Abortion, then, involves the killing of a human being. But that abortion involves the deliberate killing of a human being is no reason for abortion to be illegal. Nor should one be morally troubled by it.
This is one of the less troubling citations from the article by a philosophy prof at Saint Mary’s. People with disabilities, watch out. Calling on Stephanie Gray to have a sit down with this man (she’s rather good on how/why/when we are all human).
It would take a great deal more philosophising for me to be untroubled by killing a human being, just by the by. Even if I were well-versed in what would make me totally happy and independent, and understanding that a human being is not a person.
_________________________
Brigitte would like to highlight some other troubling bits from that piece: Specifically…
A human fetus, on the other hand, though human, has only a rudimentary awareness of its environment and lacks self consciousness entirely. It has no interest in living, for it can have no interests at all.
Because a fetus is not a person, killing a fetus is not killing a person. That established, now comes the time to speak of a woman’s right to choose. A pregnant woman is a person, and because easy access to abortion helps her to live her life as she wishes, we as a society should make sure abortion is easily available to women generally.
Now it is true that each human fetus is potentially a person, in that, most likely, in the fullness of time, any particular fetus will become a person. But this is an argument against abortion only if it is better to have that particular future person walking around than it is to respect a here-and-now person’s autonomy.
The overall point is that abortion is not in any degree a morally fraught option. A woman considering whether to have an abortion or, instead, to raise a child is making a practical decision, not a moral one. This is what we who are pro-choice have to make more widely known.








caveat: I am not a philosophy “prof”
(part 1/3)
The easiest way to refute these a posteriori “philosophical” defenses of abortion is often the good old reductio ad absurdum. So let’s try one…
The main crux of our authors argument seems to be in this passage: To kill a reader of this newspaper would be to kill a creature richly aware of its environment and full of beliefs and desires, including the desire to continue living. To kill him or her would be to kill a self-conscious creature. Thus, to kill a reader of this paper would be to destroy a self-aware locus of experience, one, moreover, that prefers not to die.
That is why only extremely strong, ethically sound reasons could justify killing a reader of this paper. Absent such reasons, we’re enjoined to let her live.
A human fetus, on the other hand, though human, has only a rudimentary awareness of its environment and lacks self consciousness entirely. It has no interest in living, for it can have no interests at all.
Note the implicit argument here:
(1) A human person is (a) a human being that (b) is aware of its environment and (c) self-aware
(2) A fetus is not aware of its environment nor is it self aware
(3) Therefore a fetus is not a human person
(4) It is almost always wrong to kill (a) a human person who (b) has the desire (or interest) to live.
(5) Therefore it is not wrong to kill a fetus.
Note that this is not technically a valid argument, since (4) does not necessarily imply that it is not wrong to kill something that is not a human person who has a desire to live. But we must assume that this is what our author meant, even if he didn’t express himself exactly, and we will assume (4): “It is never wrong to kill something if it is not (a) a human person with (b) the desire to live.” This makes the argument “If((3)&(4)); then(5)” valid.
To this he adds the clarification:
(6) Further, the fetus has no desire to live (because it has no desires)
(7) Therefore, even if it were a human person, it would still not be wrong to kill the fetus, from (4b).
Now, assuming the correction to (4) above, the argument is valid (meaning that its conclusions logically follow from its premises) but it is not sound (meaning that one or more premises is false). We do not disagree with premise (2), so in order to show the argument to be unsound, we must show that (1) or (4) are false. Further, if we disprove only (1) we must also disprove (6). This will be the easiest way to refuting the argument, because (4) is so hotly debated as it is. For space’s sake, I will continue in another comment.
cont. from above (2/3):
Keep in mind that our main goal is to disprove conclusion (5) by refuting premises (1) and (6).
In order to refute premise (1), we will show part (b) to be false by reductio ad absurdum.
(1) Assume that a human person must be (a) human being that (b) is aware of its environment and is (c) self-aware
(8) A human who is asleep is NOT (a) aware of its environment NOR (b) self-aware
(9) Therefore, a sleeping human is NOT a human person.
(10) BUT (9) is absurd.
(11) Therefore, given (8), (1) must be false.
Obviously the strength of this argument rests on the implied claim that a sleeping human IS indeed a person (ie. that (9) is absurd), but I sincerely doubt that our author would dispute this claim. Therefore his philosophical anthropology is deficient. Note that the move from (2), which is given, to (3) relies on (1). Therefore (3) is false and therefore (5) is also false. QED.
In order to refute premise (6), a distinction needs to be made between expressed interest (or even conscious interest) and unexpressed (or unconscious) interest. That is simply to say that if something does not express an interest or a desire or is not conscious of the interest or desire , it does not follow that it does not have the desire. So if I am hungry, I needn’t say anything about it to anyone, but I am still hungry. Further, if I am distracted by my work and do not realize that my body needs food, nonetheless I still have the desire for food, though I am not immediately conscious of it. Once I take a break for a minute, I will realize that my stomach hurts and that I haven’t eaten in 8 hours and that my body must be in need of food. Now, in the strictly biological sense the body has no needs that cannot be reduced to the desire to perpetuate itself or to produce offspring. These are the two fundamental biological desires. In some animals, the former is even subjugated to the latter. Therefore any other biological desires (besides perhaps the desire to reproduce) must indicate a more fundamental desire to live.
So unless our author means conscious or expressed desire to live, which seems ridiculous, then it is clear that a fetus, showing clear biological desires such as the ability to assimilate nourishment into its body and to fight disease, therefore displays an unquestionable desire to live.
cont. from above (3/3):
So therefore, since premise (1) is false, premise (3) must be false. If premise (3) is false, premise (5) must be false. Even if premise (3) is false, according to the clarification, (6) and (4b) still yields (5). However, (6) too has been shown to be false. Therefore, (5) is false.
