Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
Timothy Murray lost his father earlier this year and had been asking his principal for counseling when she called in the police
Because denying an action is simply requiring that the existing circumstance continue, while forcing an action is to require that the person engage in a conscious action (to specify, it’s a stronger control over someone else’s body).
“Do you consider a fertilised egg to have the same moral weight as a person”
I already answered this more generally, fertilisation is not the revelant part it is that it is a distinct organism with a reasonable expectation of future conscious experience. Many fertilised eggs do meet this standard, but not all. Likewise fertilised eggs are not the only things that meet this standard. Things like pluripotent stem cells that are being created to form fetuses, also meet this standard.
(I strongly suspect that you are fishing for a specific response, which you find absurd despite ultimately accepting all the premises.)
I’m not. I thought you were pretty clear, but I wanted to check. I’m sort of exploring what you believe, rather than fishing for anything in particular.
So, in your view, if a building were burning, and inside was an artificial womb of some sort with twenty viable eggs that will eventually become people, then would there be a moral duty to save them over one five-year-old child?
Do you believe that it isn’t?
The “burning IVF clinic” is a poor instance of analogous reasoning. The reasons why one would save a 5-year old, are not fundamental moral principles but purely psychological. One would save friends or attractive people first as well, this does not grant them greater moral value.
Even if we don’t consider it to be purely emotional preference, the “triage” rebuttal can hold as well. I.e the fact that we choose a 5-year old is that their value is more immediately apparent, even if we have no reason to believe them to be more morally valuable.
“You don’t believe that it isn’t”
The problem here is that if you want to show that something is true, you can’t rely on premises being true that require the conclusion to be true. It just becomes a useless tautology that provided no additional information.
How do you identify when a moral rule is a fundamental principle versus a psychological preference?
In your view, is someone who saves twenty viable eggs over a five year old a more moral person than someone who does the reverse? (in some sort of ideal sense, regardless of whether anyone would do this or not)
I don’t think that I’m engaging in any circular reasoning. I’m not trying to argue that bodily autonomy is good- I’m making the base assumption that bodily autonomy is good and should be treated as a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of a lot of moral intuitions that I have. That’s not any more circular or arbitrary than any other moral principle.
EDIT: Also, I appreciate you getting back to me, and in case we don’t talk again until after the holidays, Merry Christmas!
“I’m making the base assumption”
Right, which is the problem… When you are trying to establish if something exists you don’t assume that it’s already true.
You have actually presented zero argument that bodily autonomy is a right, so we really have no basis for assuming it is. Even if you try to make personal rights arguments this can be refuted as a failed descriptivist argument. Are medical decisions being left to the individual due to a inherent right to bodily control, or the fact that people who are directly affected by a decision chose better outcomes? The bodily autonomy argument does not account for why we think it is good to deny people the ability to make poor medical decisions (i.e children, the mentally handicapped, ignorant people, or in the case of prescriptions anyone without sufficient knowledge). The latter argument does.
“A more moral person”
I think I already answered the question. Both individuals are acting morally by saving others, although saving more people is a better outcome.
“How do you determine when it’s a moral principle and a psychological preference”
This is a difficult question. Some cases are apparently obvious, like saving attractive people. In general the problem is searching for the answer that best satisfies our intuitions about morality and reasoning. The primary argument for when a feeling is insufficient, is if the basis for it is too complex. The purpose of a moral system is to provide a set of rules and methodology to determine if an action is morally good or not (otherwise we would just rely on spontaneous feelings, with all the problems of individualistic moral relativism), it does not make sense to rely on feelings about a morally complex action to override a more fundamental principle. At some point you have to say that your feelings about something are not morally relevant.
Where do rights come from, in your view?
Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life?
“Why does a potential human being have a right to life that is equal to an existing life”
And just like that…the personhood argument. Remember what I said about every abortion argument boiling down to denying (or affirming) the moral value of a fetus?
Of course if I’m going to be rude, I’ll take your statement literally and point out that fetuses are categorically both humans AND existing life so your attempt at distinction fails.
