| | [ Back to JB's Debater Profile ] Hello again, everyone, for the concluding set of remarks in this fantastic debate we've been having over abortion. I realize that the material presented has been quite voluminous. I also freely concede that the blame for that fact can properly be placed primarily on me. To atone for this, I'm going to try to make this closing summary and statement both brief (or what passes as such in the context of my typical output) and full of material. (In other words, reading this summary is going to be practically as good as reading the debate itself, and a lot easier on the time and the eyes.) Allow me to summarize what I can gather of the positions of the four original debaters and our guest entrant. I'll save myself for last. Mary made several bold assertions. First, life does not begin at conception, but rather properly begins when the reproductive organs are formed, as the capacity for reproduction is utterly essential to the definition of life. As a result, it must be deemed acceptable to terminate the non-life that exists prior to that development. Second, abortion is a necessary aspect of healthcare for women, and to abolish it would be to attack the practice of medicine itself. Third, all objection to abortion necessarily rests on moral or religious grounds--to use her term, "sectarian". Both the First Amendment itself and the spirit of that amendment as evidenced in the writings of the Founding Fathers have made it explicitly clear that those grounds are utterly inadmissible under the Constitution. Hence, a ban on abortion is unconstitutional. Kameron's position may also be summarized in several points. The Bible clearly views abortion as a grievous wrong. Passages such as Jeremiah 1:5 specify the existence of a "self" throughout the pre-natal developmental process. Wrongful termination of a "self" is the sense of "murder", prohibited in the moral law contained in the Decalogue. Abortion is therefore condemned as immoral in Scripture. It is also self-evident that the product of conception is human, since biologically, like begets like, in accordance with what has been termed the "Law of Biogenesis". Via an argument known by the acronym "SLED", various justifications for dismissing the unborn are themselves defeated. These include the objections: that the unborn are too small to matter; that the unborn are not sufficiently developed; that significance is only conferred upon the child after relocation to outside of the mother's body; and that the reliance of the unborn on the mother is grounds for diminishing its worth. I leave it to him to summarize the arguments he's had with the pro-choicers involved here, as well as interactions over the other religious arguments tossed around, as they are more relevant to his case than to mine. Tony asserts that the unborn child is indeed a human life (though Tony's terminology was often in a state of disorder, setting the "fetus" in contrast with a "human"--this ambiguity was severely detrimental to his presentation), but that the fundamental grounds for protection are constituted by the additional factor of consciousness. This stems, undoubtedly, from Tony's utilitarian system of ethics. Since consciousness emerges at some point in the pre-natal developmental process--Tony did not specify when--the beginning of this emergence marks the point at which wisdom insists we limit our consideration of abortion as moral; likewise, abortion after that point should be illegal, though the legality prior to then is defensible on the grounds that nothing immoral is occurring. Whereas caution could compel us to ban abortion prior to that point as well, in the interest of protection of life, this need for caution is neutralized by additional considerations. In addition, Tony has attempted to critique several pro-life arguments that were not used in this debate, but were defended in modified form by other participants in response to Tony's critique. As these are not crucial, discussion of them will now be omitted. ARU's position is rather similar to Tony's, but often more cogently expressed. The development of a central nervous system of sufficient complexity in the vicinity of the 20th week of development marks the transition from a living human non-person to a living human person. Because it is personhood that warrants protection, and not impersonal life such as that of the product of conception prior to this development, abortion is not objectionable when the subject is a living human non-person, as is the offspring before the 20th week. Before this, the offspring is in fact nothing but active chemicals--hardly a cause for an outcry upon disruption. I, on the other hand, have laid out several principles of my case, and I shall resubmit them here as they have emerged from the result of the debate. First of all, when the situation involves the possibility of the loss of human life, one should always err on the side of caution. I regard this as rather self-evident, and I don't recall any of my opponents having squawked much at this one, save to object that life is not a sufficient determiner. More on this later. Indeed, Tony himself explicitly affirmed the truth of the principle. Second, when life and death hang in the balance, law should reflect morality. Denial of this principle is clearly absurd. Only Mary took exception to this one (though not in response to me, since she responded to no other participants). I consider it sufficient merely to direct you all back to my entry for the second round, in which I believe that I have thoroughly dismantled her position, both on the grounds of rationality and on the grounds of constitutionality. Simply put, her alternative criterion for legislation (that being the perpetuated functionality of the society), when not combined with the additional criterion I proposed, was shown to be markedly deficient by highlighting numerous horrific and disagreeable acts that would have to be legal under Mary's criterion, including infanticide, genocide, ritual human sacrifice, male domination of women, slavery, etc. She backtracked around the same time (though being as of yet blissfully unaware of my refutation of what she'd already set forth) to include "equality" as a legitimate purpose of law. Of course, I was quick to point out that: She's flatly contradicted her harder stance from before. That very line ripped away her objection to anti-abortion legislation, since such legislation would serve to "provide equality to those who lack it" (her phrase), "those" being the unborn. Notions of "equality" themselves derive from the moral judgment that it is right that equal rights should be enjoyed and wrong that various humans should be deprived of certain expressions or values (such as life). By including "equality", she's inserted her own moral stance into legislative processes, but denied the same to others. (Ironically, that would create the very inequality she decries...)
