Abortion

Introduction I will now raise more objections to my opponent's arguments. With that said, let me begin. The Desire View of Personhood Pro agrees with me that his defense of abortion entails that infanticide is morally permissible as well. Despite this being contrary to most people's moral intuitions, he is unwilling to abandon his arguments. If you remember correctly, Pro's view is that in order to be wronged by death, an individual has to have a desire to continue living. One can have a desire to continue living if they have the concept of oneself as a continuing subject of experience. In other words, one must possess self-awareness. However, if this is the criterion for having a right to life, one wonders if two or three year olds meet this standard. I don't think this is an unreasonable question to ask. Indeed, in Practical Ethics Peter Singer seems to think this is a possibility. He says: "It would, of course, be difficult to say at what age children begin to see themselves as distinct entities existing over time. Even when we talk with two and three year old children it is usually very difficult to elicit any coherent conception of death, or of the possibility that someone - let alone the child herself - might cease to exist. No doubt children vary greatly in the age at which they begin to understand these matters, as they do in most things. " [1] So there does seem to be a possibility that two or three year olds don't desire to continue living because they lack the concept of themselves as distinct entities existing over time. And that means that if one accepts the moral permissibility of infanticide, they should also (at least be open to the possibility) that two or three years can be killed too. I know Peter Singer has never actually advocated for the moral permissibility of killing two or three year olds, and that when it comes to ending life he thinks it should be done as early as possible. But this seems arbitrary. Why should it be done early? If certain beings really don't have the concept of themselves, it's not exactly clear why it's wrong to kill them under this standard set up by him. If infants are not persons, i. e. don't have the right to life, then one also wonders why they couldn't be killed and used for their organs. Jeff McMahan, another philosopher who advocates infanticide, claims in his book The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life that it is morally permissible to kill a healthy orphaned newborn in order to harvest his organs to save the lives of four other human beings. He calls this scenario, "Healthy Newborn. " "A woman dies in childbirth leaving a very premature but healthy newborn infant, just a few hours old. The child's biological father died months ago and neither he nor the mother had any living relatives. Both were reclusive and had no friends; hence there is no one who is specially related, even indirectly, to the infant. Suppose there are four children in the same hospital, all of whom are three years old and need an organ transplant within the next twenty twenty-four hours in order to survive. Because these children's organs have been impaired by illness it is not possible to wait for one to die and use his or her organs to save the others; nor is it possible to sacrifice one (say, by lottery) to save the other three. But the newborn infant has the right tissue type and its organs could be used to save all four. " [2]When it comes to this scenario, what separates my opponent from Jeff McMahan is that not only would it be morally permissible to kill this baby, but it would be morally required. This is because my opponent subscribes to utilitarianism, which is an ethical theory that says the right thing to do is the act that will have the best consequences of the options open to you. And clearly, killing a non-person to save four persons will have the best consequences. According to the American Transplant Foundation, more than 123,000 people in the United States are currently on the waiting list for a lifesaving organ transplant. Another name is added to the national transplant waiting list every 12 minutes. On average, 21 people die every day from the lack of available organs for transplant. [3]If we accept my opponent's view that infants are not persons, and his ethical theory of utilitarianism, it seems like we are committed to the view that we should kill healthy orphaned newborns in order to use their organs for others to use. This will produce the best consequences and maximize the preferences of all sentient beings. Imagine that our society actually adopted this view, and we started to pay women to get pregnant and carry babies to term only to later kill them for their organs. These babies would be unwanted, and thus we don't have to worry about what the preferences of the parents would be. In fact, killing the infants would be fulfilling the preferences of the parents, since this is what they are getting paid to do. However, I think a society that adopted such a practice would be profoundly immoral, because they would be intentionally killing individuals that have a future of value. The Suicidal Teenager Objection Here Pro makes two claims. The first is that suicidal teenagers don't actually desire to die, rather they desire to get help. But this is clearly untrue, once one considers the fact that many suicidal teenagers do in fact take their lives. The second is that killing this suicidal teenager would lead to bad consequences such as grieving parents and distress among other suicidal teens. But now Pro is appealing to something other than the desire to live for why killing is wrong. It's no longer about frustrating desires, but rather the bad consequences that result out of killing. Even if we were to accept this as the reason for why it would be wrong to kill the teen, I can simply change the situation around in order to avoid the bad consequences. Let's say the suicidal teen is an orphan and has no relatives that would be saddened by his death and because he spends all his time on Debate. org, nobody knows him and therefore no other suicidal teenagers would feel worse about his death. Now suppose I'm a highly trained assassin, and I know how to kill individuals without society finding out about it and becoming scared of the fact that there is a killer roaming about. It seems like then Pro would have no problem with me killing this teen. After all, I will not be frustrating his desire to live, I will not saddened his relatives or scare society. But clearly it's wrong to kill this teen because he has a future of value. The Temporarily Comatose Adult Objection In response to this objection, Pro says: "If a coma is only temporary, i. e. , one still poseses the capability to regain consciousness, then one cannot easily say that the person in question lacks all desires, in fact some coma patients are aware of their surroundings, even some who are diagnosed with a vegetative coma. " But I never claimed that adults in a temporary coma lack all desires. Rather, I said: "Adults in a temporary coma also don't desire to continuing living. They are completely unconscious and thus lack this important desire. " I specifically said the desire to live, not all desires. This might seem like a petty nitpick, but it's actually important to point out. Thus, I don't think he gets around this objection. The Indoctrinnated Slave Objection Pro claims that the slave indoctrination would lead to bad consequences, and thus is morally wrong. But again, suppose that I keep my slave indoctrination a secret, and society never finds out about my operation. Moreover, one can imagine a case where the slave indoctrination would lead to good consequences. Suppose that I use the slaves to benefit the rest of society, and overall it produces better consequences. It seems like then Pro would have no problem with bringing slavery back. But surely this absurd, most people alive today would not be willing to defend slavery. The Creation of Brainless Human Beings Pro doesn't really seem to provide a response to this objection. What I think he's trying to say is that altering a human's brain to have no desires at all is impossible, and that it would just result in the death of the human organism. I could be misinterpreting him, so hopefully this doesn't come off across as a straw man. But I definitely don't think it's impossible for a human being to survive such a surgery. Of course it depends on what one means by "possible. " It certainly seems logically possible, i. e. it can be asserted without implying a logical contradiction. So as long as it's logically possible, I don't think it can be simply disregarded. Other than that, Pro doesn't provide a good reason to think that doing this to human beings would be morally permissible. The Buddhist Master and Divine Persons Objection Pro claims that it would be wrong to kill the Buddhist Master because it would scare the Buddhist that are not masters. But again, if I kill the Buddhist Master without the others finding out about it then it seems like Pro would have no problem with me ending his life. Pro also claims that because Divine Persons most likely don't exist their moral status should be of no concern to us. But whether or not they exist is not relevant, because if they did exist, they would obviously be persons with a right to life. Pro then says that if someone is immortal, it does not matter whether they have a "right" to life because you could not kill them anyway. However, it is entirely possible to violate someone's moral rights without inflicting any actual damage upon them. Attempted assault, rape, or murder is wrong even if such an attempt did not and could not have succeeded. [4]Conclusion Pro's arguments lead to insanely immoral conclusions and his responses to my objections to his argument are not satisfactory. Sources in comments