Now what you probably mean is “why does an undeveloped human have the same right to life as a fully grown human”. It comes from a descriptivist argument of the wrongness of killing. If it is not permissible to kill adult people on the basis of future conscious experience, then this also applies to fetuses because they too have future conscious experiences.
Now the problem is showing that future conscious experience is the core reason for the wrongness of killing. It’s descriptively very powerful, it accounts for the permissibility of letting brain-dead individuals die (or even actively killing them), the impermissibility of killing temporarily unconscious persons, and the impermissibility of active killing of temporarily suicidal persons (the later problem is also fatal to Boonin’s cortical organisation argument, as it is not the current desires of an individual that we have a moral imperative to satisfy but rather an idealised person with desires considered rational. Boonin’s argument relies on fetuses not having desires to continue living, but this is simply special pleading; a person lacking desires would not permit them to be killed anyway because of the aforementioned idealised rational desires).
Now we have a moral principle that accounts for all of these clearly immoral acts. When we apply it to abortion, we find that it is also not permitted. So do we reject this principle in favor of all the other principles that allow abortion along with the other active killing that we agree is immoral?
Or do we consider that abortion is a complex decision that is clouded by personal preference, desire for convenience, and ignoring empirical facts in favor of prima facie evaluation? (i.e fetuses don’t look or act human, therefore they must not be, contrary to all deeper evaluation).
In other words, it seems highly plausible that our superficial feelings about abortion are NOT morally relevant, and the moral principle that does correctly describe the morality of other active killing is also correctly describing the morality of abortion as well.
Note that it is not necessary for the right to life of a fetus to be equal to an adults to make abortion immoral. It simply has to be sufficiently strong enough to prohibit in convenience cases. Just like how dogs don’t have to have the same moral value as humans to prohibit killing them for fun, it just needs to be sufficiently high to outweigh any moral value of the fun.
“Where do rights come from, in your view?”
I already addressed this when talking about determining moral principles. They come from our intuitions about what is wrong and what is logical reasoning.
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I’m not making the argument that you think I’m making.
Bodily autonomy as a fundamental right
Bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle because it makes sense of my moral intuitions. I intuit that it’s wrong to rape. It can’t be because of the physical harm, because it’s still intuitively wrong to rape someone if you drug them and are gentle. It can’t be because of the mental harm, because it’s still intuitively wrong to rape them if they’re unconscious and will never know. Murder is wrong and remains wrong even if it causes no pain, even if the murdered person is unaware that they are being murdered. In both of these cases, you’re using someone else’s body without their consent.
This principle, that people should be able to control who can use or modify their body, and for what, is an assumption in the same way that you’ve described other fundamental moral principles- because it makes sense of our intuitions. Once we derive the principle from our intuitions, we can use it to clarify edge cases. To take one example- assisted suicide. Is it wrong? Bodily autonomy says no. If someone asks you to kill them and they sincerely want to die, then it’s not wrong. This is borne out when we compare what the principle says to what we see in society: while there are any number of (valid) concerns involving coercion, informed consent, and mental health, there are also hundreds of stories and legends about human beings helping each other to die. That it happens is tragic, but the act itself is intuitively morally permissible.
To me, the idea that bodily autonomy is a fundamental moral principle seems fairly obvious, and I think it’s obvious to most people when not discussing abortion. If someone is using your body without your consent, you feel morally justified in rejecting them.
My view on abortion
As I said at the start, I’m not making the argument that you think that I’m making. I don’t intuitively consider a fertilized egg to be a person, but I do intuitively consider a five-year-old to be a person. I’m not sure where you would draw a line to divide non-person from person and so I don’t: I assume that everything from conception onward counts as a person because it seems good to err on the side of granting person-hood when in doubt.
I still support abortion until viability.
We have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. My fundamental moral principle of bodily autonomy says that the person being used can withdraw their consent and reject the use of their body. But, in this case, the user will die if they are rejected. Does the principle still hold? Does one person’s right to life trump another person’s bodily autonomy? If I concoct alternative scenarios in which the same rights are at odds, my intuitions seem to come down on the side of bodily autonomy.
