The Morality of Abortion

Since we are combining our defense and conclusion in this last round, I'm going to organize each part under bolded subheadings. Defense of my opening In my opening, I argued that the unborn, from the moment of conception until some later time, is not a person. I made this argument on the basis that when twinning and fusion occur, there is no criteria of personal identity that determines whether the twins are new persons, whether one is the same person as the original, or whether the person existing after the fusion is the same person as the original person before twinning, whether it's a wholly new person, whether it's one of the twins, and if so, which twin it is. If they were, in fact, persons, there would be definite answers to these questions, but since there isn't, they're not persons. Con responded to this argument with a thought experiment in which we have an adult split into two adults, then fuse back into one adult. Essentially, his argument is that while we may puzzle over personal identity, and who is who, we wouldn't for that reason think these various adults were not persons. They'd clearly be persons even if we were confused about which persons they are and where they are the same or different persons as each other. While I insisted the problem is ontological, Con appears to think the problem is merely epistemological. So my defense will go towards showing that the problem really is ontological. The flaw in the analogy is that there actually IS a criteria of personal identity that can answer these puzzling questions about adults dividing and recombining. If you took an adult and cut off an arm or a leg, you'd associate the person with the rest of the body, not with the appendage that got cut off. If you cut an adult in half at the waste, and imagine for the sake of argument that he survived, you'd associate the person with the top half, not with the bottom half. If the top grew a bottom half, and the bottom half grew a top half, then the original person would be the original top half, and the person that grew out of the bottom half would be a different person. You see, adults have brains, and brains produce consciousness, first person subjectivity, etc. Therein lies the "self." The self is irreducible and cannot be split into two. Even if you split the adult in half along their brain, there would still be an answer to the question of which side is the original person or whether they're both distinct persons. We may, in that case, not know what the answer to the question is, but we'd know there was a definite answer. It's different with a clump of undifferentiated cells. There is no locus of "self." If the one clump splits into two clumps, there would be nothing about one clump to distinguish it from the other clump in such a way that personhood would or wouldn't be preserved. That's why I say this is an ontological problem rather than an epistemological problem. in the case of adults, there is something that makes them a person, and that's located in their brain. Not so with a mere clump of undifferentiated stem cells. Conclusion Con and I have both agreed that this debate comes down to the question of "What is the unborn?" More specifically, it comes down to whether the unborn, from the moment of conception, is a human person. If not, then abortion is morally permissible for at least some length of time, be it ever so short. If so, then abortion is not morally permissible (except maybe in extreme cases that we didn't get into). I made an argument to show that from the moment of conception until some later time, the unborn are not persons, and therefore abortion is morally permissible during that time. Con attacking the argument with a thought experiment, and I think I adequately defended my argument against his rebuttal. Con was originally a little ambiguous in his defense of the unborn. His argument went toward showing that the unborn are living human beings in his opening without defending, specifically, that they are persons. In answer to my rebuttal, he attempted to define his way to victory. This was his definition of a person: "Person: A human being that is alive and separated from any other human person." He went on to show that unlike body parts, the entity that comes into existence at conception is distinct from other human beings in certain ways. But this hardly matters. If I cut off your hand and burned the rest of your body so there was nothing left but ashes, that hand would be distinguished from other humans. It would have a unique DNA not shared by any other clump of cells in the galaxy, and yet it would not for that reason be a person. But why should we even except Con's definition of a person? Con showed that the unborn are persons by that definition, but he left the definition undefended. One can't simply define their way to victory in a debate. Suppose, for example, this was my opening: "Person: A human being who has been born of a woman." Then I said, "The unborn are not yet born and are therefore not yet persons." Q.E.D. Would you not immediately recognize that there was something self-serving about my definition and question whether I had gotten that definition right? At the very least, you'd demand that I defend that definition before granting me the day. Well, Con hasn't defended his definition of a person. And we have good reason to question it. Think about it. How do we usually distinguish personal beings from impersonal beings. Why do we not consider rocks, trees, stars, and flowers to be persons, but we do consider adults, cats, angels, and gods to be persons? We do so on the basis of whether there is a mind. Or in the case of the comatose at least the capacity for having a mind, or being a being that once had consciousness or could regain consciousness. The unborn, from the moment of conception are not that kind of being. Once they develop a brain, an argument could be made for their personhood, but before that, no. Please don't consider that as an additional argument against the personhood of the unborn. That would count as a "new argument" which typically are not allowed in the final round. Take it, rather, as an illustration showing that Con did not defend his particular definition of a person. Since he did not defend his definition of a person, Con did not meet his burden of proof. Thank you, PossieTV, for the debate! And thank you, reader, for giving us both a hearing.