Abortion Is Morally Permissible

I have never seen a defender of abortion as widely read in pro-life philosophy as him and consider it a privilege for us to be able to debate. My opponent has dubbed his view the “mentalist view. ” If by “mentalist” he means that only beings with self-conscious mental activity have a right-to-life, then I am inclined to accept his label and discard the "rationalist" label. (At least I did not refer to him as an “anti-equality advocate! ”) (1) Now, let’s examine the two arguments I used to defend the moral impermissibility of abortion along with my opponent’s “mentalist view. ”The Substance ViewI argued that even though I do not share any of the same memories, and only 10% of the same bodily material, with my infant self, it is natural to say that I (not something else that became me) was born or conceived on a certain day or that I (and not it) am in an irreversible coma. In other words, there is something that unifies my past, present, and future identities that itself is not purely psychological. To demonstrate this, I argued that the mentalist view suffers from the “fission problem” of personal identity through a cloning thought-experiment. Under the mentalist view, If I was cloned by a machine and a duplicate was created that had identical mental states with mine, it would seem that the same person exists in two places holding contradictory beliefs about himself. In other words, the mentalist view causes one person to literally become two persons (or maybe more! ). My opponent tried to escape the fission problem by employing the theory that, “a person can be identical with a past or future being only insofar as that person is then psychologically continuous with that person and no other being is. ” But now instead of claiming that two people exist after the cloning procedure, the mentalist is reduced to saying that no person has survived the cloning the procedure, because there are still two beings that are psychologically continuous with pre-cloned Trent. But it seems strange to say that I “died” or no longer exist when a clone somewhere else was created who happens to share my mental states. In contrast, the substance view provides a sound metaphysical view of the human person as a rational animal whose identity and value persists through change, a view whose metaphysical coherence Pro did not challenge. Regarding the substance view’s argument that the right-to-life is an essential property of a person, Pro used the counterexample of a brain-dead or irreversibly comatose human being having a right-to-life as his main defeater of the substance view. Pro contends that our intuitions about the brain-dead not having a right-to-life defeats the idea that all humans have this property. I offered three counter-arguments in response to this claim, of which, two I will elaborate. First, I showed that Pro has not taken into account Patrick Lee’s new argument that the brain-dead are no longer human substances and therefore they do not have a right to life. Pro did not challenge this, but argued that it is counterintuitive to claim that the irreversibly comatose, or other humans who cannot have future experiences, have a right-to-life. I suspect that what is driving most people’s intuitions that brain-dead humans (and similar people) do not have a right-to-life would be the counterintuitive claim that it would be murder to take them off life-support. But I argued that these persons could have a right-to-life, but not a positive right-to-life support, and therefore it would not necessarily be murder to take them off a machine that is keeping them alive. (2)Pro also did not challenge this but countered that it should be obvious that a comatose person not on life support does not have even have a negative right-to-life (or a right to not be killed directly). However, I don’t think most people will have the same intuitions about the prospect of directly killing a brain-dead person that they would have with the prospect of just letting them die. In the same issue of the medical journal that published Shewmon’s paper on brain death, Amir Halevy reaffirms the intuition most of us probably have against burying or cremating a breathing human body. (3) In conclusion, I have shown that the substance view explains why humans maintain their identity and right-to-life through change and Pro did not adequately rebut my case. The Future-Like-Ours ArgumentThe future-like-ours argument simply claims that what makes killing a human wrong is that it is wrong to deprive someone of a future that they will later value (or a future-like-ours) regardless if they currently value it. Pro’s main argument is that only humans who have the ability to rationally desire their futures have a serious right-to-life, which excludes fetuses and infants. In order to salvage his mentalist view, Pro claims that all rational humans have an “ideal desire” to live and that it is wrong to violate their ideal desire even if they don’t actually want to live (recall the suicidal person’s right-to-life). Do you see a similarity in these two ideas that have been debated thus far? • An Ideal Desire: A desire that a being may not currently have, but would have, under better circumstances. • A Future-Like-Ours: Future experiences that a being does not currently have, but will have, if they continue existing. I contend that Pro’s reasoning has treaded into an argument that I have been defending throughout this debate. Namely, that depriving someone of something valuable they aren’t consciously aware of, but would have obtained without external interference, is morally wrong. Pro may contend that at least beings who have never had conscious experiences (or can’t remember their experiences), do not have a right-to-life because they have no morally relevant desires (actual or ideal) to frustrate. Now, if no other moral theory seemed promising, we may have to accept Pro’s conclusions. But the only argument Pro offered against FLO was that it is ONLY wrong to kill beings who have a future-they-desire (FTD), and not a FLO. But this is exactly the issue that is being debated, and not an intrinsic defeater of the FLO argument. However, consider the examples I provided throughout the debate of humans who never had desires of any kind. Imagine an infant in the crib about to be euthanized, an unconscious clone of a young woman used as a sex doll, and mindless zombie clones, kept at a non-human level of animal cognitive function, used for target practice. If no action were taken to genetically modify them in-utero, these humans would lead lives like the rest of us and robbing them of that seems, in many people’s opinions, to do them great harm. Since my opponent never showed that the FLO argument leads to a counterintuitive conclusion (as he attempted to do with the substance view and his brain-death objection), I see no reason a person should reject a theory like FLO that is coherent and better explains widely held moral intuitions people generally have about the impermissibility of killing or mistreating many kinds of human beings. ConclusionIn conclusion, I have shown that the substance view and the future like-ours arguments adequately account for the intuitions we have about human identity and the wrongness of killing human beings in various cases. Furthermore, I showed that these views are neither incoherent nor do they lead to counterintuitive moral conclusions. Furthermore, I have shown that the mentalist view leads to a personal identity contradiction and cannot account for valid moral intuitions many people have about not harming pre-conscious humans who are not fetuses. Therefore, my position stands that abortion is, in general, morally impermissible. Sources:. http://www.debate.org...