Some scenarios
The scenarios
Imagine that two people are drowning in the ocean and one can’t swim. The non-swimmer clings to the swimmer, who is able to support them both but with an increased risk of drowning. The swimmer finally shrugs off the non-swimmer and the non-swimmer drowns.
I intuitively feel that a virtuous person would have struggled on and done their best to save the non-swimmer. That would be the heroic thing to do. Refusing to support the non-swimmer, however, is morally permissible. This scenario isn’t as good an analogy as it could be, because there’s no direct bodily violation, but two agents relying on each other to act in particular ways. Lets see if we can find something more directly applicable.
Imagine that one person agrees to have their body surgically connected to another in such a way that their organs will do the work of keeping both people alive. The supporting person finally requests that they be separated again, killing the supported person.
Much as in the previous scenario, I can feel both that the virtuous thing to do would be to soldier on and that it’s morally permissible to make the decision to leave the supported person to die- in fact, I feel that it’s more morally permissible than in the last scenario. Crucially, in this scenario, one is actually violating the body of the other, rather than relying on them to act in a particular way. What happens if we go the other way?
Imagine that one person is sitting by a pond when they suddenly realize that another person is drowning. They decide that, for whatever reason, they will not act to save the person’s life.
I feel that a virtuous person would act to save the drowning person, obviously. My moral intuitions about what should and shouldn’t be permissible are torn, in this case. In general, they still grudgingly come down on the side of the person failing to act, but there are caveats and special cases. Looking at the law as a proxy for what society feels on the subject, I see that they mostly agree with me.
My conclusion
In each of these scenarios, one person is refusing to allow their body to be used by another when the life of the other is on the line. In each scenario, my intuitions come down on the side of the person doing the refusing- strongly, when the use is direct and invasive, weakly when it involves independent behavior and action. So bodily autonomy seems to hold as a fundamental principle.
Application To abortion
During a pregnancy, we have two people, one of whom is using the other in order to survive. The mother decides that she no longer wishes to allow the use of her body, and gets an abortion. Much as in the previous examples, I may consider it virtuous to carry the child to term, but I can’t deny that she should have the fundamental right to reject the non-consensual use of her body.
At this point, I think it should be clear why I think this.
Abortion, of course, is more than just denying someone the use of your body- it involves killing the fetus as well. If the fetus can’t survive on it’s own in the world, then arguing about this is, to me, moral hair-splitting. Person or not, killed by a doctor or killed by exposure, the fetus is still dead. Where I deviate from the standard liberal position on abortion is when the fetus can survive on it’s own. At that point (and granted, that “point” is more of a gray area), both the mother’s right to bodily autonomy and the fetus’ right to life can be upheld and it now matters whether the fetus counts as a person.
My rule of thumb, as I said earlier, is to err on the side of person-hood when in doubt and so I think that post-viability abortions are not morally permissible.
Continued In Reply
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Conclusion
Your views are incoherent
I’ve assumed throughout, that a fertilized egg has the same sort of moral weight as a child or an adult human being, for simplicity. I don’t actually believe this, however. You apparently do. Why? Because an egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”? Pluripotent stem cells, as you said, also meet this standard. If that’s the case, so do skin cells, with the appropriate technology. Fertilized eggs, as you also said, don’t always meet this standard- I assume because 40% of fertilized eggs fail to implant. So if the only rule you have for what “counts” (has the moral weight of a person) is that it has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience”, and you’re specifically excluding eggs that are fertilized but don’t implant, and including stem cells that we have artificially coaxed into fertilization, then why is an aborted egg considered a violation of your morality, but stem cells thrown in the trash aren’t?
There’s no dividing line between one and the other, except the word “reasonable” in your “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” definition. By which you mean “reasonable to me”. A fertilized egg has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” to you, right up until it fails to implant- and then it doesn’t anymore. A fertilized egg that implants has a “reasonable expectation of future conscious experience” right up until an abortion- and then it’s murder.
The only differentiator here is your opinion.
