Infanticide should be legal in the United States.

Thank you, sherlockmethod, for taking time out to debate with me. We seem to disagree on some key issues, so I'm sure we will have plenty to argue about. For starters, the laws we create in society are a reflection of the moral standards we've adopted. And I'm arguing that the law "should" be a certain way. Words like "should" or "ought" imply ethical judgments. [1] As such, my opponent and I are arguing about the moral principles that underpin our laws, not the actual constitutional merit of the laws themselves. For example, a law can be constitutional and wrong (morally) or vice versa. Therefore, laws and constitutional standards cannot be used to justify their own validity; that would be circular reasoning. Not to disparage my antagonist in any way, but this is a basic point in logic. I'm not saying anything that isn't universally accepted by logicians. With that out of the way, lets get into the actual debate. =======================> Why Infanticide Can Be Morally Justified <========================= C1: Infanticide is justified in the case of infants with severe medical problems that will end up killing them painfully. My opponent argues that a child, once born, should have a right to life under the constitution, and thus infanticide is unacceptable. Later on, he suggests that my proposal is equivalent to advocating for "homicide". Unfortunately, he has yet to explain why this is the case. As such, my opponent seems to be appealing to moral principles, which, oddly enough, he has not mentioned at all in the course of his first round. Despite what my antagonist may believe, there are very strong and reasonable grounds to suppose that not every human born in the United Sates has a serious right to life. I will demonstrate this by putting his reasoning into a syllogism and then I will demonstrate why it is unsound. If his arguments were put into a syllogism, then they might take the following form: P1: It is wrong to kill an innocent member of the species Homo sapiens that has already been born. P2: A human infant is an innocent member of the species Homo sapiens that has already been born. P3: Therefore, it is wrong to kill a human infant. (from 1 and 2) (Modus Ponens) C: Therefore, it is legally objectionable to kill an infant. (from 3) If my opponent's argument is constructed like this, strong objections can be raised against the first premise. For example, a devastating counterexample can be raised against the notion that it is always wrong to kill an innocent member of the species Homo sapiens that has been born. An adult human with complete upper brain death is an innocent member of the species Homo sapiens that has been born. However, an adult human with complete upper brain death does not possess a serious right to life; they are, for all intensive legal and moral purposes, already dead at that stage. [2] As Bernard Gert - the Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Dartmouth College – points out, simply being alive does not have inherit value in itself. It is, rather, the capacity for conscious experience in a human that is important. [3] So, those who may wish to still believe all humans have a serious right to life should consider how ridiculous the anti-infanticide syllogism would appear in light of the counter example listed above. Clearly, the notion that all innocent members of the species Homo sapiens have a serious right to life if they are already born is deeply erroneous. Unlike an adult, a human infant is lacking attributes in several very important areas. The human infant does not posses the same mental faculties as a full-grown adult and therefore cannot be said to posses the same serious right to life that conscious persons do. As demonstrated earlier, this moral principle can be recognized in the way humans differentiate between fully conscious adults and those that have experienced a permanent loss of consciousness due to disease or some sort of traumatic accident. And it is in this ethical purview that it is possible to recognize that an infant does not have a strong right to life since, like a brain dead adult, it does not posses a significant mental life with thoughts and desires. This is why murdering grown adults is wrong whereas killing an infant is not (as least some of the time). Furthermore, I don't think my antagonist's attack on my first argument can withhold scrutiny. While trying to refute my central argument in this section, he claims that anencephalic infants will die without pain and, therefore, infanticide is unnecessary. However, according to my opponent's own source, "A baby born with anencephaly is usually blind, deaf, unconscious, and unable to feel pain." [4] The key word in that sentence is USUALLY. On some occasions, according to Con's source, anencephalic infants can feel pain. Therefore, risking immense suffering on these infants by letting them die naturally from cardiorespiratory arrest is simply unacceptable since some of them apparently can feel pain. C2: A human infant is not a person and thus cannot have a serious right to life. Before I continue, let me make a few things clear. I do not take a cavalier attitude toward the practice of infanticide. Moreover, I'm not in the mood to draw up a legal document, but I will say that I don't think infanticide should be allowed after the infant has been alive for one month. And lastly, I'm only advocating infanticide for disabled infants insofar as they are so disabled that they will surely die miserably from their conditions. Moving on… In attempting to demonstrate why my proposal is flawed, (Con) wrote the following: "Infants are persons under the law and this debate is about legality so they can be said to be persons, Dr. Singer and utilitarianism aside." Now, this argument simply begs the question. My opponent is essentially claiming that an infant has a moral right to be protected under the constitution without first establishing why constitutional protections should apply to beings that are not rational, autonomous or self-conscious agents. Con simply can't use existing laws to justify the morality of a legal standard; as was stated earlier, that would be circular reasoning. Secondly, at no point in the United States constitution does it specify what qualifies someone as a person. Moreover, even if the constitution explicitly rejected my proposal, that would not demonstrate why my proposal was flawed: it would only demonstrate that my arguments lacked constitutional merit. And since this debate has nothing to do with constitutional standards, this point would be irrelevant at any rate. C3: An entity's potentials cannot grant that entity rights. My opponent has chosen not to address this argument. That's fine with me. Unless he wishes to refute this in his second round, I will have won this specific argument. ::Conclusion:: In order to win this debate, all I need to do is successfully manage to defend my first argument regarding severely disabled infants with terminal ailments. Up until this point, I think it is quite clear that I have done this. As was shown earlier, infants with anencephaly can potentially suffer, and infanticide is, therefore, a valid way to ensure that those infants won't suffer horribly in their last moments on Earth. Additionally, I have also managed to successfully defend my second contention since my opponent hasn't managed to refute the criteria I have given for personhood. As such, the weight of the arguments leans heavily in my favor in the debate so far. Sources: 1. http://plato.stanford.edu... 2. http://spot.colorado.edu... (7.2 The Counterexample Objection) 3. Gert, Bernard. Common Morality: Deciding What to Do. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. (p. 30) 4. http://www.ninds.nih.gov... Best, Freeman