Abortion

This is a private forum - in order to make the discussion clean, structured and concise. Feel free to read through.

If you want to post on this forum then ask me for permission to join. Elsewise your post will be reported as distracting.

You are granted free permission to participate - I feel like you are all serious and interested in debating fair and square.

The other forum became messy, unstructured and it got out of hand.

This will be different. I want us to have a clean discussion. 

Rules:

Are you in for it?

First point.

I make a claim: "Adults have moral value - killing adults is morally wrong, regardless of which adult that is"

Everyone might have different reasons for believing so, but we should all do.

Any objections?

I don't accept the claim, provide demonstration.

At least not without more justification.

Thanks for the question.

I will provide justification.

This claim is founded upon ethics. Different ethical systems generally fall into two main categories:

[1]: 

"all men are created equal - and are bestowed by their creator certain unalienable rights" This was written in a country where everyone was at least culturally Christian.

[2]:

P1: Humans value their own well-being

P2: If you desire others to respect your well-being you ought to respect theirs

Con: Therefore you ought to value well-being

[3]:

Point 1 has been justified beyond a reasonable doubt. 

Any other objection?

I don't believe in god and you have yet to justify ones existence

I claimed people believe point 1 because of religion. The point does not require Gods existence, just the belief in it.

Regardless, reason 2 should be enough to prove the claim anyways. I conclude that since reason 2 was not challenged that point 1 has been affirmed.

Any other objections?

I will give time for everyone to comment on point 1 before we proceed. In that way, we can keep the argument structured and avoid repetition based on disagreement later.

Ethics: Principles of deciding what is right or wrong,

Moral law: The rules we construct using ethics, such as "do not kill"

Value: moral worth. If something has value, it is to be considered entitled to moral treatment - for example, adults are entitled to not be killed, they have moral value.

Not really interested in discussing the philosophy of applying moral value to human beings, so I won't object.

I assume point 1 has been accepted. We will assume it to be true until objected against in the future.

In other words, we can say that "if x is a human, x is entitled to human rights"       (at least those that it needs to prosper)

We started without any moral axioms, but now, using the fact we agreed on, I have constructed one:

Later, we will discuss implications and WHO are humans.

Any objections or new input?

humans, scientifically speaking, and humans with moral value are two different things. The latter only has moral value because of subjective axioms built into objective arguments, furthered into pragmatic ethics. Without this no human has value. Fetuses lack this trait and therefore are not worth the same, morally, as people with it.

Let's first get the definition cleared out: Human = member of the species homos sapiens [3]

We are not talking about fetuses at this point - we are talking about humans in general. We are trying to take a step back and look at all humans - and look at how we value them. The debate will become complicated later on for sure. But right now, the question is simple:   how valuable is each human?

There are only two alternatives:

I claimed that a five-year-old is just as valuable as a seven-year-old. Yes, they are different, but they have the same value because both are humans.

You claim different humans have a different value. I would like you to elaborate on why you think so. Also, tell me which category you would put your position into.

[1]: since "are you a human" is a yes or no question

[2]: since "describe yourself" is not a yes or no question

[3]: we can debate the criteria for being a member later on

Neither of those views are true, you have established a false dichotomy

The third view is that there is a single characteristic which establishes this: personhood. Seeing as you never addressed my responses to your "criticisms" I consider this unchallenged. Fetuses simply do not have personhood, therefore they have no moral value, it is that simple.

I never addressed your response because it was not clear what you meant. I will critique it when you explain it to me.

You call my dichotomy false. But it's not, it's basic logic. Either human have equal value or they don't:

I disagree on point one. Say that a man is going to murder billions of people by setting off a nuke. It would be justified to kill him while he is in the process of pressing the countdown of nuclear button from 10 to 1 and killing him is the only way to prevent the nuke. If all men had equal value, then two men still have more value than one, thus allowing killing of people if they would harm others.

