabberwocky2819 "but recognizing that no person should have a right to anyone else's body."
Why not if it can save life while sacrificing something sufficietly minimal?
I'd argue that the right to life would supercede the right to do what i want with my body the moment that i find myself attached to another person body and have to stay attached to keep them alive. But i only have to stay attached 10 seconds and will have no psychological or physical concequences. In this case i'd argue that we have a moral duty to make this small sacrifice and failure to wait 10 seconds would be equivalent to intentionally killing another person without sufficient justification.
@@andrespolanco3182 Nope, again the personhood doesn't matter. Watch.
If I'm dying and need your blood to live, can I take it against your will? I'm a person.
@@andrespolanco3182 Also, abortion itself doesn't kill anyone (the procedure)
I have very valid arguments against the categories people make to convince themselves that these organisms have "souls" and that therefore they should. But when it comes to this argument where you suppose they are important because they have a future, i gotta for one ignore the fact that we don't know their future and they can possibly die, and ignore that your future is affected too and being robbed too, and ignore where ethics come from, since this means that killing a braindead person that his family want to stay alive, is totally okay, for there is no future, which is smth that automatically arised from the lack of understanding of how ethics work and how tied they are to our human emotional aspect.
And then i gotta ask what makes the fusion of a sperm cell and an ovocyte so special, and id i can cut the junctions between cells, and make the result multiple twins (an argument previously used against the fact that a zygote suddenly gains this magical power called soul after fusion, then gives more souls by our own creation? But that's not the point here, we assume no one believes in spiritual magical souls in the first place), and therefore would you say that you would need to always do that since if you don't, you would also be stealing the future of those twins you created?
If we were to genetically modify the human zygote and make him an ape zygote (argument made previously for the human zygote being so special cuz it has "human soul" powers cuz human power only comes from human power, -even if you want to word that differently-, when you could just modify it and make it having another organism's soul powers, which shows the misunderstanding about the molecular aspect of whatever people call life), the same argument works to show how a human zygote could show a couple of different amino acids, and that would be all the difference with other zygotes, and if you were to modify other zygotes, they would be able to become human, and therefore all animals would have a future, so all things that can have in one of its possible futures a human life, should be sacred, (nutrients themselves sacred?), which requires another post hoc rationalisation since the initial logic we started from was flawed in the first place and awaits many modifications each time to make it make more sense.
Btw the reason we have ethics is our human emotions. If we were to be rocks or plants, we wouldn't react accordingly and even have the corresponding positive and negative neural responses, and the complex emotions to interact with our environment and feel good and bad, therefore their existence in the first place.
If we have an emotional attachment for smth, or that smth shows emotional reactions, as we and that smth are complex organisms that have emotions, then the affliction of pain would be what we would describe with the word unethical in our biased language to describe our agreement on how bad it makes us as a united social structure feel.
If the action is agreed upon to engender pain, then it's unethical. R word is just a sexual act, but it's bad specifically because of the emotional traumatic response associated with it, no matter if other animals do it. Murder without suffering wouldn't be bad if we didn't have emotions to show about it. If all were to disappear pouf, there would be no emotional reaction, therefore the impossibility of establishing a moral comment on the event. If you pronounce the word shark and it causes the same traumatic response as the forceful sexual act, it is just as unethical. Unaliving someone causes deep emotional responses in him suffering and other beings feeling for him. Unaliving a brain-dead patient whose family considers to be alive, therefore holds the same emotional value for them as someone that is alive, is therefore unethical. Unaliving a tree that a tribe considers to be their mother, and actually believe in it, or even their god like entity, is unethical, as it holds the same emotional value. Unaliving an embryo, whose nervous system shows no cellular communication at the level of the establishment of what humans call by their linguistic categories, emotional responses, isn't unethical in the limits where no one would know of its existence for example, but unethical if the mother decides to keep him alive, therefore it holds the same emotional value as an alive embryo, and unaliving it is like hilling her child, because for her, it's actually her child, alive, and she's attached to him just as much. This is just a perspective on ethics, based on neuroscientific data. You might not believe in another person's religion, but killing his god is probably worse than killing a person in that society's moral code, which you might already agree with in most cases, dear reader.
I did not mention actual arguments. I just established the moral framework approximated using our current knowledge. If you want further arguments about anything, feel free to ask.
would you shotgun a bush that might have a civilian?
does judith comment anything on the relationship of the violinist and the person he is attached to? it reminded me of that one if someone is invading your house argument some people use to justify their position.
