[ADMIN - abortions can be done after 12 weeks of pregnancy.]

Thanks for replying, I’ve been away at Hearts Aflame (woot woot!)

I think it might be getting tedious now but I don’t want to let that reply go without pointing out a few things. I may as well point out the unimportant things too and then a more important thing.

“I would also point out that those moles or cancers are not human individuals and thus could not have the potential for rational thought.”

Well actually, they are individuals. And so what kind of biological stuff are they made up of? feline? bovine? (there is of course a very strong association of words at play here). Anyway it was my point that they are not human beings. But they were once zygotes and they may have had – and at least some certainly had – the potential to become human beings even though it didn’t eventuate.

There’s something that isn’t all that clear to me in your last two replies.

Your argument was:

1st premiss: a zygote is a human individual (an individual that is human rather than say bovine)

2nd premiss: All individuals that are human rather than say bovine have the same rights as all other indiduals that are human.

How is science relevant to this argument?

I can’t see how it is relevant to the second premiss. (In fact it’s not true as it is: a shapeless mole or cancer is a counterexample)

Science can be relevant to moral positions. In the dark ages they had a faulty physiology and I think as a result classed some contraceptive acts as abortive acts (or the other way around – I can’t remember). Technical scientific discoveries spill over into common knowledge and now everyone nows the true nature of the acts and so their morality has changed (they line up with practical rationality in a slightly different way)

1st premiss: I suppose logically an unborn baby could have turned out to be a piece of coal for three months. But we’ve always known it was human rather than bovine organic matter. I think the same goes for it being an individual. This technical stuff about genetic code and whatnot doesn’t really add anything. In fact: if we hadn’t discovered the double-helix would we have thought that perhaps it wasn’t an individual but …… but what?

Not exactly cutting edge state of the art science backing up the first premiss. (I just tend to get a funny impression when genetic codes or structures are brought up.)

Anyway something more important: you say that the only time – for the baby to gain rights – that is objective and not subjective is conception. There is something in what you say – I can’t actually see how to express it – but as it is, this is incredibly weak.

The timing of the change from day time to night time is definitely objective. Because it is indeterminate – i.e. there is no exact point when it changes from day time and becomes night time – this doesn’t make the timing of the change subjective rather than objective.

(But pro-abortionists must think of it as partly subjective to justify killing whatg is clearly a human being.)

Man…. I’m not trying to make the debate seem mysterious and I’m definitely not meaning to sow any seeds of doubt.

This was my point: “….. but do it with humility …..”

I think with regard to potentialities, thought, I had in mind the biological fact that they are humans, produced by humans, who at the moment of conception had the potential for their genetic code to produce a properly ordered human individual.
It’s not something I’ve thought about at length, though, to be honest.

I would also point out that those moles or cancers are not human individuals and thus could not have the potential for rational thought.

I became pro-life, unlike Mr Dunne, because I actually tried to answer the question of when somebody gets rights. The thing is, in order to have any kind of intellectual integrity or objectivity at all, we’ve no option but to choose the only time that is not subjective – the beginning of one’s life. That is, their conception.

Thanks for your reply, I feel I may have been unnecessarily combative.

I strongly disagree that Peter Dunne shows mental acuity haha

Man… forget all this stuff about philosophical evidence/expertise

I’m not sure how his stupid first quote about private and public morality is linked to the second quote but in the second one he seems to me to be trying to say that it is indeterminate when an unborn baby gets rights. (like it is indeterminate when it becomes night time; the first three months of a pregnancy are day time [he claims]).

You can’t demand that someone support every one of their assertions. Basically, an argument has premisses which support a conclusion and there would be an infinite regress if there weren’t any unargued-for premisses.

You could perhaps use Peter Dunne’s assertion together with other premisses he would perhaps agree with and derive an unacceptable conclusion. Or maybe just have premisses he would likely agree with and derive a conclusion contradicting his assertion. Or use an inductive argument. But it’s no good just saying that his assertion is irrational; we need to show that it is. And especially we shouldn’t just say that technical disciplines are on our side. (in my humble opinion they have very little to contribute).

Your argument is:
1st premiss: A zygote is a human individual.
2nd premiss: All human individuals have the same rights.
Conclusion: A zygote has the same rights as any other human individual.

The first premiss is undeniable: it is human rather than say feline or bovine but then so is my arm. But unlike my arm it is a separate living thing. Your second is the more vulnerable of the two. (when people deny the first they are really trying to say something else).

You are right of course that young children and the mentally handicapped are rational in the sense of rational animal or rational soul, but your reason – potential for rational thought – almost but doesn’t quite hit the mark. A person may be so severely handicapped that there is no longer any potential for rational thought.

(Also, I would argue, zygotes that turn into shapeless moles or cancers that no-one would scruple to remove were never rational although they once had the potential to be. Identical twinning (which may after all turn out to be able to be artificially produced from any zygote) and other considerations I think show that – as strange as it may seem – there are human individuals that are not rational.)

Thanks for the reply. To begin, I didn’t call him incoherent. It’s not that he spurted some badly organised random selection of words: rather, although he sometimes asks the correct questions and indeed shows some mental acuity in doing so, his final position is made up entirely apart from the answers to those questions. He asks the questions as if they are unanswerable conundrums – but they are answerable. In reality the answers just seem to require too much effort or risk of alienation.

Evidence does not equal expertise. I’ve no expertise in a number of fields, though evidence for my beliefs I can provide.
Also, any philosophical evidence we bring up is largely based, these days, on the scientific evidence. For example, we know that a zygote has its own genetic structure, making it filled with the potentialities of every human, and an individual apart from its mother.
From these we can make the argument that since is it an individual, it should, to be consistent, have the same rights as any other human individual.

That level of rational thought, it seems to me, is what is lacking in Peter Dunne’s final position. It’s just connecting the dots, really.

Also with ‘rational animal’, I hope that refers to the potential, barring some major disorder or accident, for rational thought, since otherwise it seems to exclude the mentally handicapped or young children.

Abortion on demand caters to those who believe that men can inevitably enjoy sexual pleasure without responsibility or commitment, and denying that same pleasure to women is fundamentally unfair. Extending an evil from one to both genders does not make for a better world. The way forward here is not terminating pregnancies, but a relentless emphasis on the dignity of women and their reproductive capacity.

Last century, so-called feminists gave us abortion on demand. This century, real feminists will end it.