If the fetus is a human person, then abortion is generally immoral

Introduction: Trent's argument is well presented and he defends his points rigorously, but he is off the mark on what the resolution asks for. I do not need to contest the majority of his claims because they can be shown not to lead to his conclusion. I'll go through his premises and conclusions and give my criticisms, then offer my own points in response. Direct Rebuttal: P1: Fetus Are Human Beings As we agreed, I will concede this point. Fetuses are members of the human species. Pro's well documented and well argued point carries no weight because it does not pertain to the outcome of the debate. P2: All Human Beings Have the Same Rights, Including the Right to Life I do not believe that all human beings have the same rights, but it was agreed that I would concede the point that all humans have the same rights. I do not contest that claim. Once again his argument is very strong but not relevant to affirming the resolution; we have already assumed this premise. However, I do not accept that the right to life is included among these rights and that was not a requirement. The fatal flaw in this premise is that Pro does not establish that anyone has the right to life. In my affirmative I made an argument against the possibility of positive rights, which I will defend in my closing argument. However, Pro provides us with no normative argument whatsoever. I invite the audience to reread Pro's P2 in his own words: he does not argue that humans have a right to life; he only argues that humans at all stages of development have the same rights. The resolution only requires that we agree that all human beings have the same rights; we do not have to agree on what those rights are or if any rights exist. If no one has any rights than this premise doesn't establish the immorality of abortion, and Pro makes no arguments for human rights. Simply saying “humans don't have a right to life” is sufficient to counter this premise because Pro offers no arguments in support of that claim. My detailed analysis of what rights human beings have (which does not include a positive right to life) greatly outweighs Pro's unsupported assertion. C1: Human Fetuses Have a Right to Life This does not follow because P2 does not establish a right to life for any human. All it does establish is that whatever rights human beings have, human fetuses have also. This was already agreed to in the terms of the debate and still carries no weight. So far Pro still has no arguments. P3: Abortion Directly Kills an Innocent Human Being The word innocent is not defined, but I reject its use in this context. A fetus occupying a mother's body against her will is violating her rights and cannot be called innocent. I established in my affirmative argument that it is justifiable to use force to end a rights violation, a contention I will defend in my closing. Pro offers no support for this description so it is a non-argument. In any case, this argument does not carry any weight toward establishing that abortion is immoral. Pro never argues that killing an innocent human being is wrong at any point in the debate. I can just blankly assert “killing an innocent human being is not wrong” and match level of analysis Pro offered. Ironically, I am the one who established that it is wrong to kill an innocent human being. I could just concede my own argument in the final round and there will be no normative analysis in this debate at all, which means it would go to me by default. Pro, after all, is the one trying to establish a normative claim (that abortion is immoral given our assumptions), and he has offered no normative analysis. C2: Abortion Violates the Fetus's Right to Life and Is Therefore Immoral Does not follow because it relies on C1, and C1 cannot follow from P2 for the reasons I have explained. P3 is only relevant at all because I, not Pro, established that killing an innocent person is wrong, and the fetus is not innocent according to the argument I used to establish that point. No positive right to life was established in the affirmative arguments of this debate, and I was the only one who defended any rights at all (negative rights). The terms of the debate did not require that I concede that humans have a right to life, nor was it implied. There are no normative arguments at any point in the chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion. We are totally justified in just rejecting this point arbitrarily because it, and the entire moral argument leading up to it, has been asserted arbitrarily. My affirmative arguments are just icing on the cake; I didn't need to make any of my own points to defend abortion because Pro never offered any analysis to prove that that it is wrong. Trent does make some arguments for positive rights in his rebuttal, but it would be unfair either for me to address them now or for him to count them toward his affirmative. Counterpoints: CA1: Normative Proof In order to establish a normative claim, we must back it with normative analysis. As I have heavily stressed above, Pro has made descriptive arguments and then assumed normative conclusions from them without normative analysis. Facts are important for determining the application of a moral theory; they do not determine a theory and only appear to when we unquestioningly accept certain moral propositions. This is an issue that is brought up in the first few pages of every basic ethics book and yet frequently overlooked by those who understand the finer points inside and out [1]. Pro makes assumptions like “humans have a positive right to life” and “it is wrong to kill an innocent human being” without backing them with any sort of analysis. These points are what Pro was supposed to be proving! This is question-begging obfuscated by a descriptive analysis of what was already agreed upon. CA2: The Is-Ought Problem Pro goes from making factual statements about fetuses to drawing conclusions about what we ought to do with them without justifying this jump. At the most basic level, it does not make sense to conclude that something should be a certain way based on how it is. Helium atoms contain two protons; any statement arguing that they 'ought' to have some other number is rightfully recognized as ridiculous. The blade of Hume's Guillotine cuts a sharp divide between the factual and the moral. No matter how you change the scale, factual statements do not lead to moral conclusions [2]. My method skips over this problem by appealing to an 'ought-if' proposition: if we want to be logically consistent, we ought to behave in this way. These restraints on behavior can be called moral rules (if morality is to have any meaning, it is the rules which constrain our actions toward one another). CA3: Contra Positive Obligations, Again Pro offers no proof whatsoever for his conclusion that children are entitled to something, so I could counter that point just be saying, “No, they don't.” However, I'll stress again the serious problems of such obligations. Positive obligations transfer ownership of property (a person) from its rightful owner (that person) to a non-owner. I do not own myself insofar as someone else owns me, and that has a demonstrable effect on my perspective of myself as an investment. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that, a priori, as we reduce individuals' ownership of themselves they invest in themselves less: they tend toward being drunkards rather than philosophers as he puts it [3]. The effect is demonstrable: the use of women as “machines for producing children,” as Napoleon kindly put it, has reduced the level of achievement for women greatly [4]. When a person is used for a purpose deemed higher than himself, he is made into a machine in a very real sense and there are observable implications. References: [1] Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues, Barbara MacKinnon (5) [2] http://plato.stanford.edu... [3] http://mises.org... [4] http://www.pay-equity.org...