Not in the thought experiment itself but she does address the relationship elsewhere in the essay
In the example, I think the violinist is famous, but you are not blood related nor a fan of the violinist .
I think the argument is more persuasive if it begins with you driving. Driving carries an inherent risk (similar to sex, assuming you are trying to avoid pregnancy).
Also, the violinist is a passenger in another vehicle, not the driver.
Your vehicles collide-the fault doesn't matter-and you wake up from the accident in the scenario of the thought experiment.
This is a superior version of the argument because it accounts for consensual sex, drunk sex, date rape, and stochastic rape. You can tweak the variables of the initial premise, but the bottom line is that you got behind the wheel of the car knowing that driving carries a small risk of accident.
@@imagomonkeiI say fault does matter because it creates an obligation to the other person. If I crash into a person's car, and as a result they need a kidney, and it's found I am the only suitable donor, then yeah no one is going to strap me down and take my kidney, but if I don't give the kidney, and the other person dies, then I'll be held responsible for the death.
The difference with children is we can incur responsibility to take care of them particularly and especially when no one else can. You don't have to directly wronged a child to be obligated to care for them, even if it is temporary.
The argument for abortion as healthcare treats pregnancy - an exclusively female domain - as a disease to be cured.
Is that not misogynistic in some fashion?
I disagree with both arguments.
For the first one, why should acively or passively depriving someone of their right to live ever be indecent but not immoral? Shouldn't indecency, by definition, be immoral in some sense? It seems like they try to create a zone of morality where one can be immoral yet not held accountable for it, which is a solution I do not like.
As for the second one, Whereas you have half the puzzle pieces or the whole, you consciously know at any moment that contraceptive methods you may use have the consequence of preventing a FLO from manifesting, therefore you really are doing something wrong when you chose to do use them, given that you have the opportunity to generate an FLO. To me, this seems to imply that any time you're not generating an FLO when given the opportunity, you're acting immorally. Marquis clearly knows is absurd, but his argument as to why is simply not enough.
A problem I have with Marquis' argument is that, if a patient told their psychiatrist that they've been chronically depressed for years and doesn't think they'll get better, does that give the psychiatrist the right to shoot that person on sight? I don't think so but if the principle that makes it morally impermissible to kill is the FLO, then I think it would.
Thank you for the video!
Well yeah but also the psychiatrist would be able to recognize that they COULD get better. A better example would be medically assisted suicide for terminally ill people. But that argument wouldn't help because most people agree it's that person's choice. But I hope I have pointed out the flaw in your argument.
To be clear the FLO argument would probably make it a moral responsibility on some level for a terminally ill person to kill themselves but not for us to kill them. Because the whole point is not to deprive anyone else of their future but he also doesn't go into detail on what makes that future valuable?
Maybe your future is only as valuable as you have the potential to be? But he never made that argument.
Issue is, The therapist would be depriving the individual of the potential of getting better, without that persons consent.
@@GavMiPiethe issue of medical consent seems to be the core of the pro abortion side ironically
Very interesting video, even as a general lesson on logical argumentation. However there's an implicit transformation, or an implication, that being "pro" either cause is the same as considering such cause moral. This is not obvious to me. I don't think that morality is the criteria adopted by many people to choose their stance on this or any subject.
In my opinion, the attempt to draw an analogy between the famous violinist and a fetus is flawed, because the violinist uses organs intended for the woman, whereas the fetus uses organs intended for itself. The fetus is in its natural environment, while the violinist is not. As a mother, you are obligated to provide shelter and nourishment for your child, and if you refuse to do so, you will be held accountable. You do not have such an obligation towards the violinist.
I think consent is still a more important factor than what the organ is designed for. Sure a v is designed for a d yet without consent it is very illegal.
@@justapotato2434 Not only can a woman not give her consent, but she actually has an obligation to take care of the offspring. Both men and women have their responsibilities, to which they cannot disagree.
@@hankova14 Except they can? Have you never heard of adoption or abortion?
@@justapotato2434 Well, obviously. My original comment addresses a hypothetical situation, so I remained in the realm of hypotheses: how it should be. I do not deny that the law currently allows abortions.
I'm not a fan of either of the arguments presented in the video.
Critique of the pro-choice argument: Pregnancy is almost always a choice. This argument only functions well in cases of r*pe, or other instances where pregnancy was completely involuntary.