In terms of her attempts to appeal to the "separation of church and state", particularly via a quotation from James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, I also regard this to have been soundly thrashed. Citing the Founding Fathers was clearly a major tactical error, given the virtual massacre that followed. The third principle is far more complex. In the final form (that is, as it now stands, after being slightly altered through Tony's thoughtful specification of a potential moral gray area), it is being asserted that it is immoral to kill a living human organism (a "human life") in a modern society where the situation is such that none of the following statements are true: There exists a divine mandate for the death (i.e., God--or the assembly of the gods, if we want to expand into polytheistic contexts--has given approval and commanded the killing). The organism is being subjected to just punishment for wrongdoing. The organism in question has given consent to forfeiting his, her, or its attribute of life, and has not withdrawn consent prior to the act. My argument suffers no harm from permitting this gray area to remain untackled, and many would undoubtedly consider suicide, whether assisted or unassisted, to be regrettable but the sovereign choice of the individual in question, given that one's own life, in some worldviews, is subordinated to that very one's will, if that will can be expressed.
Refraining from taking the life will result in the conclusion of at least one life deemed of equal or greater extrinsic value (intrinsic value is constant and therefore not under consideration). The organism has absolutely no chance of ever experiencing conscious mental action in the present or future prior to the onset of biological non-functionality.
I have argued that abortion is an act of the sort described in the third principle and hence condemned. If this is the case, and if the third principle is sustained, then the only rational conclusion is that abortion is immoral. During the course of this debate, only Mary has attempted to make the case that abortion does not fit the qualifications postulated. I will say quite frankly that her case for that was astonishingly sub-par when compared to what I had expected, and even my expectations were not particularly insurmountable. As I've already mentioned, Mary attempted to object to the identification of a zygote as life by positing that life does not begin until the development of the reproductive organs. A rather far-fetched and minority view, I suspect (one I certainly didn't anticipate on account of its patent absurdity, but if Mary was attempting to take a surprise route, she at least succeeded in that); the more common angle is probably that of Tony and ARU. To summarize my refutation of her charge: She herself claimed that cell division is a form of reproduction, and since the zygote fulfills this, it has reproductive capacity, thereby refuting her objection without any necessary input from me, save to point this out. She also said that even the gametes individually exhibit the defining characteristics of life. She is simply reluctant to recognize the obvious: the zygote, then, is alive, seeing as how biological function does not cease in fertilization but rather has a continuum. Her error here was in supposing that a pro-lifer would regard the living gametes as non-living in order to avoid some unspecified problem, whereas this is a mistaken assumption. Twinning is regarded by some as a form of asexual reproduction. While reproduction is certainly a common characteristic of life, it's not the sort of criterion that ought to be used to disqualify something from being categorized as life: Reproduction is a poor litmus test for life, seeing as how sterile individuals are clearly alive. Existent reproductive organs are a poor litmus test for life, seeing as how castrated males are clearly alive. Reproductive organs at some point in the past are a poor litmus test for life, seeing as how one could easily conceive of a child whose development failed to include the initiation of reproductive organ development but was normal in most other ways. Would this child be alive? Of course, despite the lack of reproductive organs at any point.
