Abortion Is Morally Permissible

However, in my rebuttal I will argue that Pro's affrmative has not refuted my position and that his argument leads to moral and logical contradictions. I will address his rebuttal in my conclusion. Defending the Substance View Pro appeals to our intuition that brain-dead humans, or individuals who will never again have a conscious experience, do not have a right-to-life. He claims that the defender of the substance view cannot say that a brain-dead person has undergone the substantial change of death and is no longer a human being because Alan Shewmon, a UCLA pediatric neurologist, has presented empirical evidence that brain-dead individuals can survive (with artificial assistance) for decades after their initial diagnosis. He then quotes a defender of the substance view, Patrick Lee, who Pro claims has accepted that brain-dead humans have a right-to-life. The defender of the substance view could answer this objection in at least three ways: 1. The brain-dead do possess a right-to-life: Pro appeals to our moral intuition that the brain-dead don't possess a right-to-life. But in previous debates he has quoted CU-Boulder philosopher Michael Tooley in defense of the view that our moral intuitions can be mistaken and grounded in emotion,[i] which could be the case in the intuition against the brain-dead having a right-to-life. (I will further elaborate the nature of intuition when I discuss infanticide in my critique of Pro's view below). 2. The brain-dead have undergone a substantial change and are no longer a human substance: Pro has quoted Patrick Lee as accepting Shewmon's contention that the brain-dead are human beings, but Lee has actually rebutted this in a 2010 article he co-wrote with natural law theorist Germain Grisez. [ii] Lee and Grisez use the thought-experiment of a decapitated head to show that even if the head and body were separately kept alive, this would not mean that two people now exist. The body without a brain is not a human being anymore, even if it could be kept alive in the same manner that the brain-dead are kept alive. Lee and Grisez argue that a necessary condition for being an animal at all is the capacity to be sentient, or the capacity to develop that capacity. Since the brain dead lack both of these properties, they are not properly speaking, animals, and therefore not rational animals, or human beings. 3. The brain dead have a right-to-life, but not a right-to-life-support: While I may have a right-to-life, I may not have a right to "extraordinary medical care" to keep me alive. For example, it's possible my insurance and local hospitals would not cover a 10 million dollar surgery that is required to save my life, but I'm sure such a surgery would be performed for the President because his instrumental (not intrinsic) value warrants such extraordinary care. Likewise, while a brain-dead person may have a right-to-life, the level of medical treatment needed to sustain them may not be warranted for someone who will not have any experiences at all and therefore be non-obligatory "extraordinary" care. Even defenders of the substance view like Francis Beckwith admit that the removal of life-support could be morally licit for the irreversibly comatose, despite them being a human substance. [iii] Finally, the FLO account of killing bypasses this entire objection because, under that account, the brain-dead do not have a valuable future so killing them is not wrong. However, the unborn do have FLO's and therefore it is still wrong to kill them. I believe I have shown that the substance view can accommodate the one instance of counterintuitive equality that Pro claims is fatal to the whole argument. In contrast, Pro's argument is subject to more damaging counterexamples. A Critique of the Rationalist View Pro admits that the most controversial premise in his argument against fetal personhood is premise two, which states, "An entity is a person if it has (1) consciousness, (2) the capacity to reason, (3) self-motivated activity, (4) the capacity to communicate messages, and (5) the presence of self-concepts. " I call Pro's defense of personhood the "rationalist" view because he contends that the right-to-life is a property only associated with beings who are immediately capable of rational thought. However, I believe his view creates counterintuitive inequalities and should be rejected. For example: 1. Infants: If animals like dogs or pigs are not rational enough to qualify as persons, then infants would certainly not be persons and thus infanticide would not be wrong. Pro may object that I am appealing to emotions in attacking infanticide, but he has done something similar when attacking the right-to-life of the brain-dead. To borrow some of his opening argument (where I've replaced "brain-dead" with "infants"), I would say "But surely infants have a right to life. Given how completely counterintuitive (and seemingly absurd) it is to affirm that infants do not have a right to life, it is reasonable to reject infanticide. " Pro may object that he's building his intuition about the brain-dead from the foundational belief that only beings with rational interests have rights. I would counter that my opposition to infanticide is built off the foundational belief in the intrinsic value of human beings and the wrongness of killing beings with a future-like-ours, and that by refuting his brain-dead counterexample and bolstering the FLO account (see point three below) I have created a justification for the intuition against infanticide. 2. The Disabled: Under Pro's view, adult humans who are disabled and have very low I. Q. 's would not be persons. Furthermore, an adult who lost their memories (similar to Kayla Hutchison) and lapsed into a reversible coma would cease to have a right-to-life because they apparently do not have any "interests. "[iv] 3. Genetically Engineered Brainless Humans: Robert Wennberg has written in defense of the view that depriving a person of something they do not currently desire (like an inheritance of which one is ignorant) harms them even though they do not suffer in the undesired thing's absence. [v] I contend that if only rationally functioning persons have rights, then no person would be harmed in the creation of brainless humans for organ transplants, or non-sentient female sex-dolls, or even the indoctrination of slaves who, prior to becoming conscious, had their brains altered so they had no desires of their own (even the desire to live). [vi] But, if these humans are harmed by the deprivation of futures they do not currently desire, then the human fetus suffers the same harm when he is aborted. A Metaphysical Problem Finally, Pro's definition of a person as being only a collection of mental states leads to a logical contradiction which I think counts against his view. For example, imagine I stepped into a machine like the one from the movie The Prestige that created an exact double of me. However, this machine causes me and the double it creates to lose consciousness briefly during the copying phase, after which we are moved by persons unknown. It seems that if a person is only a collection of mental states, and since we both have identical memories, then both humans would be "Trent" (especially since each of us would not know if we were the original or the copy). But this leads to contradictions like "Trent is in two places at once" or "Trent is hungry and not hungry at the same time. "[vii] However, the substance view would simply say that the double was a new human substance that is numerically distinct (but qualitatively identical), to the original and no logical contradiction is created. In conclusion, I have shown that Pro has not refuted my affirmative and that his "rationalist" defense of abortion contains moral and logical contradictions and should therefore be rejected. Sources. http://www.debate.org...