Critique of the pro-life argument: FLO is not well defined enough to convince me that contraception is moral on this view. While the sperm & egg may be artificially separated, removing the barrier would allow them to come together and produce a human with a FLO. I think focusing on personhood is a better approach, although I believe a personhood approach could be coupled with this argument to make it stronger. I find this argument stronger than the argument for the pro-choice side presented in the video.
I truly think better arguments focus around personhood because it's so intuitive to us as adult humans. I think the best pro-choice argument is that our conscious experience is the most valuable aspect of personhood & that abortion before the conscious experience is possible can be morally permissible. The best pro-life argument is that personhood begins at the point of conception because genetically, a new human is in the process of forming at that point.
Personally, I find that, ironically, the pro-life argument as I listed above functions better on a materialistic worldview. This strikes me as ironic because many of the most ardent pro-lifers are motivated by religious conviction.
The pro-choice argument I listed also functions on a materialistic worldview (given the hard problem of consciousness is unsolved and consciousness is believed by some to be derivative of the prefrontal cortex), but it also functions on a dualist or even idealist view, where the very essence of who we are has an independent or codependent metaphysical mind or soul component.
The bottom line is what eventually happens to unwanted infants, babies, and children in general.
Premise one of flo is that it is wrong to deprive an individual of a future like ours. Contraception would be preventing an individual who could have these experiences from ever existing.
Great video! Thank you for the effort you put into them.
The response to the sperm objection doesn’t hold. “They can only have a future like ours after conception, so we can only deprive them of said future after conception” well then ejaculating outside of intercourse would be depriving the sperm and egg of the chance to conceive, which then deprives them of the chance for a future like ours.
I think what he is arguing is that a sperm's future isn't set in stone like a fetuses is. A fetus WILL become a baby a sperm CAN become a baby. The difference is with a fetus you are inherently depriving a person that already exists of a future where as with sperm they don't exist yet. The idea is that a fetus is on the same track of life as we are but just on a different stage but a sperm isn't on a track of life at all ( yet ). Also I'm pro-abortion so don't make this into a big debate I just wanted to point out the flaw in this argument.
@patrickshaughnessyiii6154
Well that’s just factually incorrect. A fetus CAN become a person, but first it needs to implant onto the uterine wall after conception, it needs to undergo growth and cell division, it needs to gestate into a livable form. Ectopic pregnancies, stillbirths, miscarriages, etc etc etc are all proof that conception alone is not enough to say that a fetus will have a future. It is but one step of many that all need to be passed. Focusing on conception is as arbitrary as any other step in that process.
@@Look-seegooroas a group their future is set
@@ollieb8738 They way I see it, a sperm cell doesn't meet the criteria of "Like us" yet. Only after conception a new human being is created and then it becomes "Like us" and capable of having a FLO.
@ollieb8738 I don't think it's arbitrary at all. Flo posits that it's prima face wrong to deprive an individual of a future like ours. before conception, there's no individual.
I am pro-choice from the standpoint of a conscious experience granting humans moral consideration, but the unconscious violinist argument is flawed in the aspect that you’ve just teleported in by random chance. A natural counter to this by pro-life advocates would be that you’ve choose to have sex and assume that risk of pregnancy when doing so.
For me, a much more thought provoking angle to my worldview is the animals route. Why don’t animals get the same moral consideration in my mind? I’d feel bad if I killed them, but I don’t when I eat them.
I loved the animation, also great way to explain the arguments
Great arguments from both sides!
If you don't have authority to take someone life, then you ought not take away their life, simple
Judith's argument is invalid. Its widely accepted that the value of a human life is only as valuable as another human life (Think Trolley Problem). This means that if you can save the violinist's life by sacrificing 10 minutes or 10 months of your life, you are morally obligated to do so provided that there are no other alternatives and the duration of the violinist's life would exceed the life you lost saving them. This truth, stacked on top of your point about Positive and Negative rights makes Judith's argument weak and gravely flawed. I do appreciate her intention to separate the topic of abortion from personhood, that argument is so overdone and subjective.
Don makes a far better argument. A life is not valuable because of what it has done, but the potential of what it may do. Otherwise maintaining and caring for corpses of individuals who had died would take moral priority over individuals who are still alive. In our society, the promise of a future is what guides our moral compass and gives value to life. You/Don made an excellent point in the video about how young lives are seen as more valuable than older lives. Thus, abortion is immoral as you would be denying a future to an individual. However Don's writing is a little sloppy and leaves far too much open ended for what is supposed to be a sound argument with all bases covered.
