Abortion

Thanks for the quick reply Hello Orange. ==Responding to my opponent's Round 3== R1) My opponent's "complaint" My opponent complains that many of the things I talk about are not directly relevant to abortion. However, when ethics is debated by ethics professors, they often employ thought experiments and analogies to help the listener decide what is morally right vs. wrong. This is typical in an ethics debate. In addition, my argument cannot be as simple as my opponent's. His argument is essentially that abortion is murder (from HIS definition of murder) and murder is wrong ("because it just is"). To contest his claims, OF COURSE I need to talk about whether something can be wrong merely because it is defined in a certain way and whether ethics actually ban killing in all cases, or whether some cases are morally permissible. R2) Utilitarianism I can't honestly tell what part of my opponent's Round 3 was intended to refute Utilitarianism. He kept saying he refuted it near the end of the Round, but never actually did. He also claims he's using the Rebel Captain (he spells it "rouge captain") example against me, but he never says why it suits his side. I'll try to just . . . refute a few of the things he says regarding utilitarianism. BangBang says: "My opponent claims that it's all in the name of utilitarianism, and killing a fetus somehow benefits all of society." This is a mischaracterization of my argument. The POLICY of allowing abortion in society creates more benefits and fewer harms than the POLICY of banning abortion. Utilitarianism does not burden me to show that one aborted fetus helps all of society. And since utilitarianism is a system of ethics, if there are two possible policies, the policy that benefits society more is "moral" and the policy that does not benefit society more is "immoral," since the second option forces us to give up the first option and we would therefore be purposely harming society. BangBang says: "a. Because people value life, you will never find a society that says murder is alright; it's always just a means to an end. We may think the end is good, but never that murder is good." There are so many problems with this statement. First, my opponent is using the word "good" to imply "moral."The two terms are NOT equivalent. The entire point of ethics is to debate whether "bad" things are morally permissible. Second, my opponent continues to use the word "murder." In a society, words have power; the word murder is powerful only because it is used in our society (according to 4 dictionaries) to mean the unlawful killing of another person. By that definition, abortion is not murder, so my opponent needs to stop invoking the word murder; he should instead say "killing something with human DNA." If this is what he means, then you will find that MOST societies believe that killing something with human DNA is "alright," i.e. morally permissible. Most societies believe that it is alright when there are mitigating circumstances: you were at war, the other person wanted to kill you first, the other person was invading your property, the other person was a criminal sentenced to death. Ethics is always about whether mitigating circumstances make something permissible; the mitigating circumstances for abortion should seem obvious: the fetus is not viable as a separate entity, it is not self-aware (thus not a person) and it creates demands on another human being that that human being is not willing to fulfill. Third, the entire point of bringing up utilitarianism was to argue that we should judge the morality of an action based on the ENDS rather than the MEANS. Utilitarianism doesn't care about the means, only the ends. If you must shoot one villager to save 29 others, that is okay, even though the MEANS is "murder." The categorical imperative argues what my opponent seems to be implying: that people should not be treated as a means to an end, only as ends in themselves. However, I've already shown the problem with this with the Rebel Captain example. Nye actually continues in that quote to say that when nuclear weapons enter the equation, the choice of ethical systems is even more dire. The categorical imperative would tell us that torture uses another human as a means to an end and thus never allowed; however, in the thought experiment where you can torture one terrorist to prevent a nuclear bomb from exploding in the heart of New York City, most people would agree that the categorical imperative is too rigid an ethical system, and we should instead default to utilitarianism. R3) Definition of murder My opponent claims that this is the "is-ought fallacy" (one of my favorite fallacies) to say that since abortion is currently allowed, it is moral to allow it. However, this is actually true under utilitarianism. There is only one potential downside to abortion, as far as I can tell from what my opponent has argued: that people will think it is "murder" and thus that "murder" is okay. However, since people currently understand the distinction between murder (as defined by law) and abortion, it will not cause people to suddenly think murder is okay. In addition, the POINT of my argument here was to show that abortion isn't murder since the definition of murder is set by society. So my opponent cannot claim that all murder is wrong and thus abortion is wrong, since the definition of murder is not static. He must show specifically why killing a fetus is morally wrong. Although he currently fails to even show an ethical system proving that murder is wrong. R4) Human DNA My opponent's only real argument that abortion is wrong seems to be that the fetus has distinct human DNA. I pointed out that cancer, through mutation, has distinct human DNA from its host as well. My opponent refutes this by saying that you can excise cancer without killing the host, but this is true of an abortion as well. My opponent next starts using the term fetus and child interchangeably. However, a fetus is not a child. A child is self-aware and autonomous. A fetus is not self-aware and cannot survive without its host. That is a clear moral distinction. R5) Pregnancy complications My opponent claims, "The Fetus will almost always die before the mother when complications of pregnancy arise." This doesn't appear anywhere in my opponent's source; he basically just links us to a random website about pregnancy and then makes this claim. It's also true in the