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Embryo and Einstein – Why They’re Equal

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The photo on the right is a picture of Albert Einstein, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1921. The photo on the left shows how Einstein looked when he was very young (about three days old). The aim of this essay is to demonstrate on purely philosophical (i.e. non-religious) grounds that a human embryo is a person, who matters just as much as you or I do. I shall also attempt to explain exactly why an embryo is just as valuable as you or I. From this it follows that the embryo from which the adult Einstein developed had exactly the same moral worth (or intrinsic value) as Einstein the man, and that an outside party – for instance, the doctor who took care of Einstein’s mother while she was pregnant – would have been morally bound to treat the embryo Einstein as a fully-fledged human person, having the same inherent right to life as the great scientist whom the embryo later developed into. I have written this essay specifically for people with no religious beliefs, so I will be making use of purely secular arguments, based on uncontroversial scientific concepts, which should be familiar to anyone who has spent time studying the emergence and development of biological forms in the natural world. In the interests of full disclosure, I will state up-front that I am a Catholic, and that I am also a member of the Intelligent Design movement. However, I would like to emphasize that I am not claiming to speak on behalf of any group in writing this essay. The arguments put forward here represent my own personal views.

I am writing this essay in response to some arguments recently put forward by the “New Atheists,” most of whom would totally reject the notion that Einstein as an embryo had the same moral value as the adult Einstein. For instance, evolutionary biologist Professor Jerry Coyne has recently argued that a 100-cell blastocyst cannot be as valuable as an adult human being because it lacks thoughts and feelings, and concludes: “A blastocyst is no more what we think of as a ‘person’ than an acorn is the same thing as an oak tree.” For biologist P. Z. Myers, it is the height of absurdity to regard embryos as being just as valuable as adults (see here and here). Philosopher Sam Harris is utterly incredulous that anyone can still believe an embryo is a unique human person, given the fact that early embryos are susceptible to both fission and fusion (see here). Harris argues that “if our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old embryos” – an odd remark for him to make, as neither flies nor three-day-old embryos are sentient (see here). And the evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, after contrasting his “secular consequentialist” approach to ethics with “religiously absolute moral philosophies,” adds: “One school of thought cares about whether embryos can suffer. The other cares about whether they are human” (The God Delusion, Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006, p. 297). It is an ethical axiom for Dawkins that only sentient beings matter: early embryos fall outside the scope of legitimate moral concern, because they are incapable of suffering. And even if some embryos turn out to be capable of suffering, “there is every reason to suppose that all embryos, whether human or not, suffer far less than adult cows or sheep in a slaughterhouse” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 297).

However, I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I should mention that Christopher Hitchens is a noble exception to the generalization that New Atheists tend to be ardently pro-choice: unlike the other “New Atheists,” Hitchens openly refers to the embryo/fetus as an “unborn child,” although he does not go so far as to advocate the repeal of Roe v. Wade. And while Dr. Richard Carrier is generally pro-choice, he is also on the record as saying that he would oppose elective third trimester abortion as being identical to infanticide (see the Carrier-Roth Debate here).

In this essay, I shall endeavor to show that a strong intellectual case can be made, on non-religious grounds (i.e. without assuming the existence of God or an immaterial soul), for the pro-life view that a human person begins at the exact moment when the sperm cell penetrates the ovum (or oocyte, to use a more accurate medical term), and that a human embryo – even if it is severely deformed – has the same right to life as a fully rational human adult. In other words, I shall argue that if you grant that a rational human adult has a right to life, then you must also grant that an embryo or fetus has a right to life, too. What distinguishes this essay from other essays written in defense of unborn human life is that I shall endeavor to explain precisely why a human embryo is every bit as valuable as you or I. Moreover, my explanation makes no appeal to the merely potential qualities of the embryo; instead, I only invoke actual properties. Thus my argument is invulnerable to the philosopher Peter Singer’s criticism that a potential X does not necessarily have the rights of an actual X – for instance, a prince (who is a potential king) does not possess the same rights and privileges as an actual king. And unlike the philosopher Don Marquis, who argues that an embryo/fetus matters just as much as we do because it has a future like ours, my account of why a human embryo matters is based principally on its present characteristics. Finally, my explanation makes no appeal to the existence of an immaterial soul, although it is perfectly compatible with belief in one.

Later, I shall address the moral issue of abortion. In particular, I shall contend that Judith Jarvis Thomson’s argument for the morality of abortion is flawed, and I will show that the available evidence indicates that abortion harms women’s mental health, even in cases such as rape and incest. However, my principal aim in this online essay is to demonstrate that a human embryo is a person who matters just as much as an adult.

My argument in a nutshell

In brief, the essence of my argument is that a human embryo is a person, because it is a complete organism, embodying a developmental program by which it directs and controls its own development into a rational human adult, and in addition, it has already started assembling itself into a rational human adult. A human adult is not merely something the embryo/fetus is capable of becoming, in a passive sense; rather, it is the mature form of the organism that the embryo/fetus is currently assembling itself into, by executing the instructions contained in its developmental program, which has already started running. (In this respect, the embryo/fetus differs vitally from a potential king, who is legally incapable of doing anything to make himself king, and who has none of the rights that properly belong to a king.) I shall argue that it is reasonable to regard any biological organism which is currently assembling itself into a rational human adult through a process which is under its control, as being just as valuable as the adult it will become, and as therefore having the same right to life as an adult. I shall also contend that nothing is acquired by an embryo, fetus, newborn baby or child in the course of its development which would add to its inherent moral value in any way; hence a one-cell embryo must be just as valuable as you or I. Finally, I shall argue that a severely defective embryo, which has no hope of developing into a rational human adult, has the same right to life as a normal embryo, because the correction of its defects does not require the addition of any new instructions to its developmental program; all it requires is the repair of program flaws, and that this correction would in no way alter its identity as a human individual, or add to its inherent value. Given that a normal embryo has the same right to life as a rational human adult, it follows that a severely defective embryo (which is just as valuable as a normal one) has the same right to life as well.

Dedication and Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks at the outset to the Intelligent Design movement for alerting me to the ethical significance of the developmental programs which are found in living organisms. I’ll say more about these programs below.

Read the rest of the essay here.

Comments
Hi, I'm finally back. Sorry for the delay, visiting relatives, children and a computer doing video games and facebook all day. I typed out an explanation of how the mind develops, but it got so long it was starting to look like a KairosFocus piece, so I’m going to start over. In Msg 38, you write:
If, as you maintain, it is my complex brain states that make me who I am, then an intellectually impaired person who was able to trace his/her intellectual impairment back to the action of some chemical which damaged his/her brain while he/she was still in the womb would not be able to sue in a court of law for damages suffered. For if his/her mother hadn’t been exposed to the chemical, then a different pattern of brain states would have resulted in the developing fetus, and on your non-biological account of personal identity, he/she would then be a different person. So a judge could then throw the case out of court, saying, “Why are you complaining? If your mother hadn’t been exposed to that chemical, YOU wouldn’t be here to complain! I take it you’re glad that you’re at least alive, aren’t you?”
Well, there’s no telling what a judge would say, but let’s assume this one is having a bad day. Presumably he would say the same thing to Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had an iron bar driven through his head. I think we can assume this made a BIG change in his complex brain states. Presumably if he had sued the railroad, that judge would have thrown the case out of court, saying that if he hadn’t gotten that iron bar shot through his head, HE wouldn’t be here to complain. This is ridiculous on at least two counts: First, Phineas Gage was the same person both before and after the accident. He was changed, but he was still Phineas Gage. Second, a person who was intellectually impaired due to something that happened in the womb didn’t exist in the womb and his/her (now impaired) mind would not have developed until after birth. That person could not have sued the chemical company for making her a different person, but s/he could sue because the chemical made her develop into an impaired person. I think the problem here is that you’re mistaking consciousness for mind. Your conscious ideas change every time you think of something new. Your mind is what generates those conscious ideas and it is enduring. It changes, but it’s also continuous from infancy to death. Incidentally, there actually are lawsuits for wrongful life. Google says, “Wrongful life is the name given to a legal action in which someone is sued by a severely disabled child (through the child's legal guardian) for failing to prevent the child's birth.” There’s also "wrongful birth” where the parenta sue for the same reason and "wrongful abortion" where someone has an abortion of what would have been a healthy baby because a doctor mistakenly told her that the woman would be in danger if she continued the pregnancy or that the fetus would be deformed or disabled. I get the impression that all three types of lawsuits have been brought only against doctors. If anyone successfully brings a wrongful birth lawsuit against their parents, and such lawsuits become common, I predict a sudden and large reduction in anti-abortion sentiment.dmullenix
December 2, 2011
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Hi Vince, Thanks for that last reply. I think I understand your position much better now and I think I can see a way to agreement. Unfortunately, we’re just entering the Thanksgiving holiday season in the US and I’m going to have very poor connectivity until Friday or Saturday. I have to look up a lot of stuff on fetal development and post-natal brain development before I can give a good reply. A short preview: The developmental program builds a human body with a brain inside it and then, in interaction with sensory data from that body and the outside world, creates a mind in that brain. The interaction with the body and the world is absolutely necessary. The developmental program can't make a mind without it. This mind is permanent and occasionally conscious. It is the most valuable thing in the known universe. It is me and it is you.dmullenix
November 22, 2011
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Hi dmullenix, Thank you for your post. Let me get straight to the point. If, as you maintain, it is my complex brain states that make me who I am, then an intellectually impaired person who was able to trace his/her intellectual impairment back to the action of some chemical which damaged his/her brain while he/she was still in the womb would not be able to sue in a court of law for damages suffered. For if his/her mother hadn’t been exposed to the chemical, then a different pattern of brain states would have resulted in the developing fetus, and on your non-biological account of personal identity, he/she would then be a different person. So a judge could then throw the case out of court, saying, “Why are you complaining? If your mother hadn’t been exposed to that chemical, YOU wouldn’t be here to complain! I take it you’re glad that you’re at least alive, aren’t you?” The action which a person should sue for, on your account of personal identity, is wrongful creation. Thus a person could sue the chemical company on the following grounds: “Look at me. My existence is hell – I’d be better off dead. This chemical company made me the way I am today, with my intellectual impairments. If it wasn’t for this company, I wouldn’t be here – my mother would have had a different child, with a different brain. Since this company is responsible for making me who I am, and since being “me” by its very nature entails being in a living hell, day in and day out, then this company is obviously responsible for making my life hell. That is why I’m suing them for wrongful creation.” But then the judge could respond: “If you’re so unhappy being alive, then why haven’t you killed yourself already? Look – here’s a suicide kit, and you can do it painlessly. Why don’t you, then? And what’s more, why should I award you any money? It won’t make you happy, because by definition your existence is hell.” And I would have to agree with the judge’s logic. Suing for wrongful creation is just silly. On my account of personal identity, on the other hand, suing for damages suffered in the case above is a straightforward matter. There already was a human individual in the womb, with a developmental program up and running. Since the program was running, we have an already existing person, who was damaged by the chemical. You spent quite a bit of time ripping apart Ms. Rebecca Kiessling’s testimony. I’m sure the lady is perfectly able to defend herself – she’s a lawyer, after all, and has probably met 100 people like you, with the same objection; “What are you complaining about? If your mother had had an abortion, you would never have existed, anyway!” But those objectors cannot explain why the individual in the case I described above should be able to sue the chemical company, so their position is philosophically indefensible. Ms. Kiessling’s pro-life position is clear, consistent and perfectly defensible. Legal cases aside, there are good grounds for preferring my account of personhood to yours. For what it boils down to is a question