Great video! I do have one thing I'd suggest you consider down the line. Being unbiased is impossible. Hiding your beliefs does not make the video unbiased, it simply makes it harder for the audience to tell which argument you're presenting with slight favoritism. You ought to make your personal bias known so the audience can know which side has a bias towards it.
It's widely accepted? No, utilitarian ethics are not the only variety of ethics that exist, and this isn't the only way to evaluate utilitarian ethics.
Pretending that it's a moral truth is even worse. Simply gibberish.
@@thejabberwocky2819 I didn't say that it was the only form of ethics I said its the widely accepted form of ethics. I'm sure there's a small minority that thinks you have a brain rattling around somewhere beneath that thick skull of yours, but look how ridiculous that idea is.
While it is true the personhood argument is overdone and subjective, it is really the only one that matters in the end, because the only way of morally justifying abortion is IF the fetus is not a person, the moment you concede it is a person, you lose the moral high ground.
@@andrespolanco3182 No, it isn't. The moment you proclaim a fetus is not a person you play right into the hands of the forced birther, who will compare you to nazis for dehumanizing what they see as a person no matter how you define personhood. You don't need tor remove personhood to justify abortion. No living person has a right to your body. End of subject.
@@andrespolanco3182 I completely agree... A shame that something so contentious is nigh impossible objectively define.
I was anti-abortion for most of my life until the last couple of years. The thing that changed my mind was considering monozygotic twins and human chimeras.
In the former case, a single blastocyst divides cleanly in half, becoming twin embryos. In the latter case, one twin absorbs the developing tissues of the other, and they continue growing into one person. Chimeras have both twins' DNA (each isolated to the portion of the body that grew from its original cells). The resulting person can even have a mixture of XX and XY chromosomes if one twin was male and the other female.
So if personhood is an intrinsic quality of human animals from the moment of fertilization, then did the zygote that grew into twins have two persons in it originally? Is each resulting twin only half a person? And for chimeras, should they be tried for cannibalism since they “ate” their sibling in utero?
The only answer that makes sense to me is concluding that personhood should be confered on a fetus when it begins to show signs of personality. This is the stage of development historically known as the quickening-when a fetus begins to move on its own. Beyond that point, if it is necessary to abort the pregnancy for any reason, every effort should be made by medical professionals to keep the fetus alive outside the womb.
That's an interesting perspective. I think if someone ate their twin in utero they are kind of a cannibal but it depends on your definition lol😂 but even if they are obviously we shouldn't charge them with murder either way cause they themselves weren't even conscious. But I don't think any of that equates to personhood or right to life? I also don't think right to life is dependant on personhood. But I respect your opinion.
I also have to ask whenever if the mother dies during pregnancy because of the baby if she’s responsible and should be charged, since she’s fully human and deliberately caused the mother to die since she has consciousness and awareness at birth.
@@Look-seegooro I draw the line with personhood just because it makes utilitarian sense to me. Until it reaches a point of development where it starts to become aware that it's alive, it doesn't make sense to prioritize its potential personhood over the actual personhood of its mother. I realized in my own reflection on the subject that it doesn't make sense to assume personhood begins with fertilization.
I will say I don't _like_ abortion. Ideally, it wouldn't be necessary except in extreme medical situations. But we as a society* fail pregnant people and young parents already, so we should at least allow pregnant people to make decisions that are in their best interest.
*I'm American, so I'm just speaking of the USA. Other countries do better, and others worse.
On your two questions, if a zygote is inherently that problematic because there is no distinguishable person then therefore shouldn't be that when something has a distinguishable "characteristics" then therefore that's when the continuous starts? Tbh, I don't think it's really that problematic, if a zygote has two people, then give it that way, it's a *unique* situation. If that's how fantastic life is, where we can have 2 persons in one body, go with it. I don't understand the full science behind it, but even then there is an *inherent* two persons in the zygote *metaphysically* , then yes, that zygote is that valuable.
On chimeras, no one can be held accountable for that so called natural cannibalism, there's really nothing we can do, I don't think it's problematic either way, it's only problematic if we don't treat it with dignity, with respect. It's unsatisfactory at its best, but could we hold that zygote accountable when it grows up? No, just imagine if two unconscious zombie-like humans fight each other to the death and cannibalize it, then one wins now wakes up because of that, how could we really say he cannibalize that one especially if it isn't his control? There is no *him* in this case, that is his biology doings. Those are unique cases really, but I don't think they are inconsistentsy here, especially if there is no problem metaphysically or biologically even.
