Abortion Is Prima Facie Morally Wrong

Let me say that it has been an absolute pleasure to debate Josh on the moral permissibility of abortion. I have no illusions that this debate will end once my opponent and I are done arguing. In this final round I hope to summarize and respond to all of the criticisms that have been put against my arguments. Additionally, I will also show once more why my opponent's main argument is not sound. C1: It is not always wrong to kill an innocent human being. In a rather desperate attempt to salvage his fallacious argument, my opponent has had to explicitly contradict himself in order to avoid my prior objections. If you will recall, he previously stated in round one that "it is morally justified to pull the plug on a truly brain-dead adult." He now maintains that "someone in an irreversible coma does have the right to life." According to the American Academy of Neurology, someone in an irreversible coma has, by definition, suffered brain death.[1] And brain death is most certainly not a "myth." His response in defense of this new position is almost unbelievably weak. He says that people who are in irreversible comas have a right to life because they have a right to keep their organs. However, this is completely irrelevant. Having a right to keep your organs is not the same as having a moral right to keep on living. Given how counterintuitive it is to even remotely equate killing a brain-dead human with a conscious adult, I maintain that my objection still stands. For the sake of argument, Josh grants that anencephalic fetuses don't have a right to life. It is simply not the case that all humans have the natural inherent capacity to become persons, as is demonstrated by the existence of anencephalic fetuses. He tries to recover from this admission by saying that these occur in only 1 out of 10,000 births. But his point here is simply irrelevant. My opponent's argument is making the universal statement that it's wrong to kill any member of the human community. A universal statement is negated by even 1 counterexample. It would therefore not be an exaggeration to say that Josh has negated his own argument. Both of my counterexamples remain intact. But Josh can't hide behind the ambiguous meaning of "human community" in his argument. If by "human" Josh actually means a being with the natural capacity to potentially become conscious, then his argument still fails for all the reasons I give in my third contention. C2: A fetus is not a person and thus cannot have a serious right to life. Josh is trying to give the impression that Peter Singer supports killing adults with down syndrome or those with similar conditions. Indeed, he seems to suggest that Peter Singer and I support eugenics. These accusations are just completely unfounded scare tactics. They represent little more than slippery slope fallacies masquerading as rational arguments. Peter Singer has never argued for such positions.[2] Adults who have never become self-conscious agents (e.g., those who grew into adulthood with only a brain stem) would not qualify as persons. Under Singer's views, killing them would be justifiable in certain situations. The impressions that Josh has given of Singer's views are misleading and fallacious. My opponent tries to save his infanticide objection to my argument by saying that he is appealing to his moral intuitions. Well, I simply fail to see the strength of this objection. Lots of people, for example, seem to think that homosexuality is deeply wrong on the basis of moral intuitions. As the philosopher Michael Tooley points out, appeals to moral intuitions are only appropriate in the case of basic moral principles.[3] A specific claim about the wrongness of occasionally killing human infants is far from a basic moral principle. Moreover, my opponent's intuitions are further undermined by the lack of philosophical support for the view that potentials can determine rights. In his previous round, Josh has continued to argue for the substance view of persons. But apart from giving assertions, he hasn't really made any arguments for this position. There are no good reasons to think that rights can't be attained by having emergent properties like consciousness. Indeed, the notion that rights can be attained by mere potentials leads to moral and logical absurdities, which I elaborate on in my third contention. On the other hand, refusing to grant a right to life to a being that has never been conscious is not at all arbitrary because those beings have never had a desire to continue living. Moreover, Josh has either misrepresented or misunderstood the argument I gave in my second round about gradually diminishing natural capacities. If you will recall, my opponent argued that rights can't be linked with properties like consciousness because consciousness comes in degrees. But natural capacities also come in degrees as well. That's why I asked him to imagine a spectrum of species all the way from humans down to amoeba. This spectrum would be composed of a range of animals with gradually diminishing natural capacities. Therefore, even if I were to grant that Josh's groundless criticisms are valid, his own views of rights are no better off. C3: An entity's potentials cannot grant that entity rights. For a second time, my opponent has completely ignored one of my central arguments against the notion that rights can be determined by potentials. This should count as a concession because I wont be able to respond to any new argument he may want to bring up in the third round. As I've pointed out, the potentiality argument leads to logical absurdities. If potentials can grant rights, then children should have the same rights as adults. But surely this is false. Toddlers shouldn't be given the right to vote because they have the "natural inherent capacity" to become rational adults. If you will recall, I've also argued that the potentiality argument entails the view that contraception and abstinence are wrong. My opponent tries to show why this argument is false by stating that one case involves active potentials, while the other involves passive potentials. But remember, in order for my opponent's objection to be coherent he has to demonstrate why active potentials are important, whereas passive potentials are not. I challenged my opponent to demonstrate this, and he has not done so. Later on, Josh responds to Warren's space explorer analogy. According to him, "Your cells are not persons yet; they're potential organisms. They're not harmed by you escaping." But this is exactly the point that I've been making all along. A fetus is not a person either. A fetus is only a person if you accept Josh's faulty arguments for personhood. A fetus can't be harmed in the way that a person can be harmed because it is unconscious and has never had the desire to continue living. At most, its potentials can be destroyed. Because the rights of an actual person trump the rights of any potential person, the potentiality argument against abortion fails even if it's correct. | Conclusion | In the end, Josh's unsupported arguments are not a sufficient basis for removing the important value of reproductive choice from women. The second premise of his argument has been negated twice over. Brain-dead humans and anencephalic fetuses don't have a right to life. Even if Josh wants to excommunicate these humans from the "human community," his argument would still fail. Not only does the potentiality argument lead to logical absurdities, it still wouldn't show why abortion is wrong even if it was assumed to be true. By contrast, my second and third contentions are negated only insofar as unwarranted emotional arguments are capable of defeating rational arguments. Thank you all very much. Sources: 1. http://tinyurl.com... 2. http://tinyurl.com... 3. http://tinyurl.com...