of: what should we ultimately value? There are certain mental states – e.g. acts of thinking and choosing and loving – which only persons can have, and it might seem tempting to value these and only these. But then we would be hard-pressed to explain how people can retain their value when they go to sleep, or fall into a coma. You say we should value people’s complex brain states, since these are what gives rise to the mental states that we associate with people when they are awake, and these states continue to exist even when the person is asleep. I say we should value any human individuals with developmental programs that are up and running, since these are ultimately what gives rise to complex brain states, and hence (on a materialist account, which I’m adopting here for argument’s sake, as my pro-life essay was written for atheistic materialists), what gives rise to the mental states that only people can have. So who’s right? Should we value the proximate cause of people’s mental states (as you claim) or the ultimate cause (as I claim)? I would argue as follows. If we are to value people properly, then whatever we value should be something reasonably permanent (like people) and not transient (like their fleeting mental states). So far, so good. But I would also add that whatever we value should not be something which is controlled by something else – for then it would be more logical to value the ultimate locus of control, as it’s what’s really in charge. A person, by definition, is something autonomous: it’s in charge, and nothing tells it what to do. In a human individual, the developmental program is what’s really in charge. It tells the brain and other bodily organs how to handle incoming information and environmental stimuli. It also directed the formation of the individual’s complex brain states during its development in the womb and as a very young child. So I would say: the feature in a human individual which gives it ethical value is not its complex brain states, but its developmental program, which is reasonably stable and lasts throughout the individual’s lifetime. That’s what we should value, and that’s what we should base our claims of personal identity on. I would also add that since an individual’s complex brain states are in state of constant flux throughout his/her lifetime, it makes little sense to identify these states with the permanent and enduring entity we call a person. The only thing which is enduring about these states is the capacity to have them – and that capacity is grounded in the person’s developmental program. An individual with a developmental program that’s up and running can be called a thing, with at least one stable property: his/her developmental program is always the same program throughout his/her life. Hence it makes sense to say that the person is always the same person. Well, that’s about as clear as I can make my position, Dave, so I think I’ll sign off here. I hope that helps.vjtorley
November 22, 2011
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Reply to 36: 1: As your reference confirms, Hitler banned abortion, at least for “real” people. As I also said, he didn’t mind it for “sub humans”. I’m still waiting for Eugene S to tell us what his point was. That anything an evil person does is immoral? I hope not. I have it on good authority that Lenin and Hitler both breathed oxygen. Quite a few medical organizations have dropped the abortion portion of the Hippocratic Oath. Hippocrates was Greek and the Greeks thought that a human was present from the moment of conception and just got bigger and bigger until birth. We now know that this is not true and the medical profession changed it's rules to accommodate reality. The anti-abortionists haven’t. 2: There are two problems with thinking about abortion. One problem is that the anti-abortion group has come to their position through emotion and it’s extremely hard to use reason to argue people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. Their minds hold on to their beliefs tenaciously and actively block out facts and reasoning that threatens those ideas. The second problem is that reasoning on abortion is tricky – it’s a little like modal logic. If you follow the rules of logic faithfully, you are sometimes surprised by where you end up. If a woman carries a defective fetus to term, the process goes like this: (Conception) -> (Fetal development) -> (Birth) -> (Development of a defective mind and/or body) = (A) (The defective child who is angry with her parents for screwing her up.) If a same woman gets pregnant, aborts her defective fetus and gets pregnant again, the process goes like this: (Conception) -> (Fetal development) -> (Abortion) = (b) No mind ever exists. (Conception) -> (Fetal Development) -> (Birth) -> (Development of a normal mind and body) = (C) (The normal, happy child.) The defective child at (A) is justifiably angry with her parents for creating her with a seriously defective mind and/or body. She knows they could have done much better by her and gotten an abortion, which would lead to (B): No mind to be angry. If her parents had then started another pregnancy and it proceeded normally, the result would be (C), a healthy child with no complaints. A lot of people get hung up with child (A). She exists, she has the same right to continue existing as any other person. But if her parents had aborted the pregnancy and started over, the situation would be (B) – a child would never have existed and what doesn’t exist not only doesn’t mind not existing, it’s unable to mind. No complaints at all. If her parents got pregnant again, child (C) would have eventually been born and it would have been normal and as happy as any other normal child. 3: When I say the world determines the rest, I mean our environments have a tremendous influence on how we turn out. I mentioned that I am unable to speak Swahili. That’s because I grew up in an English speaking country. Had I been raised in a Swahili speaking country, I would speak and understand Swahili as well as I speak and understand English. I also grew up as a mentally active English speaker. I didn’t blindly accept everything that came my way. My inborn proclivities, determined by a combination of my DNA and fetal development, lead me to accept some things and ignore others. The things I accepted changed me and influenced other decisions further down the line. I wound up as Dave Mullenix, English speaker and debonair man about town. In another country, I might have wound up as Dave Mullenix, debonair Swahili speaker. In another socio-economic class, I might have wound up as Dave Mullenix, functional illiterate who died in a famine back in 1955. If I’d been born to the same parents in the same place, and fell in with a bad crowd, I might be Dave Mullenix, Prisoner 073-730. We have free will, we make choices, but we also live in the world and it has its affect on us. 4: You’re incorporating the biggest anti-abortion lie into your reasoning. Abortion doesn’t kill babies, children, adults or grand parents. It kills a fetus and no mind is ever produced. If there’s a 20% chance that a fetus will develop into a malformed baby and you abort it, the 20% of malformed babies never exist and the healthy babies aren’t killed, they never exist either. There’s a whopping big difference between being killed and never existing! 5: I don’t care what John Cardinal O’Connor or Pope Paul VI said or didn’t say. At various times in the past, the Catholic Church has had a much more sensible and moral attitude towards abortion. 6: Here, you’re either deliberately BSing me or you have a really serious problem, especially for a philosopher. Your height, weight and mind are properties and they are also things. They can be observed and measured. 7: The brain is a thing. It is also a part of a body. Have you studied fetal development? A lot of brain development is done by directing dendrites to grow up a chemical gradient for a certain period of time and then connect to whatever neurons are closest. That’s one of the ways alcohol causes fetal alcohol syndrome – it slows the growth of the dendrites. They follow the chemical gradient for the correct amount of time but then they are nowhere near the correct neurons and problems ensue. That randomness – connect to whatever neurons are closest – is one of the reasons why the same DNA gives us different people. If you take a zygote and divide it in two, with luck you’ll wind up with two embryos with identical DNA, each as alike as you would expect for two organisms which were once one, and get two completely different people at the end of the process. That’s why the process is not important, only the mind that is produced at the end.dmullenix
November 21, 2011
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Thanks for replying, VJ.  Before replying in kind, I'd like to show you an illustration of one of the absurdities that bedevil the anti-abortion movement and which they are almost completely blind to.  On your pro-life page, http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/prolife.html, you tell the story of "Rebecca Kiessling, a successful attorney and pro-life speaker who was conceived through rape."  You quote her thus: "I was adopted nearly from birth. At 18, I learned that I was conceived out of a brutal rape at knife-point by a serial rapist. Like most people, I'd never considered that abortion applied to my life, but once I received this information, all of a sudden I realized that, not only does it apply to my life, but it has to do with my very existence. It was as if I could hear the echoes of all those people who, with the most sympathetic of tones, would say, "Well, except in cases of rape... ," or who would rather fervently exclaim in disgust: "Especially in cases of rape!!!" All these people are out there who don't even know me, but are standing in judgment of my life, so quick to dismiss it just because of how I was conceived. I felt like I was now going to have to justify my own existence, that I would have to prove myself to the world that I shouldn't have been aborted and that I was worthy of living. I also remember feeling like garbage because of people who would say that my life was like garbage - that I was disposable. Please understand that whenever you identify yourself as being "pro-choice," or whenever you make that exception for rape, what that really translates into is you being able to stand before me, look me in the eye, and say to me, "I think your mother should have been able to abort you."   My goodness!  How shocking!  What a bunch of immoral monsters those pro-abortion people are! Except ... what if her mother had fought off her rapist?  What if she had kicked and scratched and screamed for help and broke free from her rapist and run away without ever getting impregnated?  Poor Rebecca Kiessling would never have existed!  Yet those immoral, perverted pro-abortion people still insist that a woman has the right to resist a rapist!   Don’t take my word for it, ask one directly.  “Do you support a woman’s right to scream for help if she’s being raped?  Do you support her right to fight back?  To kick her rapist, to scratch his face, to break lose from his grip and run for her life?  You do?  Do you realize that if she resists rape, some baby that she would otherwise have had will never be born and little Rebecca Kiessling will never exist?” So how about it, everybody?  Do you support a woman’s right to not be raped, even if it means that some man or woman will never be born? Are you willing to go up to a woman who was conceived by rape and look her in the eye and say, "I think your mother should have been able to fight off her rapist." Not getting raped, not having sex, getting an abortion. All three acts have exactly the same result: some innocent person is never born. No person ever exists. Yet the anti-abortion forces only object to one of them. And they don't even see a problem.dmullenix
November 21, 2011
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DMullenix, A human being comes into existence as soon as conception takes place. It is a human being at that instant onwards regardless of the development stage. I don't care about Chaushesky et al but if they said what you said they did, I agree with them on this point. BTW, as far as I know it was Hitler's policy on the occupied territory of the USSR to encourage abortion which actually had been banned by Stalin.Eugene S
November 19, 2011
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dmullenix, Thank you for your post. A few quick comments: 1. I have been unable to locate any evidence that Hitler regarded the fetus as fully human, as you claim. You might want to have a look at this post for a contrary view. I note that the Nazis jettisoned the pro-life Hippocratic Oath. 2. Your reinterpretation of the odd "Hinduistic" paragraph which you wrote apparently now means that the child reproaching the mother for not having the abortion is the healthy child that would have been created if the mother had had the abortion. But since this healthy child does not exist, it can't reproach the mother for not creating her. Aren't you being just a little melodramatic here - imputing reproachful feelings to an imaginary being? 3. I'm glad to hear that although you're an atheistic materialist, you believe in free will, and I have no quarrel with your definition of sin: "deliberately, carelessly or negligently doing something that is both bad and unnecessary." But I'm puzzled when you add: "free will is people being born with DNA that determines some of their development and their experiences in gestation and the world which determine the rest." "Determines"? What's free about that? You even say that the whole of people's development is determined - some by DNA and the rest by environment. What room is there for freedom in this account of yours? As for determinism being false in physics: I agree, but as any philosopher will tell you, being undetermined doesn't automatically make you free. 4. Re the Sherri Finkbine case: evidently you think that the mother has the duty to abort, even if there's only a 20% chance that her baby will be born with a major abnormality - which means that 80% of the babies killed wouldn't have such an abnormality. Now let me ask you: what if it were 2% and not 20%? Would she still have the duty to abort? Your logic seems to suggest that you would say that a mother has the duty to abort, even if the probability of a major abnormality is higher than the average for the population as a whole. Am I right? Is this your view? Because if it is, then what you're really saying is that a woman over the age of 35 has no right to have a baby, and that a woman who has a condition that makes her slightly more likely to have a baby with a genetic defect has no right to have one either. In your Utopia, would such women be forcibly sterilized? Just curious. 5. You claim that "The Catholic church used to have a relatively benign policy on abortion: No abortion after quickening, which is at about the 14 week mark." Not true. As John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York, put it (see http://www.priestsforlife.org/magisterium/cardocqanda.html#qa8 ):
"Pope Paul VI declared that the teaching of the Church about the morality of abortion 'has not changed and is unchangeable.' Although some people point out that Saint Thomas Aquinas thought the soul did not come to the fetus ('ensoulment') until sometime after conception, the fact is that he considered abortion gravely sinful even before this time. He taught that it was a 'grave sin against the natural law' to kill the fetus at any stage, and a graver sin of homicide to do so after ensoulment."