Mary's attempt to disqualify a zygote from the category "life" has failed, and given my first principle, the burden is hers. The rightness of the application of terms such as "living", "human" "organism/totipotence", etc., has not been debunked by any means by my opponents in this debate. I have laid out the positive case for the applicability of my third principle in my opening statement. The only thing left to do, then, is for them to attack the validity of the principle itself. One tactic, an attempted reductio ad absurdum, involved applying the principle to other situations and getting unreasonable results. One of these, tried by several of my opponents, I believe, was an application to the individual gametes. In response, I pointed out that my definition of "human" involved somewhere in the area of 46 chromosomes. Gametes, I would be more likely to say, are human-derived cells indistinct from the producing organisms. That leads me into my second response, which was that gametes, like somatic cells, do not meet the qualification of "totipotence"--that is, rather than being a distinct organism, as is a zygote, they are merely products and parts of the bodies of the parent organism. Hence, the destruction of a gamete cannot, under the strictest use of this principle, be ruled immoral. As a result, the absurd conclusion does not follow. The parallel is therefore broken, and the reductio ad absurdum attempt vanishes in a puff of logic. I struggle to recall any further objections along those lines to the principle. The other method used was simply to provide an additional qualification and then to also assert the complementary principle likewise. By this I mean that in the manner in which Tony and ARU were arguing, not only did they add the further qualification of "consciousness" or "personhood", but they furthermore made a statement about what is morally acceptable (whereas my third principle spoke only to what is not morally acceptable). I counterattacked this on several grounds. For one, I challenged the ethical propriety of creating a class of "living human non-persons". I also questioned the meaningfulness of a distinction between non-person and person in terms of morality in the context of the materialistic worldview to which they both adhere. In addition, I highlighted their failure to genuinely make a case for this new principle, which assuredly is in need of defense. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, I assailed the applicability of their own principle to the situation by defending the personhood of the zygote. This I attempted by pointing out that: Personhood is an essential attribute. Essential attributes are altered only by an essential transformation. No essential transformation occurs during pregnancy after fertilization. Personhood is an attribute of both an adult human and a newborn infant human. Therefore, the state of non-personhood can only precede an essential transformation. Given (5) and (3), personhood is an attribute of the zygote. Therefore, a zygote is a person, pace my opponents.
There are, of course, a few possible angles of attack available to them at that point. They may, for example, object to (3). However, the burden would then be on them to highlight where the essential transformation occurs, and I do not believe they could do this. The development of consciousness is not an essential transformation, as consciousness is not an essential attribute. I can also envision my adversaries attempting to dissent from (1). For example, ARU's concept of personhood appears to possibly denote a higher level of consciousness and sentience. As such, he is speaking of a non-essential attribute, as is Tony. However, I have countered that non-essential attributes, particularly those such as expressed biological functions, are quite clearly insufficient for suddenly declaring life-taking to be moral. If personhood and non-personhood rest on a continuum and differ simply by degree, I suspect they must take refuge in utilitarianism, whereby the act is simply reduced to the degree to which the unborn offspring is capable of experiencing sensations of pain. However, I believe that in the course of this debate, I have shown that utilitarianism is an insufficient ethical system. I also have shown that Tony, the most outspoken proponent of utilitarianism 'round these parts, has himself compromised his utilitarianism in such a way that he is unable to recover justification. Thus, given utilitarianism's removal, I see no reason to regard "consciousness" as the sole decisive factor in the matter. I also do not submit to the inevitable and unfounded complaints that personhood is not intrinsic to the possessor of personhood, but is rather at best a secondary attribute. It is, I reassert, essential. Thus, we must regard the zygote as a person, as equally as we would my opponents in this debate. (Yes, they are persons, thus upholding (4).  ) The third principle, then, is both valid and applicable. Therefore, abortion is an immoral act that involves human life. As such, in accordance with the also-undefeated second principle I have laid out, it should be illegal as well. The conclusion is reached: abortion is immoral and should be banned. Now I appeal to the reader. If this is the case, what will you do about it? If you're already pro-life, then you have probably agreed with much of what I've said. You are also inclined to vote accordingly. Abortion has killed millions in the United States alone. Pro-life rhetoric often paints it as a case parallel to the Holocaust for a reason other than the shock value: the death tolls are both unacceptably high. Stop this modern Holocaust. Let no more innocents be taken like this. It is our responsibility to fight this atrocity. If you were pro-choice before but have become shaken in the course of this debate, having seen the light of sweet reason at long last, it's your chance to wash your hands of complicity in bloodguilt and to fight this evil. Join us. If you were pro-choice and remain so, I can't fully fathom why, given the strength of the argumentation contrary to that position, but feel free to contact me by e-mail, messaging system, etc. My contact information is readily available. I'll be happy to address questions. However, even if you remain unconvinced that the pro-life position fully holds up, I expect that after reading through the arguments here presented, the reasonable among you will be acutely aware of why pro-lifers feel so strongly about this issue and are so adamant in our quest to stave off what we perceive as both a new extermination program and a grave threat to a very crucial value: human life. Finally, if you've had an abortion or are reluctantly considering an abortion, but have seen the light and know the wrongness of it, let me tell you that there is someone who has the forgiveness of God to offer. His name is Jesus, and I'd be happy to talk to you about Him, and even introduce you, if you're willing. Finally, as a Christian, if there is any advice I can offer, or any help I can lend within my means, you know how to reach me. When it comes to the call of my faith, especially as regards an honest seeker, I'll not turn a blind ear and a deaf eye. (I may have gotten my sensory organs confused... but you know what I mean.) Peace be upon you all, and communion with God, by whom all else is created and who values each and every human life--including that within the womb. Pax et caritas, JB |