Note through this whole refutation, we have not yet established that it is wrong to kill a fetus, just that it is not necessarily ok. In order to prove the stronger claim, ie. that abortion is wrong, we will need to substitute a proper philosophical anthropology, which can stand up to the rigorous demands of our experience. To understand this, let us examine the argument against abortion:
(1) It is always and everywhere wrong to kill a human person
(2) A fetus is a human person
(3) It is always and everywhere wrong to kill a fetus
…
(4) At least some things which are always and everywhere wrong should be illegal
(5) It is possible that abortion should be illegal
Note that the legality of abortion is separate from its actually being right or wrong. Our author has disputed claim (2) (and to some extent claim (1)), but we have shown his disputes (to (2)) to be inadequate. Nonetheless, in order to assert (3) we must still show that claim (2) is indisputable. I would argue that anything that has (a) human parents (ie. complete human DNA) and (b) intrinsic unity and (c) biological directed-ness is a human person. This means basically that anything human which is not decaying and not simply reproducing cells out of control (ie. a cancerous tumor) is a human person. If this is indeed the case, then neither the sperm nor the ovum are, in themselves, human persons (although they are, in a sense, “human” in that they’re human sperm and ovum, not duck sperm and ovum, etc.). But, a zygote, embryo, fetus, child, adolescent, adult, and senior citizen on a ventilator are all human persons and therefore must not be killed.
Way to go billy d! What a great, well-written response!
Also a quick ditty in defense of philosophy: Socrates’ interlocutors were called the “sophists” and they loved to use rhetoric to bend people’s opinions in their favor. But Socrates was only concerned about the truth, and that’s why he’s called a lover of wisdom: philo sophia in Greek. Therefore the proper use of philosophy is not to do mental gymnastics until you can sleep at night with your political beliefs (not that that’s necessarily what our author is doing).
In the same vein, Thomas Aquinas said that “the study of philosophy is not to know what men have felt, but to know the truth of things.” Ironic that I quote another in order to assert this claim, but that’s just the point: philosophy is neither the wholehearted subjection to others’ fancy words (Sophists) nor the wholesale rejection of everything that has come before us (Descartes), rather, it is the search for the truth.
So be not afraid to philosophize! Because the unexamined life is not worth living. But when you do examine your life and find it wanting, be humble before the Truth and change your ways accordingly.
What’s the problem? The argument makes perfect sense to me. An organism may be human genetically, but that doesn’t mean it should be considered human or human-equvilent for moral purposes. All the attributes that make humans worthy of legal protection are absent in the fetus.
Still trying to figure out Billy’s response. It’s complicated!
If the fetus does not meet your standards for human personhood (i.e. for the moral claim to human rights), then what are those standards? Our author has posited the standards of self-awareness and awareness of the environment, but these have been shown to be deficient.
In other words, since (I assume) you believe it would be immoral to willfully kill an innocent human adult, but not to willfully fill an innocent human fetus, then at what point does the human organism acquire the moral claim to not be killed? What characterizes a human with human rights?
*willfully fill = willfully kill
Prof. Mercer’s argument is not new. It was used in the 1850s by the U.S. supreme court in the Dred Scott case. They ruled that Scott’s constitutional right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was not violated because he had no such right. That right only applied to people and slaves were not people, they were just property. The decision was rendered moot by the outcome of the American Civil War, an event which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives.
In the twentieth century the idea was revived by a decorated German World War I veteran who arbitrarily declared whole ethnic groups to be “unter-mensch” and thus rationalized exterminating them. It cost tens of millions of lives to stop the idea that time.
Mr. Mercer is now carrying this great philosophical tradition forward into the twenty-first century. Let’s hope stopping him doesn’t turn out to be as expensive this time round.
I would like to point out that, in fact of law, unborn human beings are not legal persons. Neither were WOMEN until the 1920s, and they had to appeal all the way up to the British Court of Appeal, because the Supreme Court of Canada wouldn’t agree that women could be persons.
It seems strange that women, who were denied personhood until only very recently, are so quick to deny the same personhood to our offspring.
While I don’t disagree with either Ed or Melissa, I think it’s important to realize that the question here is at least a little bit different. It belittles the opposition to simply equate their position with that of slave-owners or Nazis, although it may be analogous. However, since people like Prof. Mercer at least pretend to be interested in logical, measured discussion about this issue, I think we owe it to them to engage them seriously on this issue. I am quite sure that the fully pro-life position is the only possible position on abortion that can be logically sound and internally consistent, and therefore these more emotionally based arguments (while not necessarily wrong) at the very least encourage the irrational emotionalism that ends in shouting. If our position is what we say it is, then we shouldn’t need recourse to emotionally charged arguments, despite the fact that this is certainly an emotionally charged issue.
Wow, thanks, Billy. I never thought of it that way.
If the pro-abortion side insists on using the arguments used by slave-owners and Nazis, they should not be surprised at the comparison. This is not emotionalism it is just common sense.
If you are looking for irrational emotionalism how about the people who claim they are not pro-abortion, they are simply pro “choice” on the issue. That would be like the NRA in the U.S. claiming they are not pro gun ownership, they are pro-choice on the issue. If you believe something should be legal and anyone who wants to should be able to do it, you are”pro” it. You can’t hide behind a “motherhod” label like “freedom of choice”.
While I enjoyed Billy D.’s argument based on the rules of deductive logic, I suspect he has never actually talked to a pro-abortionist. You haven’t lived until you have been told something like “I accept the logic of your arguments, but abortion isn’t a logical issue, it’s an emotional one; it has to be decided on the basis of emotion not logic.”
Still, I would encourage Billy to put his argument out there in the general media, not just on a friendly web-site like this one. At the very least it would force the other side onto the defensive.