@@voidakolimbodagan8794How could we say that the baby is at fault? The baby is *innocent* here. Deontologically speaking the baby didn't even do anything, it isn't her fault. Plus, how did the baby deliberately cause the mother's death when it is the *natural* act of the baby (in cases of labor)?
One question a pro-lifer cannot answer.
Why don't you adopt?
Well? Why don't you adopt?
Pro lifers do adopt children you can see every year a million children get adopted.
@@babyshadowandicereamlover5315 That leaves about 20 million still languishing in the foster care system, waiting for homes, world-wide.
Have you adopted? I haven't, but I have my reasons. What about you?
@@Sue-xv8os Well first i still go to school so i can’t legally own a kid until I’m an adult. Overall there are 8 or 9 billion people in this earth who will adopt a kid. If the kids don’t get adopted the social workers will take care of them till a parent adopts them 😇. There are catholic schools which house and educate the unwanted children. There are orphanages. Foster cares.
@@babyshadowandicereamlover5315 Thank you. Anyone else?
I have no obligation to adopt the child
I have no obligation to take care of the child unless I adopted the child or I am their biological parent
The unconscious violinist is a terrible argument. It is not a morally equivalent situation to the relationship between a mother and a fetus. A women willingly partaking in actions that could result in pregnancy means she took an informed risk. The unconscious violinist argument assumes the mother had no choice in the first place. It could only be the moral equivalent to a pregnancy resulting from grape, but those are rare exceptions and an argument that only applies to rare exceptions can not justify the whole.
How do you determine that "grapes" are rare?
Why does choice to engage in the act matter? If someone involuntarily becomes pregnant, does that mean they can terminate at any time? 10 weeks, 20 weeks, 5 years?
@@Sue-xv8os The highest estimate I have seen is that around 5% of abortions are the result of rape. You cant justify 95% of abortions with 5%
@@sonicpsycho13 My only point was that the argument being presented was not equivalent to most abortions, and that point is true. If you want to argue about a specific small percentage of abortions then you should clarify that.
@@brendancoulter5761 then you missed what I was pointing out. The personhood and morality argument is ambivalent to the circumstances leading to the situation.
so by thompson it wouldnt be unethical to let a baby die ?
god isn't real anyways
It shouldnt be..we should be concern of citizen decline
Both arguments are pretty reasonable. Have a good day.
Nope. One is evil.
@@flavorgodWhich one?
@@Look-seegooropurely from a pragmatic standpoint since a fertility rate of 2.1 is required to keep the population stable , it's pro choice
purely from a pragmatic standpoint, it's forced pregnancies and eugenics
The proboem i see with morquis isn't his argument but his inconsistency when it comes to abortion. A logical conclusion of his argument would simply lead us to accepting that no sbortion what so ever is premissable only in cases where the child is already dead.
tough but amazing video
One philosophy honours God, the other spits at his face.
I'm choosing the second option 🤝🏻
The one is always trying to please his childish imaginary friend and the other one accepts 50% of the human population as human beeings
@Milorad_Parlic You murderer sympathizer!
tell me, honestly, how you know the will of God? On that specific matter, I don't think God actually gave humanity clear instructions on what we are to do...
and no, I'm not trying to mock you, I'm trying to have a discussion in good faith
@@truly_infinite History and Scripture and a literal 2000 year old institution that he placed on this Planet.
Accountability!
You can use abortion if your life was actually end of the line. But you can’t use abortion just because you made bad decisions with your own body or have been assaulted and blame on a innocent child who had nothing to do with the situation. Period.
"Or have been assaulted"?
Do you know what r@pe is?
@@Sue-xv8os Do you think that abortion would bring the rape survivor peace? No it increases their mental health and worsens it. Why should a baby die just because of the father’s crime? Alot of rape survivors chose to keep their kid and never regretted their decision it actually helped their mental health be cured. Do you think woman would be relieved knowing that their rapist is alived but they just have taken an innocent baby life away.
@@babyshadowandicereamlover5315 Glaringly obvious you've never been close to a rape victim. VICTIM.
So, if the fetus isn't viable? Can't abort. How about twins where one is killing the other? How about you're not on death's door, but 100% will be of allowed to continue (ectopic)? How about a high risk to health or life (e.g. cancer)? Moderate risk? They'll die within 1 year of birth (trisomy 18)?