6. Regarding the skepticism I expressed towards the view that the mind is some sort of thing, you write:
Are you saying that YOUR mind is nothing? Or that it’s not important? What in the world is typing, your fingers?
I'm not saying that my mind is nothing; I'm just saying it's not a thing. My height and weight aren't things either; they're properties of a thing (me). What you call the "mind" seems to consist of EITHER a discontinuous succession of mental states and/or mental acts, OR some underlying power that I possess, to enjoy these states and/or engage in these acts. On the former view of the mind, it is difficult to see how sleeping people could be said to possess minds - which raises the question of how (on your view) they could be said to possess rights. On the latter view of the mind, we have to ask ourselves: where does the power reside? You say it resides in the brain: the brain is what has the capacity to think, when it is sufficiently mature. But I could reply: if individuals with a capacity to think have a right to life, then why shouldn't individuals (such as the embryo) with a programmed capacity to acquire that capacity have the same rights? 7. Finally, you write:
And the brain’s not a thing? The brain? The physical brain that you can hold in your hand? I give up.
You must have a pretty big hand if you can hold your 1,360 cc. brain in it! Seriously, though: the brain is not a thing but a part of a thing. Moreover, its development is regulated by the body's built-in developmental program, so I'd regard the latter as the more ontologically fundamental. That's where the power to think ultimately resides: in the program that generates it.vjtorley
November 19, 2011
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And how could you? There's nothing there.dmullenix
November 19, 2011
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Lapper herself is glad she was not aborted. As she puts it: “At least I’m alive, and people should celebrate that.”
I find such statements interesting, but for myself I can only say I wouldn't be bothered if I'd never been born regardless of reasons why. Why should I?Cabal
November 18, 2011
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Eugene S “The first country to legalise abortion was the USSR under Lenin (1920). It speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” And Hitler believed a fetus was fully human and enacted the death penalty for abortionists (although he made abortion legal for those races he considered subhuman). Nicolae Ceausescu banned both abortion and birth control. I don’t know what Osama bin Laden’s position on abortion was. Do you have some kind of a point here? VJT: There’s a mental short circuit that’s hard to avoid – the difference between destroying an existing mind and never creating a mind in the first place. The first case is a tragedy, the second is – absolutely normal for all of the billions of minds that never existed because their mothers had a headache on the night they otherwise would have been conceived. You’re right that a mind that exists, such as the Down symptom child I mentioned, is unlikely to want to die. And it would be absolutely useless for her to complain about her condition because the deed is done – for whatever reason, she’s here, she’s hurting and there’s nothing that can be done NOW to fix it. But if her parents had aborted their defective pregnancy and gotten pregnant again and delivered a healthy child, that child would have been happy and the Down child would never have existed to feel bad about either it’s condition or its not existing. I assumed for the sake of argument that the child in question has the knowledge and intelligence to understand that if her parents had aborted their defective pregnancy and had another child instead, she would be that healthy child. Or he, depending. But in any case, they could have had a healthy child and she or he would be it. That’s the spirit I wrote that paragraph in. No, I’m not a Hindu, although re-incarnation would be neat if it were real. Imagine all the evil people reborn as dung beetles. Karma would be neat too. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that I know of for either. When I say “soul”, think “mind”. I use “flesh” and “mind” when talking to the religious. I’m an atheistic materialist and I have no problem with free will. I do have a problem with people who try to define free will as being something outside of and unaffected by this universe, such as the dualists who seem to think the brain is just a relay station for a supernatural entity of some sort that does the actual thinking. I also get very annoyed by the people who believe that if there’s no supernatural then every motion of every particle in our brains and bodies is pre-determined by the motions of previous particles that move them. That type of Newtonian determinism is dead, done in by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. To see what I mean, try to knock a cue ball into a corner pocket on a pool table that’s a mile across. You can’t do it because the uncertainty of the positions and momentums of the atoms in the pool cue make it impossible to hit the ball accurately enough to hit the pocket every time. The balls will fan out and only a small percentage of them will actually hit the pocket. The virtual particles that are now known to appear and disappear on the sub-atomic scale are also completely unpredictable, as far as we know. I'm sure there are other phenoma that rule out Newtonian determinism that don't come to mind right now. To me, free will is people being born with DNA that determines some of their development and their experiences in gestation and the world which determine the rest. The totality of the two have caused them to develop their distinct personalities, including their knowledge and preferences. That knowledge and those preferences constitute their free will. It’s not completely free, I can't speak Swaheli no matter how hard I try, but it’s what we’ve got and it's enough. Given free will, I have no problem with sin. It’s deliberately, carelessly or negligently doing something that is both bad and unnecessary. Such as failing to terminate a defective pregnancy before it produces a defective human being. Thanks for the date on the LIFE photos. I remembered them as coming out in the early sixties. I know photos of the early stages of gestation were available then because I had some ready to use in that debate and still remember my disappointment when the teacher said “No props.” Regarding the Sheri Finkbine case: Sometimes the anti-abortion forces are REALLY scary. So it’s all right with them if the odds are “only” 20% that the fetus will turn into a baby with deformed limbs, missing arms and legs, missing ears, deafness, heart defects, missing eyes, paralysis of the face, kidney abnormalities, mental retardation or some combination of the above. That’s one chance in five. They would literally have a better chance if their parents just played Russian roulette with them. Nobody has a right to take that kind of a chance with somebody else. Anyone who does should be jailed. Thanks for reminding me that the Catholic church used to have a relatively benign policy on abortion: No abortion after quickening, which is at about the 14 week mark. 80 or 90 percent of all abortions are performed before that point and most of the rest are caused by the late discovery of a serious defect or a threat to the mother’s health. It’s tragic that they backslid. Congratulations to Fr. Thomas Harper S.J. and everybody else who held that belief. Their knowledge and morals were better than the rest of the heirarchy and the Church sinned mightily when it overruled them. Regarding Allison Lapper, I’m glad she’s happy despite having no arms and flapper like legs. You don’t say if her parent knew of her condition in time, but if they did and had an abortion and tried again, their healthy child would probably be even happier with normal limbs and Allison would never have existed. She would no more have mourned her non-existence than she would have if her mother had come down with a headache on the night she was conceived or as the million or different boys and girls her mother might have given birth to if a different sperm had fertilized her egg that night. “Looking at your post, I think your most serious philosophical mistake is to regard the mind as some sort of “thing”. Because you view it as a thing, you are prepared to argue that it possesses importance in its own right. But where’s the evidence that the mind is a thing? The only thing I can see is the human body. And that thing begins at conception. What about the brain, you ask? That’s just a part of a thing, not a thing as such.” Sometimes you just take my breath away. It’s hard to even get a grip on that “argument” because it’s so breathtakingly inane. Are you saying that YOUR mind is nothing? Or that it’s not important? What in the world is typing, your fingers? What’s making them move? Your muscles? What’s making your muscles move? Your nerve impulses? What’s causing those nerve impulses? Nothing? And the brain’s not a thing? The brain? The physical brain that you can hold in your hand? I give up.dmullenix
November 18, 2011
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Hi dmullenix, Thanks for your posts. Before I talk about the Sherri Finkbine case and the photos in "Life" magazine, I'd like to highlight this remark of yours:
If your happy Down symptom children turn on their parents, they should ask, “Why did you create me with a defect? You KNEW I would have Down syndrome. Why didn’t you start the pregnancy over and do it right? If you had better morals, I could have been normal.”