You claim that rescuing fertilized eggs from a burning IVF clinic is morally equal to rescuing children from the same burning building, but when I imagine a world in which everyone acts on this claim, it’s absurd. You yourself wouldn’t behave in the way you’re describing, but would leave the eggs to burn in order to rescue a single child- no matter how many eggs there were. You claim, further, that this is because there is a difference between the psychological weight we place on people that look like us (children), and not on people who don’t (fertilized eggs), but when asked how one might go about differentiating between a psychological impulse and a “true” moral intuition, your answer is that an intuition isn’t a moral intuition “if the basis for it is too complex”, which feels a lot like saying “you’ll know it when you see it.”
You don’t consider bodily autonomy to be a fundamental right, despite it’s simplicity, despite probably sharing the same moral intuitions that I do in many of the scenarios that I’ve discussed above. If someone were surgically connected to you, should you be able to say “no”, whether it would kill them or not, whether it’s the heroic thing to do or not? If you were drowning, and someone were using you as a life preserver, should you have the right to push them away, whether or not they would drown, whether or not it would haunt you afterward?
You fail to see that your dismissal of bodily autonomy, when taken to it’s conclusion, leads to even more absurdity. If you don’t have the fundamental right to reject someone’s use of your body, what gives you the right to deny society access to your organs? If it would save dozens of living, breathing people, and you have no right to deny the use of your body, what fundamental principle do you invoke to avoid getting used for parts? A vague claim that “forcing an action is stronger than denying an action”?
Without a fundamental principle of bodily autonomy, you’re forced to patch together ad-hoc and weak explanations like this in which you weigh different “types” of actions, try to estimate harm, or appeal to societal consequences in order to justify your right to deny other people the organs they need to survive.
The only conclusion that I can draw from this discussion is that you started with the belief that life begins at conception and should be preserved at all costs, likely for religious or social reasons, and are working backward in order to justify those beliefs.
Thanks for the conversation
It’s been interesting.
I’ve learned a lot about what you believe and why you believe it, and it’s given me the opportunity to clarify and refine some of the things that I believe. I think that, regardless of whatever credentials you do or don’t have on this topic in real life, your views are contradictory and confusing- but I appreciate your willingness to put them out there for discussion. I think that I’ve gotten all the use out of the discussion that I can, however, so I’m going to end it here.
I imagine that you’ll want to do a closing rebuttal sort of thing. I won’t be replying to whatever you have to say, so, if you celebrate-
Merry Christmas!
“I’m not making the arguments you think I am.”
You actively avoided making concrete arguments, instead fishing for a specific response exactly like I accused you of. I’ve debated literally hundreds of people who think exactly like you, I know all your arguments it’s extremely mundane. Like I already pointed out you willfully ignore any actual criticism.
You 100 percent are making the arguments I said you were, you simply are ignoring my criticisms of them because it’s inconvenient for you.
You blanketly assert that because rape is wrong therefore bodily autonomy is sufficiently strong to permit active killing? How does this follow? Do you not realise the radical distinctions between the circumstances?
“A virtuous person should act (to save a drowning person”
Why? If it is not morally good and there is no obligation to do good, then on what basis do you assert that it is virtuous? This is you attempting to reject a conclusion because it disagrees with permitting abortion via bodily autonomy.
“I intuitively consider a 5-year old to be a person”
Why? As I already pointed out intuition isn’t just a mere feeling, it involves a great deal of logical evaluation to determine which feelings are more valid than others. I spent a fair amount of time on this so for you to just reject it as “hurr-durr my intuitions tell me” is pretty insulting but expected from an uneducated person.
FYI, nobody cares about your intuitions, we care about human intuitions. If you are some weird serial killer nobody is appealing to your specific reasoning but general human reasoning.
“Using laws as proxy” Awfully convenient that you chose laws that concern a duty to rescue and not guardianship. If there is a contradiction in laws (as there often is) should we really be citing them to construct a non-contradictory moral system?
“My rule of thumb as I said earlier”
Where? You never said this, infact you have been deliberately cagey about not making any claims that I had to deduce your arguments from the questions you asked.
It’s super dishonest of you probe for questions, while trying to hide your beliefs (poorly) and then ignore all the criticisms and rebuttals to popular arguments simply because you’re going to spam them at me and then refuse to listen to further refutations.