Similarly, self defense makes it so that they would not harm even more people, so therefore killing others is just in some situations.

in addition, even if we accept the fetus has the same level of coherent thinking of human, we still have no obligation to protect it. There is the famous violinist analogy where the doctors force you to do a nine month blood transfusion with an unconscious violinist. We are allowed to plug off the life support because we did not consent to this accident and we did not consent to the nine month transfusion. We have no right to force others to protect ourselves. In fact, even if one man could stop a gunner from shooting us, they may justify their inaction using fear and hesitance, thus allowing ourselves to be killed indirectly. 

however, however, you are on the right track. Mister Chris and Wagyu working together would likely come up with an interesting combination of arguments, combining the uncertainty of self defense along with the future value argument. Even though humans have only the future value, it is undeniable that some amount of people get pregnant through the act of sex. Even if we ignore coercion, we are definitively at least killing some actual children who would become people. Many experts and philosophers agree that most people would rather be born in a horrible condition, rather than never be born at all (though there are curious and excellent counter arguments to such). Combined with the lack of proportionality of self defense (as Mr. Chris grants exception for mother's life in danger), this works in tandem to prove that we are denying the millions of actual children who could've been born, the opportunity to choose for themselves, or even be adopted by other families, so that their lives may be improved. That's why abortion is so tricky to argue.

I haven't seen one of Wagyu's argument which was coherent.

At least not in regards to abortion.

it's not 100% sound, not even when combined with Mr. Chris's self defense analysis, however, it has some interesting considerations, namely that even euthanizing a man in a coma who has only 20% chance of waking up, is immoral. Even if the man was in a coma for his entire life, this alone cannot justify killing him. The woman's liberty is an important role in Abortion and why I consider pro side greatly winning if argued well. 

You did not really disagree with point one. You just said that more humans have more value combined - which is an obvious conclusion from point one.

There is a difference between refusing to save a life and intentionally kill another human being. 

I agree. Killing an unconscious adult is definitely immoral because he will lose future "well-being". But that statement is also a natural conclusion of point 2.

I invite you to participate in this debate.

But please wait for the appropriate time before posting, and stick to each point. We are not in a hurry to write every idea at once, we have a structure making it easy to discuss.

Here is how far we have come already:

Point one - Killing adults is immoral

Point two - there are two alternatives:

My claim is that since age is arbitrary on the scale of society, all humans have equal value.

Any objections? Only object if you think that all humans have a different value. We will discuss WHO are humans later, so no need to bring up fetuses yet.

I object to the usage of the term “human” in this context, and would prefer that it be exchanged for “person”.

 I see no problem with using the word "human" in this context. 

Please elaborate on why you think we should change the wording, and please define the word "person".

I think that, if we apply the term “human”, then we are going based on simple taxonomy: we fit a certain set of traits that make up a Homo sapien, ergo we meet what is human. It’s a purely scientific determination. If we want to bring philosophical issues of what makes a human beyond the scope of purely physical traits, then person allows for that widening of scope, since it is not a taxonomic term, but rather also recognition of how we are (or should be) perceived by society as a whole. It also recognizes the difference between an individual and a collective, whereas I believe that the usage of the term “human” could refer to any subset of life from individual skin cells up to individual persons.

I disagree.

P1: All adults are equally valuable (as established in point 1)

P2: The only trait all adults share is being 100% human (all other traits are variable or subjective)

C: If we are to assign moral value to any characteristic, it must be "humanity"

Being a human is a yes or no question that can be answered by biology concisely and coherently for everyone - once defined. Being a person is not clear-cut enough to decide who is entitled to being valuable. Who is a person? This is not a yes or no question - since different degrees of personality obviously exist, even between adults. Saying all persons literally translates into: "all humans, except those not regarded as individuals"[1]. But we could just as easily debate who is a human as which humans are persons.  I see no reason to move moral value from a clear, consistent, and scientific definition onto a word that is vague, variable, and partly subjective.

I insist that we stick to the current definition. I still hold that option 1 is the correct one: all humans are equally valuable. 

Instead of trying to figure out which humans are persons, we can get the exact same result by trying to figure out who are humans.