This is staggeringly nonsensical. The child is telling his/her parents that if they had started the pregnancy over and did it right, he/she could have been normal???? But if they "started over", it wouldn't be the same child! It would be another one. Ask yourself this: does it make sense for a child to say to his/her parents: "Why did you create me? If you'd been more careful, you could have created another child, Fred, instead of creating me! Why didn't you do that?" Of course it makes no sense for a child to say that - for then the child is wishing him/herself out of existence. The only way I can make sense of your remarks is to suppose that you are a Hindu, who believes in a soul that can be reborn in various bodies. Only within that framework would it make sense for the child to complain to his/her parents: "Why didn't you abort me and start over? For if you had, I could have been reborn in a better body, instead of being stuck with this crummy one!" Come to think of it, I have noticed a lot of references to "soul" vs. "flesh" in your recent posts. You even speak of "sinners" - a rather puzzling term, because I was under the impression that you were an atheistic materialist who (presumably) would have denied the reality of free will and hence of sin. Perhaps I have you pegged all wrong. If so, I apologize. Are you by any chance a Hindu, dmullenix? Don't be shy - you've got plenty of distinguished company (Mohandas K. Gandhi, for instance). Well? Your memory of the photos of the embryo and fetus that were published in Life magazine is faulty. You mistakenly claim that they came out in the late 50s or early 60s. In fact, they didn't come out until 1965. You also claim that they convinced millions of Americans that the embryo/fetus was not a human being:
Ordinary Americans (and I assume the rest of the first world) started learning about the real details of human gestation in those days and it was obvious to just about anybody that at the beginning of gestation, we were not dealing with a human being. More of a cross between a worm and some sort of sea food. And this new knowledge was what started to change attitudes on abortion.
In fact, the Life magazine photos of the embryo and fetus were actually welcomed by the pro-life movement as bolstering their case! Pro-lifers printed them over and over again. I know, because I grew up seeing them in the early 70s, while I was living in Tasmania. You want proof that the Life photos helped the pro-life cause? Here's an extract from the Wikipedia article, A Child is Born (book) :
A Child Is Born (full title: A Child Is Born: The drama of life before birth in unprecedented photographs. A practical guide for the expectant mother; original Swedish title: Ett barn blir till) is a 1965 photographic book by Swedish photojournalist Lennart Nilsson. The book consists of photographs charting the development of the human embryo and fetus from conception to birth; it is reportedly the best-selling illustrated book ever published... The book was often cited as presenting the first images of a live fetus in utero. In fact, Geraldine Flanagan's The First Nine Months Of Life had in 1962 compiled a similar set of fetal images from medical archives. Life, an American magazine, marked the publication of A Child Is Born by reproducing in its 30 April 1965 edition 16 of the book's photographs. The pictures were run simultaneously in the British Sunday Times and in Paris Match. All eight million printed copies of Life containing the images sold out within four days... The images played an important role in debates about abortion and the beginning of human life. Nilsson himself declined to comment on the origins of some of the photographs' subjects, which in fact included many images of terminated and miscarried fetuses: all but one of the images that appeared in Life were of fetuses that had been surgically removed from the womb. Nilsson also refused to be drawn on the question of the point at which life begins, describing himself as a journalist and the debate as one for other authorities. Pro-life campaigners perceived and presented the book's images as evidence that a fetus is a well-developed, discrete human person from well before birth. Pro-choice activists, on the other hand, have portrayed the images (and the technology they represent) as evidence of medical and imaging techniques that now allow serious fetal defects to be detected very early and furnish pregnant parents with more information upon which to base choices. Some critics have described as ironic the images' popularity with pro-life campaigners who argue that the fetus is a living human, given that many of them depict (surgically or spontaneously) aborted fetuses. Both the popularity of the images with pro-life campaigners and the photographic techniques, which have been described as eliding the presence of the woman in whose womb the fetus is developing, have made the book the subject of substantial feminist critique. Some of these criticisms have addressed the book's language, which often describes the photographs' subjects as "persons" or "babies". (Bold emphases mine - VJT.)
I'd now like to discuss the Sherri Finkbine case, which you make so much of. You write:
And then the Sherri Finkbine case broke. She was a mother of four and the hostess of a children’s TV show in Phoenix, Arizona. Her husband picked up some sedatives in England and brought them home. Sherri took several of them. She was pregnant at the time. Then the news came out: When taken during early pregnancy, Thalidomide causes horrible birth defects. Among other things, it screws up the limbs. Instead of arms and legs, you get flippers – if you’re lucky.
The Sherri Finkbine case did indeed have a profound influence on public attitudes towards abortion - but only in the case of severe deformities. (The Catholic Church, to its credit, continued to insist that Thalidomide fetuses had the same right to life as everyone else.) But there's something you forgot to tell us about Thalidomide babies, dmullenix - quite often, it doesn't cause the horrible birth defects you describe. Here's what the Website RealChoice says about the Sherri Finkbine case:
Finkbine, then 30, is shown in BBC coverage smiling radiantly as she steps off a plane in London after her abortion. It's interesting to note that only 20% of the babies born to mothers who took Thalidomide were born with birth defects. But this mere 20% chance of missing or deformed limbs, or other birth defects, was considered to be enough to justify aborting the 80% of thalidomide-exposed fetuses who would not have been affected. This speaks volumes about our attitudes toward people with disabilities. (Emphases mine - VJT.)
I've tried to locate a medical source for that 20% figure, and I've found one. See this brochure by OTIS (Organization of Teratology Information Services). Excerpt:
When a pregnant woman takes thalidomide 34-50 days (4.5 to 7 weeks) after the beginning of her last menstrual period, there is a risk of approximately 20% or greater to have a baby with problems such as extremely short or missing arms and legs, missing ears (both outside and inside), and deafness. There is also a risk of other problems such as heart defects, missing or small eyes, paralysis of the face, kidney abnormalities, and mental retardation. (Emphases mine - VJT.)
So 20% apparently refers to the risk of severe defects. There are also lots of miscarriages caused by thalidomide. Even so, the point remains: a significant number of mothers who took the drug go on to have normal babies. It is not an automatic sentence to a life of misery. But how many people know that? Finally, here is an article by Mary Kenny, a former pro-choice feminist, about a woman named Alison Lapper, who was born without arms and with flapper-like legs - not as a result of her mother taking Thalidomide, but as a result of a congenital disorder called phocomelia. An excerpt:
The admirable Lapper certainly did have a hard time as a baby. Her birth mother was told that Alison was too ugly to live, and doctors considered her "a cabbage". She was brought up in foster care, but overcame her many difficulties and disadvantages to gain a first in fine art at Brighton University, and to become a delighted mother herself.
Lapper herself is glad she was not aborted. As she puts it: "At least I'm alive, and people should celebrate that." You seem to think that people were very pro-life back in the 1960s. They were not. They were pro-natal, perhaps, but not pro-life. Unlike you, my memories of the 60s and early 70s were of a time when it was difficult for people even to conceive (terrible pun, I know) of the embryo/fetus as a person. In 1972, when I was in Grade 7, I remember our Social Science teacher casually remarking that "the day you were born was the day you began to be". Nobody took any exception to the remark - it just seemed natural to think that way at the time. I know I did. The idea of holding a funeral for an unborn child would have seemed absurd, back then - although apparently they've always been quite common in Japan, where I now live. When a woman miscarried, doctors would often tell her to "have another baby". Even in the Catholic Church, many theologians did not regard the embryo/fetus as an unborn child. You want proof? Take a look at this excerpt from Peace through the Truth, by Fr. Thomas Harper S.J. Here's what it says about original sin and the fetus:
It is evident from the whole tenour of what we have written about original sin, that this hereditary taint cannot be infused into a child, (if such we may call it,) before it has received its soul. For it cannot affect a yet lifeless foetus, a mere mass of matter; since it formally consists in the privation of a spiritual quality, between which and matter there can be no conceivable proportion.
"Lifeless foetus"? "Mere mass of matter"? "Before it has received its soul"? He sounds a lot like you, doesn't he, dmullenix? And that's not all. Pro-life Catholic philosopher Professor Edward Feser has noted (see http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/10/harper-on-original-sin.html?showComment=1318291897182#c7552858668539236781 ) that "As late as the 1950s, Scholastic writers of unquestioned orthodoxy, in books having the Imprimatur, were debating the question of whether the rational soul was present at conception." The fact is that although the Catholic Church has consistently opposed abortion as a mortal sin and an attack on innocent human life for 2,000 years, it has never dogmatically defined whether the embryo/fetus is a human person. From 400 A.D. until the late nineteenth century, the dominant theological view was that it was not one, in the early stages of pregnancy. See the article on ensoulment in Wikipedia. This view was largely shaped by the poor biology of that time: the ovum wasn't even discovered until 1827. What changed this medically uninformed attitude among the populace? Nineteenth century American doctors. The full story is described in “The Physicians’ Crusade Against Abortion” by Frederick N. Dyer (Science History Publications, USA, 2005. ISBN 0-88135-378-7.) These doctors often had to combat public perceptions that the fetus wasn't a person until quickening. Professor David Storer forcefully condemned such nonsense in a talk entitled, “An Introductory Lecture before the Medical Class of 1855-56 of Harvard University,” in which he remarked:
The generally prevailing opinion that although it may be wrong to procure an abortion after the child has presented unmistakable signs of life, it is excusable previous to that period, is unintelligible to the conscientious physician. The moment an embryo enters the uterus a microscopic speck, it is the germ of a human being, and it is as morally wrong to endeavor to destroy that germ as to be guilty of the crime of infanticide.” (David Storer’s lecture was printed in “Two Frequent Causes of Uterine Disease,” Journal of the Gynaecological Society of Boston, 6 (March 1872): 194-203, 198-99.)