@@sonicpsycho13 Claiming that a non-viable fetus justifies abortion is flawed logic. Every life has value, and even in difficult situations like ectopic pregnancies, there are medical interventions that can be pursued to save the mother’s life without resorting to abortion. When it comes to conditions like trisomy 18, it’s crucial to remember that every child, no matter how long they may live, deserves a chance at life. Instead of eliminating a life because of potential challenges, we should focus on providing support and care for both mother and child, emphasizing the importance of protecting life at all stages.
I’m a selfish person and don’t believe in morals. I don’t think abortion is bad because I don’t value a baby’s life, especially considering that it takes 2-3 years for a human baby to become as intellectually capable as a pig.
However, if I were president, I would ban abortion. If I forbid people from killing a child, an adult human, a cat, etc., then I should also forbid them from killing a human fetus. Every life is equally worthless, so they should all be treated equally before the law.
Also, babies don’t just fall from trees; they’re the consequence of one’s actions. People always have choices, though not too many. By choosing to have sex without sufficient protection, they’ve already made their choice.
Personally, I would get an abortion if I wanted to, so I won’t tell others what to do. Killing a human fetus isn’t a big enough issue for me to protest, as long as it doesn’t directly affect me (and obviously hasn’t 😄). Do whatever you want with the undeserved freedom you’ve been given-as long as I’m not president 🙃.
What do you think?
@@tori2380-g2g You’ve done a great job turning my own argument back on me, but I think your counterpoint feels a bit forced. The key difference is that someone receiving insulin injections doesn’t harm anyone else.
In both cases, the individual engages in behavior that may negatively affect their own life, and in both cases, there’s a treatment available. However, in one scenario-abortion-a potential life is terminated, while in the other-diabetes treatment-the person simply becomes healthier.
If we delve a bit deeper, I’d even argue that in a social welfare state, I support providing insulin to individuals with diabetes, but only for a limited period. I don’t think the long-term consequences of someone’s poor life choices should be continually funded by others.
@@tori2380-g2g I will answer you in much narrower pieces one by one.
*Your Statements:*
-Life's value is contingent on the ability to perceive the environment and gain experiences.
-A fetus is non-sentient and thus holds no intrinsic moral value or rights to life.
-Since a fetus cannot feel pain or have experiences before approximately 22 weeks, it has no claim to life during that time.
*Counterpoint:*
_Statement:_ The ability to feel pain does not inherently make a life more valuable.
_Anology:_ -(I realize you may find these analogies unconvincing, but I think they’re worth considering.)- There are people who isn't capable of feeling any *physical* pain (congenital analgesia), there are people who isn't capable of feeling any *emotional* pain (Emotional Numbness or Sociopathy) and there are people who isn't capable of feeling anything (Deep Coma -not brain-dead, not brain-dead, temporarily unable to perceive anything)
_Question:_ Are they okay to kill? Should these individuals be considered expendable? Can they be sacrificed to improve someone else’s life, even if they’ve done nothing wrong?
_Note:_ While I personally believe that terminating a fetus is acceptable, I don’t think the absence of pain perception is a valid justification for it.
*Your statement:* Society inherently values individuals differently based on subjective qualities like intelligence, discipline, and contribution to society.
_Your Analogy:_ A lawyer with two small children is valued more than a homeless alcoholic due to their societal role and responsibilities.
*Counterpoint:*
_Statement:_ -I agree everything with this statement, but...- It’s important to distinguish between societal norms and legal principles. Laws are typically built around the principle of equal protection to ensure fairness, regardless of subjective societal values. The idea of legal equality stems from the need to protect against the very kind of subjective biases that lead to unequal treatment. Applying this principle universally ensures that no life is devalued purely based on societal judgment.
_Anology:_ In a criminal trial or healthcare setting, both the lawyer and the homeless individual are entitled to equal protection and care under the law, regardless of their social standing. (Every life is equally worthless)
_Note:_ As I’ve mentioned, (even though I would ban abortion if I were the president) "I don’t think abortion is bad because I don’t value a baby’s life, especially considering that it takes 2-3 years for a human baby to become as intellectually capable as a pig."
*Clarification:* I did not say "I don’t believe that humans deserve life". In fact, I don't think that life is something that can be deserved. But let's say I do think that life is something that can be deserved or not deserved, then I would still not claim that all humans are undeserving. I would argue that some deserve life and others do not, based on my personal criteria.
