This House believes that abortion is morally permissible.

IntroductionIn this last round, I will show that by any impartial measure, abortion is morally impermissible. To do this, I’ll return to the 2 main issues in this debate.Argument from PersonhoodReaders will remember that Pro and I present differing personhood accounts.Pro’s conception limits personhood to those who perform various cognitive actions. I offered 3 criticisms of this view.Slippery Slope - Here I argued that an exclusive performance-based criteria will inevitably exclude some humans, like infants and the disabled.Pro denies the slippery slope on the basis that I allegedly misrepresent Singer to make my case.Pro’s criticism fails for 2 reasons.Irrelevant - my target here is Pro’s conception of personhood, not Peter Singer. Indeed, Singer agrees with me that the performance view entails the permissibility of infanticide, because infants don’t exhibit these characteristics sufficiently (see below). Singer’s defence of infanticide is just the logical consequence of Pro’s view and a powerful reductio against it.Pro then asks why those with prohibitively low IQs are also at risk. Simple, because they have highly defective cognitive performance, less so than animals (non-persons).Wrong - As for the charge of misrepresenting Singer, his views here are notorious,“My comparison between abortion and infanticide was prompted by the objection that the position I have taken on abortion also justifies infanticide. I have admitted this charge - without regarding the admission as fatal to my position” (1)While neither Singer nor Pro advocate infanticide, this is only because they are living inconsistently with their own ethical judgement. Undermining human equality - Here I argued that as Pro is basing rights on intellectual capacities, these rights should differ according to these capacities.Pro denies this, claiming either that personhood is an all or nothing affair. Remember, Pro’s conception of personhood is based on qualitative factors, like reasoning. If Pro holds that it is necessary to merely possess these characteristics in any form, then many animals (e.g. pigs) would have to be considered as persons, morally equivalent to humans. Even insects possess some of sentience in a less developed form. Are they persons? This is clearly absurd.Alternatively, if rights are reserved for beings with high cognitive performance, this leads to undermining equality. Humans differ greatly on the spectrum of Warren’s 5 criteria. Grounding equal human rights from unequal cognitive performance is absurd.The only way out of this bind to reject Pro’s conception of personhood.Episodic problem - Here I showed that the performance view leads to personhood disappearing episodically (e.g. sleep or temporary coma).Pro attacks this saying claiming both that such cases still exhibit some of Warren’s criteria and that using sentience dissolves this problem.This brings me to the Goldilocks problem. In order to deal with hard cases, Pro has to continually readjusting the bar on each of the criteria. In response to my coma patient example, Pro holds that exhibiting a semblance of self-motivated activity is enough. If this is this the threshold Pro holds, consider this:“Self-initiated activity is already present at 8-10 weeks when human beings in utero begin to suck their thumbs and move about”. (2)This leads to the real problem of Pro’s approach. Both he and Warren contrive an account with the sole purpose of excluding the unborn. This self-serving conception still even can’t cover the disabled and the temporarily comatose while excluding the unborn, as Warren herself admits (3). As such, we have a plethora of reasons to reject the performance account.The substance viewI initially gave 2 arguments to think that the unborn were human beings. Pro didn’t respond to either of these, so I’ll take it we both agree that the unborn are human beings.I also defended the substance view of persons - that every human being is endowed with inherent moral worth given their essential nature as a de facto rational agent. This view holds that all human beings, including the unborn, are persons.Pro charges that I beg the question by not justifying this view.As I said in R2 however, justification comes from its superior practical application, it:1. Avoids the slippery slope, equality and episodic problems2. Demarcates the moral significance between humans and animals.3. Solves all the difficult cases - infants, the disabled and Pro’s alien example.Whatever one thinks of this case, it’s hardly question-begging.Contrast this with Pro. He gave no justification of Warren’s criteria at all, beyond identifying them. The only hint of justification he mustered was his cultured alien example, which he immediately dropped. He then claims the substance view is arbitrary and leads to specieism.His examples attack straw-man. I explicitly said in R2,“Humanity is a sufficient, but not a necessary condition of personhood.”Humans are endowed with their personhood as de facto rational agents. Given I agreed that Pro’s cultured aliens would be persons for the same reason, I’m astounded by Pro’s claim. Pro’s examples of bananas and sperm fail because they aren’t de facto rational agents.As such, the substance view of persons by far the most plausible account. Given this entails the unborn are persons, abortion is morally impermissible. Resolution negated.FLOHere I argued against the permissibility of abortion on the FLO account of killing.Pro responds that it’s not our future, but our present value that accounts for the wrongness of killing.This is when Pro really goes off the rails.I already anticipated this in my last round, using examples of a temporary coma patient and a suicidal teenager. Neither have a valuable present. As such, Pro can’t account for why killing them is wrong, unlike my FLO approach. On this basis, we should accept the FLO account, which entails the impermissibility of abortion.As for Pro’s insistence to straw-man my argument as one from potentiality, if Boonin’s point wasn’t clear enough, let me try again with with originator Don Marquis :“This argument does not rely on the invalid inference that, since it is wrong to kill persons, it is wrong to kill potential persons also. The category that is morally central to this analysis is the category of having a valuable future like ours; it is not the category of personhood.” (4)Pro’s 3 criticisms are thus completely irrelevant. Take his sperm example. Does killing sperm deprives a being of a FLO? No, obviously not. It can only become something which would have a FLO (zygote). Potential FLOs (like potential presidents) don’t have the same rights.Think about it this way, every person was once an embryo. As such, that you exist (and are currently actualising an embryo's FLO) proves embryos have a FLO. By contrast, it doesn’t make sense to say, “I was once a sperm”. Sperm are haploid, humans are diploid. The organism that grew to become adult you exists after only fertilisation. As such, Pro’s straw-man blatantly commits the fallacy of composition here.ConclusionGiven the strength of these 2 arguments and the weakness of Pro's case, if abortion is to be defended, it must be done so on other grounds.Sources1. Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, P1732, 3. Kaczor, Christopher, The Ethics of Abortion, P544. http://faculty.polytechnic.org...