That's what got the ball rolling. David's son Horatio continued the medical crusade, and by 1900, abortion was outlawed across the U.S. Looking at your post, I think your most serious philosophical mistake is to regard the mind as some sort of "thing". Because you view it as a thing, you are prepared to argue that it possesses importance in its own right. But where's the evidence that the mind is a thing? The only thing I can see is the human body. And that thing begins at conception. What about the brain, you ask? That's just a part of a thing, not a thing as such. What about the soul, you may ask? Now you're getting religious, aren't you? But as I argued in my pro-life essay (see here and scroll down to "When does the embryo/fetus acquire rationality?"), on an Aristotelian view of the soul, it should be present when a human body is present. We now know that applies from conception onwards. (Aristotle didn't know that.) So to sum up, talk of "the mind" appears to be a way of reifying a set of spatially and temporally discrete experiences into a thing which possesses rights. It won't work. There is no such thing. You can't get a subject of rights out of a pack of mental states. But you can get them out of an organism which contains and is running its own developmental program, which will enable it to have those experiences.vjtorley
November 17, 2011
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DMullenix, I, for one, have nothing to do with US anti-abortion movement. I don't even live in the US. But I oppose abortion because I am Christian and because I think it is murder. The first country to legalise abortion was the USSR under Lenin (1920). It speaks for itself, doesn't it?Eugene S
November 17, 2011
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Joseph, That's Darwinism. No wonder.Eugene S
November 17, 2011
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They don't need your sympathy. It looks like it is you who need theirs, given your statements. It is so convenient to shield yourself from the pain of this world by philosophising. You have worries about you future child's health? No problem, call a human being a foetus, press the button, and get rid of it. Oh no, I forgot. The dead body could be utilised for making skin care products...Eugene S
November 17, 2011
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dmuulenx:
Development programs don’t count for anything at all. Can you talk to a development program? No, but you can talk to a mind. Can it talk to you? No, but a mind can.
Minds don't talk. And people can and do talk to inanimate objects.
A fetus has no personality and no memories.
Nice bald assertion. BTW it is NOT anti-abortion, it IS PRO-LIFE
I will give general advice to anybody living in the first world and having reasonable access to health care who is contemplating creating a baby: If you are not willing to monitor your pregnancy and abort it if you detect a serious defect, you are not morally fit to be parents.
Fortunately your opinion means nothing to the rest of the world. Also I take it that your parents were not morally fit because here you are and you are definitely defective.Joseph
November 17, 2011
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VJTorley is from Australia or somewhere in that general vicinity and it’s struck me that many commenters here are too young to remember pre-Roe V. Wade, so here’s how America came to change its abortion laws, to the best of my recollection. I was born in 1947 and up until sometime in the late 50’s or early 60’s, abortion basically wasn’t thought of much, but when it was nearly everybody would have considered it pro-forma immoral. By that, I mean that nobody thought much about it, but everybody just “knew” it was immoral. After all, babies lived in the womb and then they were born. I even remember seeing a short-lived comic book series that starred two babies, in their mother’s womb. They could talk and everything and they were even wearing diapers. The series was short, probably because they didn’t have much to talk about. Things started to change in the late 50’s or early 60’s. The first thing I can remember was a remarkable series of photographs that appeared in Life magazine, which was still very big and had a wide circulation in those days. The cover picture was of a baby, floating in the womb, eyes open, with a look of wonder on its face. (A dead face, actually, but that wasn’t pointed out till much later.) That picture still circulates. I’ve seen it in the last year. And, of course, it was proof positive that babies lived in the womb. You could see it with your own eyes. Except that inside the magazine, the article showed equally clear pictures of all stages of gestation. I can’t remember how young they started – they may have skipped the fertilized egg and blastula stages. But there, in color, perfectly focused and several times life size, were pictures of a very early embryo. Just a few weeks. And man, it did not look anything like a baby. And there were other pictures, taken at later and later stages of pregnancy, and man, it took months before they started looking human and even then it was an alien version of a human. If you woke up with one on your pillow, you’d scream! Ordinary Americans (and I assume the rest of the first world) started learning about the real details of human gestation in those days and it was obvious to just about anybody that at the beginning of gestation, we were not dealing with a human being. More of a cross between a worm and some sort of sea food. And this new knowledge was what started to change attitudes on abortion. And then the Sherri Finkbine case broke. She was a mother of four and the hostess of a children’s TV show in Phoenix, Arizona. Her husband picked up some sedatives in England and brought them home. Sherri took several of them. She was pregnant at the time. Then the news came out: When taken during early pregnancy, Thalidomide causes horrible birth defects. Among other things, it screws up the limbs. Instead of arms and legs, you get flippers – if you’re lucky. Her doctor recommended a therapeutic abortion, everything was set up to perform it and then she told her story to a friend at a newspaper to warn others about Thalidomide. And the letters and threats began. The hospital cancelled the abortion, she was fired from the TV station, she had FBI protection at one time. She tried to get an abortion in Japan, they wouldn’t let her in. She finally went to Sweden and obtained a legal abortion. The fetus had no legs, one arm and it was so deformed they couldn’t tell the sex. And everybody in America followed the case in the newspapers and TV. By that time, I was rooting for Sherri and so was, probably, a majority of the country. I graduated from High School in 1965. In either our freshman or our junior years (62 or 64), our English class featured debates and my team drew “Abortion” for a topic. This sent me out to the library, digging up everything I could find on the subject and even by that time, even to a high school boy, it was glaringly obvious that, at least in the early stages of pregnancy, the fetus was not a human and abortion was not murder. By the mid sixties, everybody’s attitudes towards abortion were changing. Even the religious right started to change and several prominent conservative pastors came out in favor of abortion, at least to save the life of the mother and to a lesser extent to prevent terribly deformed babies from being born. (This is not my opinion, by the way. I read it in an article in Christianity Today, Billy Graham’s magazine.) Then in 1973, the Supreme Court decided Roe V. Wade and instantly, the religious right backtracked to their original positions and all the pastors that had stuck their necks out on abortion pulled them right back in again. The problem was that the religious right hated the Supreme Court like you can scarcely believe today. Literally, if you went for a drive through the Bible Belt, you’d see “Impeach Earl Warren” (the Chief Justice) signs on billboards and painted on barns. Satan himself wasn’t loathed as much as the Supreme Court because they were A: Liberals and B: Took the constitution seriously, which lead to decisions that took away many of the unjustly acquired privileges that conservative religion had usurped. Particularly, prayer in schools! I live in Wisconsin and we “lost” prayer in schools back in 1895. Yes, that’s eighteen ninety five, the late nineteenth century. We “lost” it because some Catholic parents sued because their children were being forced to read the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer in the schools – and then they got beat up on the way home because they objected to it. And of course, it turned out that not having a school teacher read a cursory prayer to the students made absolutely no difference to the education or morals of Wisconsinites and Wisconsin continued to have one of the best school systems in the country. But when the Supreme Court, which was already widely hated by conservatives of all stripes, took school prayer away from the entire country, the religious right went ballistic and they haven’t come back to earth to this day. And then those Supreme S.O.B.s went and legalized abortion! That was the beginning of the anti-abortion movement and no amount of reasoning has ever worked on them because their hatred of abortion is purely emotional. Today, after the anti-abortion movement has conducted almost thirty years of screaming rhetoric, wide spread harassment, tons of bald faced lies and committed a few outright murders, they have made themselves completely logic and fact proof. For them to face the error of their ways now would also mean facing the extent of their immorality. And they aren’t ever going to do that!dmullenix
November 17, 2011
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Eugene S, see paragraph 6 of my reply at 30. Anyone who needs a crippled child to learn to love has my sympathy. No, strike that. Their child has my sympathy. ScottAndrews2: “They” would not have existed to be cured. We’re talking about abortion, remember? No minds, so there is no “they” present. It’s illegal to disturb sea turtle eggs because we want sea turtles. We DON’T want children afflicted with Down syndrome or any other serious defect. That’s why good people stop the pregnancy before any mind forms and start over. If a child is born with undetected Down syndrome or any other serious defect, it’s a child, not a fetus. You don’t abort children. I will give general advice to anybody living in the first world and having reasonable access to health care who is contemplating creating a baby: If you are not willing to monitor your pregnancy and abort it if you detect a serious defect, you are not morally fit to be parents. Please don’t try, you sinners. Scott, I think the anti-abortion forces have done more to devalue human life than any other Americans since at least the days of Jim Crow and Selma. ALL anti-abortionists have, at the least, equated human life with a mindless piece of flesh. Many of the anti-abortionists, the ones who would let a mother die rather than have an abortion, go further and put the mindless piece of flesh above a human being. Shame on them all! They are sinners. VJ, there’s nothing weird about my post. The problem is that you’ve drunk deep from the anti-abortion cup. I can summarize everything I’ve said like this: Minds count. They count more than anything else in the world except another mind. Human minds (and any other human quality minds that may exist elsewhere in the universe or on earth in the future) count most of all. Flesh only counts if it somehow serves a mind. “And it certainly doesn’t follow that an organism with a mind is more important than an organism currently running a program that will enable it to build itself a mind.” Development programs don’t count for anything at all. Can you talk to a development program? No, but you can talk to a mind. Can it talk to you? No, but a mind can. Can it comprehend anything? No, but a mind can. I would sacrifice a development program to save a kitten any day because a kitten has at least a simple mind. I define “greater” as “being more important than.” A human mind is more important than a kitten’s mind. A kitten’s mind is more important than a slug’s mind. A slug’s mind is more important than a stone. When you’re asleep or unconscious, your personality and all of your memories still exist; they’re just temporarily on hold. They can be restarted instantly by something as simple as an alarm clock or the sound of a snapping twig. A fetus has no personality and no memories. They do not exist. They will START to form at birth. They will only start to form if the baby is interacting with the world. The baby has to be able to move its arms and legs to learn to control them, to use its eyes to learn to see, to hear voices to learn to speak, to reach out and touch things to learn the shape of the world – there is almost no part of an adult mind that is not totally dependent on interaction with the universe to form. Fear of falling and spiders, maybe, and not much else. IF the baby is raised so it can interact with the universe, and all else goes well, THEN it will slowly begin to form a mind – and every mind will be different. Even if the baby is one member of a pair of identical twins, and has exactly the same DNA as her sister, her mind will be different from her sister’s. If you get a cloning factory to manufacture a million fetuses with identical DNA, every one of them will develop a different mind because the minds start to form AFTER birth and every one is different because every one interacts with the universe differently. (The most I’ve ever heard of any fetus “learning” is that if you play music with a simple beat to a fetus for the last month or two of pregnancy, it will be calmed after birth if you play the same beat. I wouldn’t be surprised if it works just as well for cat fetuses and kittens.) There is absolutely no comparison between a fetus without a mind and an unconscious human. Zero. Nada. If your happy Down symptom children turn on their parents, they should ask, “Why did you create me with a defect? You KNEW I would have Down syndrome. Why didn’t you start the pregnancy over and do it right? If you had better morals, I could have been normal.” Yes, I would consider your couple in their late forties to be heinously immoral if they put their selfish desire to have a baby ahead of that baby’s well being and continued their pregnancy when they discovered their child would have Down syndrome. I’d feel the same way if they had a healthy baby and injected it with a poison that created the same symptoms. I would support putting people like that in prison. See my reply to ScottAndrews. “They” don’t exist in the womb. There is nobody there to “cure”. Think carefully about this: VJT: In a similar vein, referring to a Down syndrome child, you write: Me: But if her parents had done the right thing, their child would have been born with a normal brain and body and she’d just be an ordinary friend. VJT: No. She wouldn’t be, period. There’d be another child. And whose child would that be? Somebody else’s? Remember, the mind begins to develop AFTER birth and most of it is formed from its interactions with the world. She would be the only child to develop a mind. She would be their child and she'd be normal.dmullenix
November 17, 2011
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Dmullenix, Thank you for your post. I don't think I've seen such a bizarre post in a long time. I'm not saying that as a personal criticism, but you and I are evidently poles apart - I'm tempted to say galaxies apart - on some issues. Oh well. Let's begin with your math.