sense that when the fetus grows in a fallopian tube and ruptures the tube, first the fetus dies and THEN the mother dies from internal bleeding (so the fetus dies "before" the mother). Waiting for the fetus to die a natural death in this case would completely doom the mother as well. My opponent has taken a very extreme position here that even most pro-life advocates wouldn't take ("no medical exceptions"). R6) The Declaration of Independence/UDHR This is just an appeal to authority. I've provided actual reasons that rights don't start until birth, including the need to be autonomous and self-aware in order to have rights. My opponent never bothers to answer this. It's also the is-ought fallacy – even IF our country currently defined rights as starting at conception, that doesn't mean that a good moral system actually does have rights beginning at conception. Also, these documents never say specifically that rights start at conception. They are both ambiguous on this point, since they talk about "men," which are autonomous and self-aware beings. R7) Rape My opponent says that just like the woman didn't choose to be raped, the fetus didn't choose to be created. This is true. But remember the Violinist analogy: the Violinist may not have chosen to be linked to your kidneys for 9 months and neither did you; but just because NEITHER of you chose this situation DOES NOT mean that you are morally required to agree to be linked to the Violinist for 9 months, even if severing the cord that connects you will result in his death. Since you have ownership over your own body, you have the right to deny another person the use of that body. The goal of abortion isn't so much to kill the fetus as to get it to stop using the woman's body; if it was possible to easily implant it in someone who wanted a child but couldn't conceive, I'm sure we would do that. R8) Medical need My opponent says that the means are not justified by the ends. So if the woman had a 100% chance of dying without an abortion, my opponent would still deny it to her. He never offers a moral system that justifies this decision. He extends utilitiarianism but utilitarianism clearly derives more benefits from allowing an abortion in this scenario. R9) Abortions don't stop when you ban them My opponent claims that murder doesn't stop when you ban it. However, deterrence is a function of the probability of getting caught times the magnitude of punishment. Banning murder does not stop murder, but it DOES decrease murder compared to a world where it is not banned. The study cited in the NY Times, however, proves that abortion does not decrease AT ALL when it is banned, using a cross-country analysis. There is no deterrent effect; women merely use more dangerous methods, like sticking coat hangers into their uterus, using chemical baths, throwing themselves down stairs, etc, when abortion is banned. R10) Unwanted children My opponent claims that correlation is not causation as far as the Levitt study is concerned. This is true; all Levitt can do is run an econometric model to show that Roe v. Wade heavily correlates with the murder rate drastically declining 18 years later. But he DOES provide an explanation for why it is causal: unwanted children are not raised well, are more likely to live in poverty, and are thus more likely to join gangs and commit crime. In states that legalized abortion earlier than the rest of the nation (prior to Roe v. Wade), crime rates declined earlier than in the rest of the nation. This last fact leads Levitt to believe strongly that his results are causal. My opponent says it's better to be alive and raped repeatedly in foster care than not be alive. First, this is not proven. If you never become self-aware, you never know what you are missing. I'd rather never become self-aware than live a life in Rwanda during the genocides, for example, or in China, during the Rape of Nanking, or in Germany during WWII (I'm Jewish). R11) Absurdity My opponent just refers us to his miscarriage argument, but doing something that is substantially likely to lead to someone's death is still considered murder. If you inject someone with Ebola and they die, that is murder, even though there is only an 80% chance they succumb to the disease. When a fertility doctor implants multiple fetuses during fertility treatment, there is roughly an 80% chance that the fetus will die ("not take"), which is why they implant 3-5. So if we accept my opponent's definition of murder as killing a fetus, we must get rid of fertility clinics as well. DROPPED ARGUMENTS 1. Judith Bulter says that a life is not "viable" if the mother's social conditions do not exist to facilitate its existence, since we are reliant on those social conditions to survive. So a fetus is not a potential person if its mother cannot afford to support it since it is not viable. 2. Judith Bulter argues that rights do not come into play at conception. A fetus is not self-aware and thus cannot have rights until it is self-aware. 3. Judith Thompson argues that a fetus is not autonomous, meaning capable of surviving on its own. The Famous Violinist thought experiment shows that just because someone is attached to our bodies and depends on that attachment for survival DOES NOT mean that we must agree to this situation, since we own our bodies and do not have to accede to another's use of our bodies. 4. Utilitarianism. My opponent never answers this and never offers a competing ethical system that would define abortion as wrong. Utilitarianism says banning abortion is morally wrong because women don't stop having abortions one iota, but instead resort to illegal and dangerous means, which killed 15,000 women per year in the U.S. prior to Roe V. Wade. In addition, flooding society with unwanted children leads to drastically higher crime rates; the Levitt study finds that crime rates would be 40% higher without Roe. V Wade. Lastly, there are 42 million abortions performed worldwide per year. [1] If we COULD stop these, that would quickly lead to overpopulation (approximately 1 billion additional people every 20 years). INDEPENDENT VOTERS Remember, I only need to prove that abortion is morally permissible (meaning there is one case where it should be allowed). 1. Medical necessity – clearly if the mother is guaranteed death without an abortion, there is no benefit to banning her from getting the procedure. Vote Con. [1] http://www.guttmacher.org...