Abortion Is Morally Permissible

And I must return his complements. My goal in this last round is to tie together some of the loose ends of the debate and see if any conclusions can be reached. C1: The sanctity of life doctrine is morally untenable. 1. What about the irreversibly unconscious? Con is simply reduced to attacking straw-men. For example, I've never argued that his view entails that it's always wrong to take a life. Moreover, he still doesn't respond to my evidence or my logic. Con is simply wrong in many of his claims. The substance view maintains that the irreversibly unconscious are persons with a right to life. They are, after all, innocent human beings. I've even quoted the leading defender of the substance view to demonstrate this! [1] Con's only defense of this position entails that a logical contradiction is true. My opponent's mere appeal to Trent Horn is clearly fallacious. His two arguments have mutually exclusive views on the intrinsic value of the irreversibly unconscious. Con doesn't dispute my evidence or logic and thus his entire case simply collapses because a logical contradiction can't be true. 2. What about humanness being a morally irrelevant biological property? Con simply begs the question again. Assuming sexism and racism are wrong because of the biological characteristic of being a human assumes that being human is a morally relevant property. Con goes after numerous red herrings about essential properties, but his points here are irrelevant even if they are true. Accidental properties like essential properties can either have or lack moral significance. The fact that we are essentially human beings doesn't necessarily mean that we are all valuable as subjects of rights. 3. I've presented a modal argument that humans can't be intrinsically valuable. It essentially had two premises. First, being intrinsically valuable entails being necessarily valuable in all possible worlds, according to the standard definitions of intrinsic value and essential properties. After initial skepticism, Con has not disputed this. Second, humans in a possible world with the mental lives of insects would not be intrinsically valuable. Con's only objection to this premise is based on a false belief about what qualifies humanity. Francis Beckwith, a lead proponent of the substance view, explains that his argument entails that humans have these qualities even if it is impossible for us to actualize them. [2] According to Con's argument, there is no possible world where human beings don't have a rational nature. 4. I argued that the right to life is an accidental property? Happily, Con has ceased to attack the usefulness of thought experiments. He is now reduced to saying that we can't prove what would happen in the cerebrum case. We can only establish what is plausible. This is exactly my point! Con remakes his original argument and completely fails to address my rebuttal. The right to life acquired in the case of the cerebrum swap would plausibly be unnatural and hence accidental because the body of the organism holding the cerebrum still has the genetic code of a non-rational type of animal. I would maintain that Brahm's views are incoherent in much the same way Con's are, both internally and with the facts. I'm interpreting them as plausibly and honestly as I can. Remember, the original position he was willing to grant for the debate was that actively aborting anencephalic fetuses is acceptable. I'm representing all of my sources accurately. C2: A fetus is not a person and thus cannot have a serious right to life. Out of nowhere, Con says that I've appealed to authority to make up the bulk of my case, but that obviously isn't true. I've consistently given warrant for all of my arguments and to show that Con isn't representing his position accurately. Con's continued attack upon P1 is irrational. Black people would obviously be persons under my argument. It doesn't matter what the masses believe "person" means. The term "person" in philosophy means a being with a right to life. Con is practically guilty of playing semantics. 1. I argued that being "harmed" requires conscious experience. Con continues his straw-man critique of Warren's views on infanticide that I haven't defended. He simply sticks to his talking points and does not address my argument. I've shown that even though fetuses wouldn't be persons under my view, this doesn't constitute a good objection because intuitions can be misleading. And I submit that his general argument fails to underpin the intuitions he holds about infanticide. I then argued that there are other considerations to prohibit infanticide, despite infants not being persons. He hasn't responded to the objections I've given to the view that a socially recognized right to life should be at fertilization. Given the necessity for clear distinctions in the law, birth marks a very good spot to grant a right to life, even if one were to grant the non-personhood of the newborn infant. Con brings up toddlers once again, but they would obviously be persons under my view. 2. I argued that my view explains why the irreversibly unconscious lack a right to life. My opponent tries to argue, again, that my defense of a sleeping person's right to life implies that brain-dead people have a right to life. But notice that Con simply drops my counterargument. Even though brain-dead people were once conscious in the past, they are no longer psychologically continuous with the persons who enjoyed that past conscious experience. This is the crucial difference and the reason Con's objection fails. 3. I agree with my opponent that both of our views can offer a species free account of personhood that could also establish why self-aware robots would have a right to life. 4. I argued that my view explains numerous issues in personal identity. Con offers basically two objections to my counterarguments that dicephalic twins consist of one biological organism. First, Con says that even if the twins share organs, this doesn't mean that they are one organism. As I've pointed out earlier, it should be abundantly clear that the dicephalic twins consist of one organism in the case where there is only one brainstem to regulate a single autonomic nervous system. Second, it is completely irrelevant that the dicephalic twins may believe that they are one or two biological organisms. There is a scientific fact of the matter here which is true independently of the twin's beliefs about themselves. 5. I argued that rights plausibly function to protect interests. Con argues that the fetus would have an ideal desire to live in a world where they had actual desires. My opponent's objection is trivially correct. The problem is that Con's objection is based on a conditional statement about a state of affairs that isn't true. In the real world, fetuses do not have actual desires. My view of rights is prima facie plausible. No one has successfully been able to demonstrate that rights can exist in the absence of corresponding desires. Moreover, my opponent's objections about the child with an inheritance and the indoctrinated slave haven't been successful. The desire based view of rights should therefore be accepted. | Conclusion | So, I don't think we've seen any good reasons to become pro-life. Indeed, Con's argument couldn't really be in a more hopeless position. Not only is it subject to four strong objections which haven't been overcome, it is literally self-refuting. By contrast, my argument explains why my opponent's view is right when it is, and my view does not suffer from the difficulties that his view faces. And therefore I think that the pro-choice view is by far the more rational and moral position to adopt. Sources: . http://tinyurl.com...