Steelman? What does that mean?
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Uh, "try to give the strongest possible argument for". Opposite of 'strawman.'
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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-
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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'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?
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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.
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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.
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and I'm absolutely not saying those criteria are perfect (check my recent poll pointing out the contradictions with all these), but they're at least *reasonable*, in the same way I consider pro-life ideas to be reasonable. This is why some people go vegetarian.
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