@@tori2380-g2g as expected, no. That situation has happened to me many times.
@@RickofUniverseC-137 Sigh… uhhh
@@RickofUniverseC-137 I personally believe brain dead people are not deserving of life if they have a very low possibility of becoming conscious again. As for those that struggle with empathy or pain, they can still choose to be cognitively empathetic and experience the world around them. I recognize that my personal morals may differ from those of the government and that laws must aim for consistency. However, if we allow the killing of animals like octopuses, elephants, and dolphins-creatures with more nerve endings than humans and often higher intelligence than some humans-this reveals a deep inconsistency. This practice relies on the unfounded belief that human life is inherently more valuable than other forms of life, which is a logical and moral contradiction.
It really comes down to humans believing (mainly due to religious reasons) that our life is somehow more valuable. That our existence itself has value.
Double digits iq argument lmao a baby is a baby
Average IQ is double digits, chances are your and my IQ are both double digits. I believe the term you were looking for is "Room temperature IQ argument".
Love this!
I don’t see why the merging of sperm and egg gives it some magic “future like ours” potential that the egg and the sperm didn’t also have separately. Sperm is a necessary, but not sufficient part of making a human. An ovum, likewise, is a necessary, but NOT sufficient part of making a human. An ovum alone does not a human make, as there are millions and millions of cells added to make a human. So why does one cell (sperm) plus one more cell (egg) equal some magical potential being when it requires 99.999999999% more Cell additions to make a human. Sperm and egg also have future like ours potential, and therefore every time you spank the monkey it’s a small holocaust in a tissue 😂 Pretty silly argument to me 🤷♂️
Respectfully, I think you might be missing the crux of the argument. You are probably right to say that a single sperm cell does not constitute a human as that sperm cell left on it's own won't ever become human by itself. It is through insemination of an ovum that that sperm cell is given a FLO as from then on, the cell, left to its own devices will multiply and inevitably become a baby.
yeah
I think the distinction is in the "track of life" a fetus is on the same track of life we are physically but a sperm isn't ( or at least doesn't have to be ). It's not about potential but about what's set in stone. A fetus will become a baby but a sperm CAN become a baby ( if it meets an egg ). I think the distinction you're trying to make is that we were all at one point sperm but no we were at one point nonexistent until a sperm and egg met and that's what started us on our "track of life" ( aging ).
To be clear I am actually pro-abortion but I still think it's morally wrong.
It's not "potential life", the egg is part of the women, the sperm is part of the man, these are not separate things from their host, but when they merge, they no longer are "just apart of the mom" or "just apart of the dad"
The allegory of the violinist seems very precarious to me, the problem does not last just 9 months, it is something for life because now you will have to take care of the baby, leaving all your dreams behind and giving it up for adoption is not the moral option either.
Both arguments are wrong
How?
Pro choice: flawed analogy
Pro life: why does depriving a future like ours is wrong?
The best argument is Pro life based on property rights
(The libertarian Pro life argument)
Is is completely rational
@@Upholstered_ How is the analogy flawed?
The future like ours argument is solid if you apply it at Conception you just need to be strong enough to do so.
He basically won the abortion debate.
It will be banned someday💪💪💪
Since behaviour is 100% genetic, abortion is objectively a great boon to society.
What do you mean that it's 100% genetic?
You're objectively wrong. It's highly genetic, but not 100%.
I wouldn't say so
even if you assume behaviour is 100% genetic , in that case you'd want controlled abortions decided not by the mother but by rather committee
I'm gonna be fucking respectful!!! (just a joke guys, I don't even want to give my opinion)
Opinions are like assholes.
SHOW ME YOURS, BI*CH!!!
Relief
The results of studies exploring emotions after abortion consistently suggest the most common feeling after abortion is one of relief.
Whether you knew right away you wanted to have an abortion or needed some time to decide, you knew continuing the pregnancy wasn’t the right choice for you in that moment.
The ability to end the pregnancy with a safe abortion gave you the option to continue with life as you planned.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling relief after an abortion. This feeling is very normal. It reinforces your knowledge that you made the best decision for yourself going forward.
100%.
A feeling of relief afterwards doesn't mean an action was good.
Imagine how a mobster feels if he manages to kill a witness to a crime he's committed, a day before he can testify.
@@MatthewFearnley Based