I'm willing to steelman this thing if yall are down for lots of twitter words
Conversation
Replying to
Uh, "try to give the strongest possible argument for". Opposite of 'strawman.'
2
1
Replying to
OK cool!
So before I start I want to make it clear that I'm pretty sympathetic to the pro-life position, in general. I don't think yall are insane, or women-haters, or against rights. I myself used to protest abortion clinics. I think your viewpoint absolutely makes sense if-
1
1
Replying to
you follow certain assumptions. I don't want to come across as disrespecting your position. I'm going to present my (or a steelman of this) position not as an attack on you, but rather as an example of what happens if you tweak base assumptions that are *also* equally reasonable
2
1
Replying to
So, pro-life often operates on the base of "ending a human life is wrong." This makes sense and is very useful for most things. Ofc we have exceptions - war, self defense. Maybe you're ok with euthanasia? capital punishment? The law isn't absolute. I know there's good reasons
2
Replying to
for the exceptions, but my point here is just that the 'rule' *requires* exceptions in order to function.
Human life is also a kind of weird boundary. Even when I was super pro-life I felt some kind of intuitive stretch when identifying "life at conception" as a human.
2
Replying to
and again - I know you can logically argue this, e.g. "Human is individual living thing with dna and fetuses are different dna from parents". But the first cell union thing isn't recognizeably human to me and I suspect to you either. If hypothetically, deep into the future, we
2
Replying to
ended up with the tech to generate these fertilized egg things at the very basic level, but with no potential to move forward, and we had a ton of them in a building... it feels weird to treat these things as morally equivalent to 'full human life'. We can also blur the idea of
1
Replying to
'human' even further - what if we get the tech to start breeding humans with non-humans? What if we genetically alter DNA until it's not really human anymore? What if there becomes a 'human spectrum'? At what point do they lose their moral right to live?
Replying to
I know these are extremes, but basically my point is that what we're doing when we define 'human' is a bit weird, and gets fuzzy if we start tweaking some boundaries. And I understand why you're defining it in those boundaries, but also please understand why it could be fuzzy.
1
Replying to
So for people who really are plunging into 'what defines human,' then the question starts to lose its meaning or power, and other criteria start to get more interesting. Instead of 'human,' then something like 'ability to suffer' or 'moral reasoning' or whatever.
2
Show replies
Replying to
But hypotheticals have been really important for figuring out philosophy. Tech today has made many situations possible that weren't before; if someone in 1800 dismissed the hypotheticals of future tech to investigate philosophical questions, they'd be missing out.
1
Show replies