Here’s an equation to help illustrate the truth about abortion: F + NM = F. Flesh plus no mind equals flesh. Here’s another one: M > F. Mind is greater than flesh. Or this all purpose equation: M > Anything else. A mind is greater than anything else.
An embryo isn't just flesh. It's an organism running a developmental program. What you need to show is that an organism with a mind is greater than an organism currently running a program that will enable it to build itself a mind. This I deny. You also need to define "greater". Do you just mean: "having more fun"? I will happily grant that minds have more fun than anything else. But it doesn't follow that they are more important. And it certainly doesn't follow that an organism with a mind is more important than an organism currently running a program that will enable it to build itself a mind. You write: "Flesh is only important if a mind is using it." But what you need to show is: "An organism currently running a program that will enable it to build itself a mind is only important if a mind is using it." I see no reason to believe that. Let me ask you this. What do you think happens to your mind when you go to sleep, or fall into a coma? Where does it go? Evidently it ceases to function. Does that mean you cease to exist when you're in a coma? You yourself deny this, when you write:
We also know from experience that it’s possible for the brain to be prevented from generating a mind, but all the information and hardware may still exist and sometimes the brain will start to function again and the mind is present again.
So what happens to you while your mind is not functioning? In such a situation, you evidently identify with the "information and hardware" in your brain. You regard that as the real "you". OK. If it's OK for you to define yourself in terms of information and hardware, then why do you object to me defining myself in terms of a developmental program in my genome, which is capable of generating my mind in a period of a few months? Remember that it may take years to coax a person's brain out of a coma (41 years is the record, I believe). You write:
There is no soul in the womb. That knowledge is why the abortion laws were changed.
Please read here: http://www.angelfire.com/linux/vjtorley/prolife.html#J (Part J - Outlawing Abortion: The Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion in the Nineteenth Century) A short extract:
One of the great myths of the pro-choice movement is that abortion was criminalized in the United States of America in the late nineteenth century, mainly for petty, vindictive reasons: in particular, putting the "quacks" who performed many of the abortions out of business; increasing the numbers of "Americans," i.e. native-born citizens, who were having many fewer children than Catholic immigrants; and keeping women in traditional child-bearing roles. The truth is that abortion was outlawed in America primarily for humanitarian reasons. The story of how this happened has been chronicled by James C. Mohr, in his book Abortion in America (Oxford University Press, 1978), and more recently by Frederick Dyer in his work, "The Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion" (Science History Publications, USA, 2005. ISBN 0-88135-378-7.)... To sum up: the physicians' crusade against abortion in the United States in the nineteenth century succeeded because of a firm and unbending conviction on the part of doctors, which they were not afraid to uphold during consultations with their patients, that the embryo/fetus was an unborn human person with a right to life, from the moment of conception.
In response to my point about Down syndrome children being happy, you write: "Do you think they'd be happier still if they didn't have Down syndrome?" I'm sure they would, but I'm equally sure that since the pleasure in their lives far outweighs the pain, they're not likely to turn on their parents and ask them: "Why did you create me?" Let me ask you another question. Take a couple in their late forties who have never been able to conceive, and who finally experience the joy of pregnancy. Half-way through, they discover that their unborn child has Down syndrome. Would you consider them immoral if they chose to continue with their pregnancy? After all, chances are they'll never have another baby anyway. By any reckoning, one is surely better than none. Finally, you write:
If I was to interview 100 people with Down syndrome, I would ask them, “Would you prefer to have been born without Down syndrome?” And if the answer was yes, I would tell them to blame the anti-abortion movement – their parents could have stopped the defective pregnancy and gone on to have a normal baby.
ScottAndrews2 nailed it on the head with his response:
Abortion wouldn’t have cured them. They would just be dead. The better question is to ask is whether they regret not having been aborted.
In a similar vein, referring to a Down syndrome child, you write:
But if her parents had done the right thing, their child would have been born with a normal brain and body and she’d just be an ordinary friend.
No. She wouldn't be, period. There'd be another child.vjtorley
November 16, 2011
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I know that some parents with both healthy children and children diagnosed with Down syndrome testify to learning what parental love truly is only after their ill children were born. After all, we are all here in this world in order to learn to love. In this light, what people with Down syndrome are doing for us is much greater than what we may have to offer them in return.Eugene S
November 16, 2011
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Dmullenix,
If I was to interview 100 people with Down syndrome, I would ask them, “Would you prefer to have been born without Down syndrome?” And if the answer was yes, I would tell them to blame the anti-abortion movement
Abortion wouldn't have cured them. They would just be dead. The better question is to ask is whether they regret not having been aborted.
Well, your argument is false because it doesn’t confront the single most important fact about abortion: Minds are what count. They are infinitely important. Flesh is only important if a mind is using it. There are no minds in the womb.
Why is it illegal to disturb sea turtle eggs? They aren't even sea turtles. It's because we value the potential sea turtle. Which will you argue - that a sea turtle is more valuable then a person with Downs Syndrome because at least it isn't defective, or because they are more rare? What if a child is born with undetected Downs Syndrome. Would it be ethical to kill it? If it was ethical a few months ago, why not now? You've made your judgment on Downs Syndrome. Would you be prepared to take an on-call job advising parents of children with other birth defects on a case-by-case basis whether their child should be carried to term? Or could you make a list? These are rhetorical questions. There is logic that favors aborting fetuses for any number of reasons. There is logic that favors preventing certain adults from reproducing. One could reason that society would benefit by applying the death penalty to most crimes, even retroactively. What prevents us from acting on logic? It is our values. Values are personal, and apply only where we have authority. In the case of parents deciding whether to abort a fetus, I believe that they have the authority to act on their values, even if I am certain that their decision is immoral. Societies have gone down the path of logically devaluing life for various reasons, and we know where that leads. When we devalue any life we devalue our own. I'm not evaluating that as good or bad. But it's true.ScottAndrews2
November 16, 2011
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DMullinex, "The question is when is a life worth living?" It is not up to us, mortals, to decide that. It is the will of God to give life and take it away. We shall probably see in the age to come why such things as severe illness or violence are allowed to happen by God. Re abortion: Some examples. Mendeleev was the youngest of in excess of 10 siblings. St Matrona of Moscow (XX century) was blind from birth and yet she saw spiritual things more clearly than some of us see material. If their parents had decided to kill them the world would not have had a wonderful scientist and a wonderful saint. Two twins talking in their Mum's womb. One says: "What Mum are you talking about? There is no Mum." The other: "Yes, there is. I believe." The first: "Besides, there is no life after birth. I know this for a fact because no one ever returned to the womb." The other: "Yes, there is."Eugene S
November 16, 2011
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DY: I’m glad your friend is doing well. Would you give a healthy person Down syndrome? Would you want to see a healthy person afflicted with Down syndrome? The question is not “When is a life worth living?”, it’s “Will you knowingly produce a human being with a serious defect when you don’t have to?” Abortion does not “…do away with those we think will not lead a life worth living.” “Those” would be people with minds. Minds do not exist in the womb. Abortion kills flesh. There is no soul in the womb. That knowledge is why the abortion laws were changed. “Are you suggesting also that we kill all the down syndrome individuals who have not been aborted?” Of course not. Your friend is no longer mere flesh, she has a mind now and that is what makes her a human being. A defective mind, and she’s stuck with it, but it’s okay because the anti-abortion apologists can tell themselves that she went to college. Or, if she’s a little worse, that she’s so happy. Or if she’s even worse, “We’ve learned so much, caring for her. It’s really made us better persons.” (My favorite) Or, for the really bad ones, she goes into an institution and wears a helmet for the rest of her short life because she falls down all the time and nobody talks much about her. And I guess the really really bad ones don’t live to make it to an institution. But if her parents had done the right thing, their child would have been born with a normal brain and body and she’d just be an ordinary friend. “That’s what the evil Nazis did.” The Nazis killed minds. Abortion kills flesh. Flesh only has value if it’s attached to a mind. If I was to interview 100 people with Down syndrome, I would ask them, “Would you prefer to have been born without Down syndrome?” And if the answer was yes, I would tell them to blame the anti-abortion movement – their parents could have stopped the defective pregnancy and gone on to have a normal baby. And then I would tell them to try to forgive their parents because the rank and file are being missinformed by the leaders of the anti-abortion movement, and those leaders, who should know better and could know better with minimal effort, are the real sinners and bear the real guilt here. Do you realize what you’re doing here? You’re asking a MIND if it wants to continue to exist, BUT THERE ARE NO MINDS IN THE WOMB. Go ahead; ask 100 fetuses if their lives are worth living. Ask a thousand of them. Or a million. You will never get an answer because there is no mind in the womb that is even capable of understanding the question, let alone answering it. We’re dealing with flesh and someone who will not sacrifice flesh in favor of a mind is a person who is capable of doing great evil while thinking themselves virtuous. Vj, this floored me: “Why on earth would you think it immoral to create such people?” There is nothing like a religion or an ideology to make good people do bad things. “If they’re happier being alive than not existing at all, then I cannot see how you could describe the act of creating them as immoral, even on your own humanist premises.” Do you think they’d be happier still if they didn’t have Down syndrome? Again, abortion does not kill minds. Abortion is stopping a pregnancy BEFORE a mind is produced. See above about asking a fetus if it’s happy. You will never get an answer because a fetus has no mind. Regarding “starting over again”: If you have a couple who would deliberately carry a known-defective pregnancy to term because an abortion can be painful and sometimes it’s not easy getting pregnant again, that couple is not morally fit to be parents in the first place. “Refusing to abort a Down syndrome baby is in no way equivalent to deliberately poisoning a baby. In the former case one allows a baby to live, knowing that it has a genetic defect; in the latter, one performs an action with the intention of producing a defect. You can’t tell me that those two actions are morally equivalent.” I can tell you one thing: to the baby, they are exactly equivalent. You don’t get to suddenly become un-retarded if your parents screwed you up because of negligence instead of deliberately poisoning you. They