Abortion

My opponent has made this debate very simple to read by putting his argument in the form of a syllogism. I thank him for this and will choose only to attack one of his contentions. But, to see the full implications of this, I will list his case below. Premise 1: Murdering a human is wrong. Premise 2: Aborting a fetus is murdering a human. Conclusion 1: Abortion is wrong. This is a very simple and elogant representation of the common argument against abortion. My opponent brought very strong evidence for why a fetus is a human. However, I only have one problem which I will address in my opponent's argument. I will attack his first premise on which his entire case is based on. Is murder wrong? This premise seemed to be the only one which my opponent did not bother to justify. The only reason he brings to justify this premise is that ""Most sane people would agree with this assertion. "". This actually commits two famous fallacies. The argument from popularity and the argument from authority. Argument from Popularity My opponent argues that most people agree that murder is wrong. First, what evidence does he bring that would sway us to believe that most people think murder is wrong? And even if he did, how does that actually make it wrong? Even if every person in the world agreed that murder was wrong, that does not bring any rational justification to the premise. Argument from Authority My opponent actually makes a second fallacy in his first premise when claiming that "sane" people would agree that murder is wrong. Again, this is no rational justification for the premise. It is simply a slightly different type of fallacy than the argument from popularity. While I admit that I might risk repeating myself too much in this debate, if every person with an IQ over 200 believed that murder was wrong with no actual reason for believing so, this would not justify one in believing it. I would also like for my opponent, when he tries to justify his claim that murdering a human is wrong, clarify as to why killing a human is wrong when apparently, killing an animal is not. This actually sheds a lot of light into why my opponent probably thinks murdering a person is wrong. We simply need to look at the differences between all humans and all animals. I will list some below. IntelligenceDoes a human gain more moral protection because it is more intelligent than an animal? This claim runs into several problems. A. --- What is the cut off point for who is intelligent enough to gain moral protection? Is every human elidgible? If so then this cancels out intelligence as the root factor in assigning moral protection, as most apes, some species of dolphins, and many species of birds have been shown to possess a higher level of intelligence than say: Infants, fetus', mentally challenged, or Alzheimers patients. So I guess we can rule out intelligence as a factor. Immaterial Soul Knowing my opponent, I can be pretty certain that this is not a distinction he makes between humans and animals as he is an atheist and a militant one at that. But let's just say for a moment that he is using this point, without reference to his personal beliefs. Is there any evidence that A. --- Human beings possess immaterial souls or B. --- Even if humans do possess immaterial souls, that animals do not? After all, the soul is supposedly immaterial and so cannot be verified to either exist or not exist. At best I guess this is a moot point. I can't really think of other differences that would not fit into the category of intelligence someway so I will allow my opponent to bring his reasons. My opponent brings two other arguments for the moral wrongness of abortion. Abortion is morally wrong because of the emotional side effectsThis is an interesting argument that I have only seen a few times before. Proponents of the immorality of abortion don't usually use this argument, but, since my opponent used it I will be forced to deal with it. Problems with this argument(A) It's consequences are inconsistent. Something having possibly regrettable emotional affects on someone does not clearly make it immoral or even wrong. My opponent provides no difference between a woman having bad emotional consequences as a result of an abortion and a woman having bad emotional consequences as a result of P. M. S. Is a woman's period immoral because it can lead to negative emotional consequences? (B) This is unable to bypass the is-ought problem, better known as Hume's Guillotine. It is the problem first brought by philosopher David Hume in which he noticed that most normative ethical theories derived prescriptive statements(what one 'ought' to do) from descriptive statements(how the world 'is'). There is no logical connection though between a description of natural properties and a prescription of moral duties. By definition any connection would be illogical for commiting the famous naturalistic fallacy of assigning non-natural properties to natural objects or actions. It is for these two reasons that we can throw out Pro's second arugment. Now on to his third and final argument for the immorality of abortion. There are better options than abortionMy opponent actually did not write anything under this and so I will give him the next round to fill it in as I'm assuming he simply made a mistake in copying or something. My opponent's arguments have each been shown not to be based on logic, reason or evidence. Conversely, I have given readers strong reason to assume that there is absolutely nothing immoral about abortion.