can say, “Well, the anti-abortion people lied to us,” but that won’t help the baby one iota. Don’t go down the philosophical rabbit hole here. We’re not talking about maximizing the average happiness of the population, we are talking about one individual baby and whether that baby is born normal or with a serious defect. “The aim of my essay was to argue that even if we grant that an embryo/fetus doesn’t have a mind, it’s still just as valuable as a human adult (who certainly has one), if it has a built-in program for turning itself into an adult.” Well, your argument is false because it doesn’t confront the single most important fact about abortion: Minds are what count. They are infinitely important. Flesh is only important if a mind is using it. There are no minds in the womb. When your arguments take into account these facts, you will no longer be arguing against abortion. Here’s an equation to help illustrate the truth about abortion: F + NM = F. Flesh plus no mind equals flesh. Here’s another one: M > F. Mind is greater than flesh. Or this all purpose equation: F > Anything else. A mind is greater than anything else. Finally, the end of human life is not symmetrical with the beginning of human life. At the beginning of human life, we know that the mind does not exist because the hardware humans need to produce a mind, a functioning brain, does not exist. Up until about 2/3 of the way through pregnancy, there is absolutely no chance of a mind being present and the odds are still astronomical until well after birth. At the end of life, we know that the body once contained a mind. We also know from experience that it’s possible for the brain to be prevented from generating a mind, but all the information and hardware may still exist and sometimes the brain will start to function again and the mind is present again. This calls for lots of extra caution at the end of life, but it has no bearing on the beginning of life where we know with 100% certainty that no mind is present.dmullenix
November 16, 2011
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dmul, I have a dear friend who has down syndrome. She went to college and is doing quite well on her own. I think you need to reconsider your reasoning. You're suggesting that we predict an outcome that we do not have in our power to predict. The fact is that we don't know just by looking at certain obstacles like down syndrome (or even the use of Thalidomide - which is hardly ever used any more) that a person will not have a life worth living. You are saying that it is in our power and self-interest to do away with those we think will not lead a life worth living. What is a life worth living, Dmul? Are you suggesting also that we kill all the down syndrome individuals who have not been aborted? That's what the evil Nazis did. They were just being consistent with the idea that there are certain lives not worth living. To call not having an abortion evil is in my view a very preposterous position. Educate yourself ever so slightly on Down Syndrome as just one example and you find that: "Often Down syndrome is associated with some impairment of cognitive ability and physical growth, and a particular set of facial characteristics. Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a lower-than-average cognitive ability, often ranging from mild to moderate disabilities. Many children with Down syndrome who have received family support, enrichment therapies, and tutoring have been known to graduate from high school and college, and enjoy employment in the work force. The average IQ of children with Down syndrome is around 50, compared to normal children with an IQ of 100.[5] A small number have a severe to high degree of intellectual disability." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome "A small number have a severe to high degree of intellectual disability." Clearly not something that we can predict. But even if we could predict, that would be no reason why we should resort to abortion. The right to life should be in our thinking as pretty much an absolute by virtue of the fact that we can't predict these things among many other reasons. If we could predict, and that prediction was our measure on worthiness for life we'd more likely be killing off the potential Hitlers before we started killing off the developmentally disabled. Why don't you go an interview say 100 people with down syndrome and ask them one simple question: do you wish you'd never been born? If the response is overwhelmingly in the negative, I think you will have your measure for whether their lives are worth living. Quite dangerous thinking there. Your utopian world will be full of perfect people. Will you even meet that mark of perfection? The sci-fi movie Gattaca comes to mind here. http://www.amazon.com/Gattaca/dp/B000T45C32/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1321384666&sr=1-1 So you've given us your moral argument for abortion. Back to the OP and see if there's really an argument there, DM.CannuckianYankee
November 15, 2011
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Dmullenix, Thank you for your post. I have to say I find your ethical position on Down syndrome extremely bizarre. People with Down syndrome have minds, and from what I've observed, they seem to be happy with their lives - arguably they're happier than I am, most of the time. Many of them can hold down productive jobs, too. Why on earth would you think it immoral to create such people? If they're happier being alive than not existing at all, then I cannot see how you could describe the act of creating them as immoral, even on your own humanist premises. You mention "starting over again" as if it were as simple as cleaning a slate. I think you should talk to a few women who have had miscarriages. They will tell you that getting pregnant again isn't that easy. When you're in your twenties, having another baby might seem as easy as 1-2-3 - but most people these days don't marry until they're about 30, and having another baby in one's thirties and forties is a far from routine matter. You also ignore the trauma of aborting a pregnancy, which I write about in section F of my essay. Refusing to abort a Down syndrome baby is in no way equivalent to deliberately poisoning a baby. In the former case one allows a baby to live, knowing that it has a genetic defect; in the latter, one performs an action with the intention of producing a defect. You can't tell me that those two actions are morally equivalent. You seem to judge the value of an act solely by the result it produces - in this case, a mind. I think most people would find your utilitarianism bizarre: it completely ignores the agent's intentions and his/her "attitude of heart and mind", as the Dalai Lama puts it in his book, Ethics for the Third Millennium. Indeed, even many utilitarians would recoil at your claim that we should strive to maximize the average happiness enjoyed by the population as a whole, as opposed to the total happiness enjoyed by the population. If the woman were to have her Down syndrome baby and then have another normal baby, she'd be maximizing the latter but not the former. The aim of my essay was to argue that even if we grant that an embryo/fetus doesn't have a mind, it's still just as valuable as a human adult (who certainly has one), if it has a built-in program for turning itself into an adult. That was why I stated in #27 above that the presence of such a program was pivotal to my case for the personhood of the embryo - and I realize that other arguments can be made, based on weaker premises. (By the way, your point about IVF misses the point I was trying to make: an embryo created through IVF - or for that matter, cloning - also embodies a developmental program, and this program is switched on and running in clones and IVF babies too. Your assertion that it's not how you get there but who you are also overlooks the bigger question: exactly what is it that makes us who we are? I don't think it's our minds, and I don't think it's just having a human body either. I think it's having a body that's building itself.) What I was trying to argue in my essay can be expressed in a simple equation: V - 0 = V, where V is the inherent value of a rational human adult and 0 is the inherent value gained during the course of an individual's development from conception to adulthood. I see no reason why the emergence of a mind in the developing individual should be taken as conferring value upon it, if the program which directs and controls the acquisition of such a mind is running in the individual all along. It's just a developmental stage. Moreover, I argue in Parts C and D of my essay that accounts of value which base our rights on our currently possessing a mind are either self-refuting or inconsistent. Finally, the point of Professor Condic's article is that our legal system currently defines death as the end of the life of an organism, NOT as the end of the functioning of a mind. Mental functions are mediated by "higher" brain centers; the life of the body is controlled by "lower" brain centers. The body can still live for a long time in the absence of a functioning mind, and legalizing abortion on the grounds that an embryo/fetus lacks a mind would also require us to automatically legalize the euthanasia of individuals whose higher brain functions have ceased - something that most people don't want to do, in our democracy. That was the point of Professor Condic's article on re-defining life and death.vjtorley
November 15, 2011
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Let me add emphasis to my last posting. I believe it is very highly immoral to NOT have an abortion if you know your fetus will develop into a seriously defective human being. If it's going to have a small defect, like an inconspicuous birth mark, preventing the defect may not be worth the trouble, expense and risk of having an abortion and going through the pregnancy again. But for a serious defect - something like Down syndrome, or a Thalidomide baby - not having an abortion and starting over is seriously evil. And I mean Nazi-quality evil. A lot of people, like the people I mentioned on First Things lamenting the dearth of Down babies, might not realize that they're doing evil. They may think they're doing the right thing, but that doesn't make their babies whole. Knowingly producing a seriously damaged baby instead of aborting that pregnancy and doing it over right produces the same results as having a healthy baby and deliberately damaging it. In both cases, the result is the same. The mother who doesn't abort may have a clearer conscience, but only because she is seriously misinformed about abortion. I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the anti-abortion forces and none at all for the leadership. They cause terrible damage to real human beings in order to save mindless flesh. I think most of them sincerely want to do the right thing, and think they are, but their mistaken beliefs cause them to sin. And it doesn't take rocket science to figure it out.dmullenix
November 15, 2011
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Hi Vincent, Thanks for the URL. I’d forgotten that one. Looks like half of the UD crowd was there. Regarding your development argument, I think it completely misses the point. It shouldn’t make any difference HOW an adult is made. Would you treat a person differently if they were started via IVF instead of the old fashioned way? Were the people in Brave New World less human because they were hatched in a factory instead of being born? (Assuming they didn’t get the fetal alcohol treatment.) The whole development argument is getting dangerously close to saying someone whose father is a doctor is better than someone whose father is a bricklayer. I don’t agree with that. I’m in the “it’s who you are, not how you came to be” camp. Ditto with whether the embryo self-directed its development or its mother did that chore. What counts is who you are, not how you got there. Regarding Biosphere Two: Acorns and oak trees are different. For instance, you can’t make furniture from an acorn; you can from an oak tree. An acorn may have the same value as an oak tree TO A PERSON WHO IS INTERESTED IN HAVING AN OAK TREE AT SOME FUTURE DATE, but that doesn’t make an acorn the same as an oak tree. The Master Spy is in a similar situation. The crystal will enable him to grow a supercomputer, but it is not a supercomputer and it can’t do the things a supercomputer can do. A really powerful supercomputer may have a mind, but the much simpler crystal can not. I think the “defective fetus” argument is deeper than you appreciate and that FAILURE to have an abortion can produce a very major sin. Consider two women, both pregnant, both know they are carrying a Down syndrome fetus. One carries the fetus to term. A baby is born and eventually develops a damaged mind in a damaged body. The other woman aborts the Down fetus long before it can possibly have a mind, gets pregnant again and carries the healthy fetus to term. The baby develops a normal mind in a normal body. Here’s the kicker: Both women produce a single mind. One produces a damaged mind and body, one produces a healthy mind and body. I think that the woman who refused to abort the first fetus and start over committed a MAJOR sin, one equivalent to having a normal baby and deliberately poisoning it to produce Down-like damage. You can’t get much more evil than that and yet good people are doing it. Professor Condic’s argument is not germane to abortion. She’s talking about when we declare the human body dead. Nobody disputes that the fetus is alive. The question in abortion is, “Does this flesh have a mind?” The evidence is solidly in favor of flesh only, especially in early pregnancy, because the brain is undeveloped or missing entirely.dmullenix
November 15, 2011
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vjtorley, I can see myself acting in ignorance in the case of aborting a fetus. But I would probably still see an infant the same way. (I can't really say. I'm a father and rather biased at this point.) To formulate rational grounds for such thoughts goes against my grain. I prefer not to overthink it. I think that's where so much of the trouble lies. Often as not the truth is very simple, and complex reasoning rarely succeeds where simplicity fails. Take for example this scriptural statement: "For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God." It simply asserts that every house has a builder, trusting the reader to share that assumption. If the reader wishes to reason that perhaps a house might build itself, there's nothing else to be said. He must have some reason for seeking that conclusion. Likewise, I wouldn't even bother rationalizing my belief that a newborn infant is as valuable as I am. (Is there an exact, precise equality? Do his greater remaining years of life outweigh my knowledge and experience? I'd rather not try to balance them.) That might seem to put me at a disadvantage if I want to convince someone else. But that's really my point. It's a rare person who doesn't believe that infants are people and is waiting to be persuaded otherwise. The only persuasion I've ever seen work with sufficient force is when a person comes to appreciate God and decides to obey him and try to see things his way. (In the scriptures this is called 'metamorphosis.' Recent discussions shed light on what type of transformation that is.) I read Gordon's article. She reasons that if parents are obligated to care for their children, why would that begin at birth and not at fertilization? Makes sense to me. But I'll never think of it as philosophy. I haven't much use for it as it seems to cloud what should be clear. Just my personal thinking - when we take a simple truth and make it a subject of philosophy, we devalue the self-evident nature of that truth.ScottAndrews2
November 14, 2011
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Hi Dmullenix, I was wondering when you'd show up. Welcome, anyway. You asked me for the link to the original discussion we had. Here it is: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/06/15/yes-you-did-richard-dawkins-and-the-question-of-abortion/ As you can see, I've fleshed out my position since we last corresponded on the subject. You attempt to ground human rights in the functioning brain - a view which I critiqued in Part C and Part D of my essay, which address sentientism and personism respectively. You ask:
So if it turned out that the mother was actually directing the development of the fetus and doing all of the assembly work using information that she possessed would you deny that the baby that resulted was really human?
Actually, that would pretty much destroy my argument for the personhood of the embryo. I acknowledge as much in my essay, in reference to the interactive personist account, which I critique, according to which the process whereby we acquire our sense of self is directed from our external environment. Here's the relevant passage:
For if it could be demonstrated that the process whereby we acquire our concept of self (and also our rationality) is directed from without, then my reason for claiming that an embryo/fetus has the same inherent value (and hence, the same right to life) as a rational adult would no longer apply. Would this demonstration destroy the pro-life position? Not necessarily. A pro-life advocate could still argue that unborn human beings have rights, simply because they are human organisms, which retain their identity as organisms as they develop from embryos to fetuses, and eventually into rational adults. But this would be a weaker pro-life argument than the one I am advancing here. Pro-life advocates who adopt this line of argument tend to justify his/her ascription of human rights to all human organisms by arguing that the alternatives (e.g. restricting human rights to sentient or sapient human beings) are philosophically and legally much more problematic than the broad pro-life view, which ascribes rights to all human beings. However, the general problem I have with this strategy is that proving the other positions wrong doesn't establish that your position is right - unless you are able to enumerate all positions that could possibly be held on a given issue, and refute them one by one. To the best of my knowledge, no-one has attempted to rigorously enumerate all possible grounds for denying rights to the embryo/fetus. As a philosopher who rates the virtue of thoroughness highly, I could never be content with merely refuting existing pro-choice positions, as I would always worry that some intrepid philosopher might advance a more sophisticated pro-choice position tomorrow. The pro-life argument which I am putting forward in this essay is more ambitious: what I have striven to do is to provide a positive reason for regarding the embryo/fetus as a being with rights. I have not attempted to build my case simply by attacking other positions, but rather by arguing for the philosophical soundness of my own position; for if my reasoning is correct, then it is capable of standing on its own merits.
So in short: yes, I would be disturbed if (hypothetically speaking) it could be shown that the embryo's development was in fact directed by the mother. Re Down syndrome: a Down syndrome baby is still the kind of thing (a human being) that matures, and the mature form of this kind of entity is a rational human adult. In my essay, I address the question of "defective" fetuses, in the following argument (#3 in Part A, section (iv)):
1. An entity (let's call it E) whose developmental program is fully switched-on and which is currently assembling itself into a rational human adult, has the same inherent moral value as that adult. 2. Any entity with a flawed developmental program, which could (in principle) be converted into entity E, without losing its identity, and without the input of any new instructions into its developmental program, is morally equivalent to E and hence has the same inherent moral value as a rational human adult. 3. A defective embryo could (in principle) be converted into entity E, without losing its identity, and without the input of any new instructions into its developmental program. (Justification: despite its genetic defect, a severely defective embryo is still the kind of thing that develops into a rational human adult when mature; hence if a hypothetical super-skilled surgeon could correct its genetic defect either at or shortly after fertilization, this embryo would develop into a rational human adult too. Moreover, even after surgery, it would still be the same individual, and it would also be the same kind of entity. Hence its identity would in no way be altered by the surgical procedure.) 4. Therefore a defective embryo has the same inherent moral value as a rational human adult.
Personally, I hope that doctors learn to cure Down syndrome one day (see my note in Step 3 above), but in the meantime, I have no hesitation in ascribing the same inherent moral value to a Down syndrome infant, or indeed an ancephalic infant, as I myself possess. I even think that it may be possible to grow frontal cortexes for adults suffering from anencephaly, one day. That would be great. I'd also like to comment on the following quote of yours:
But if the torturer/executioner shot the victim in the head, that would be it for him. Destroy the brain and the arms, legs, eyes, ears and all the other organs don’t matter. They can be in perfect shape or they can be destroyed, if the brain is still intact and functioning the victim is still a rational human being. I think that’s the real key to abortion. What counts is the functioning brain. More specifically, the mind that the brain produces.
I think you should re-read the quote from Professor Maureen Condic, in her article, Life: Defining the Beginning by the End, which I cited in my essay:
It is often asserted that the relevant feature of brain death is not the loss of integrated bodily function, but rather the loss of higher-order brain activities, including consciousness. However, this view does not reflect the current legal understanding of death. The inadequacy of equating death with the loss of cognitive function can be seen by considering the difference between brain death and "persistent vegetative state" or irreversible coma. Individuals who have entered a persistent vegetative state due to injury or disease have lost all higher brain functions and are incapable of consciousness. Nonetheless, integrated bodily function is maintained in these patients due to the continued activity of lower-order brain centers. Although such patients are clearly in a lamentable medical state, they are also clearly alive; converting such patients into corpses requires some form of euthanasia. Despite considerable pressure from the medical community to define persistent vegetative state as a type of brain death (a definition that would both expand the pool of organ donors and eliminate the high medical costs associated with maintaining people in this condition), the courts have repeatedly refused to support persistent vegetative state as a legal definition of death. People whose bodies continue to function in an integrated manner are legally and medically alive, despite their limited (or absent) mental function. Regardless of how one may view the desirability of maintaining patients in a persistent vegetative state (this being an entirely distinct moral and legal question), there is unanimous agreement that such patients are not yet corpses. Even those who advocate the withdrawal of food and water from patients in persistent vegetative state couch their position in terms of the "right to die," fully acknowledging that such patients are indeed "alive." While the issues surrounding persistent vegetative state are both myriad and complex, the import of this condition for understanding the relationship between mental function and death is clear: the loss of integrated bodily function, not the loss of higher mental ability, is the defining legal characteristic of death.... Embryos are genetically unique human organisms, fully possessing the integrated biologic function that defines human life at all stages of development, continuing throughout adulthood until death. The ability to act as an integrated whole is the only function that departs from our bodies in the moment of death, and is therefore the defining characteristic of "human life." This definition does not depend on religious belief or subjective judgment.
I hope that answers your objection regarding the brain.vjtorley
November 14, 2011
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Hi Chris, Thanks very much for providing the correct quote. I have a couple of books by Dawkins in my study, but The God Delusion isn't among them. Glad you were able to check. Thanks again.vjtorley
November 14, 2011
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ScottAndrews2, Thank you for your post. You write:
I’m what you might call pro-life*, but really only because of what the Bible says. If the Bible did not describe an embryo as a potential person with all its parts already designated, I wouldn’t see any reason not to abort it.
You might want to have a look at this article by Doris Gordon, a libertarian atheist who converted from being pro-choice to being pro-life. The article tells the story of her transformation. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. By the way, would you view a newborn baby as a human person possessing the same inherent value as you or I do, if the Bible didn't say so? If so, on what rational grounds would you do so? I'm just curious.vjtorley
November 14, 2011
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