The Pro-Choice Abuse of Logic
It’s the claim that the opponent argues illogically when he hasn’t that’s the sneaky thing. People on all sides of every contentious issue do this, but the pro-choice movement seems—and I’ll admit I may be biased here—particularly keen on this way of trying to win an argument without arguing it.
Here’s an example. In an article titled “The Injustice of Destroying Embryonic Human Beings” (https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/the-injustice-of-destroying-embryonic-human-beings/19145), the English bioethicist David Albert Jones points out that destroying a human embryo “is destroying a human being at the first stage of his or her life. I was once a baby and had you killed that baby you would have killed me and I would not have been here today.”
He argues that “there is at least a prima facie case for holding that a human embryo is an embryonic human being. If so, then destroying a human embryo is ending the life of a human being.” He doesn’t make the prima facie case in the article, but I assume it would run like this, only he would put it the philosopher’s language: That embryo turns into a fetus who turns into a born baby who grows up into a man or woman. It’s always the same thing, just in different stages. If the grown man is a human being, as we all agree he is, the embryo is a human being, because it’s him.
Rather Astonishing Nonsense (Supposedly)
But no, one of his commenters declares. His very long comment opens with “Rather astonishing nonsense, however philosophical (or theological) it may pretend to be.” Not just wrong, but nonsense, and only pretend philosophy. Okay. The swords are out.
The man then argues that
[t]he transition from “embryonic human being” to “human being” simpliciter, is, to say the least, a logical jump which has not been justified. The seed of an oak tree (an acorn) is an oak tree in embryo, but it is not an oak tree. Thus nothing logically commits us to calling a human embryo a human being. An embryonic something is not equivalent to the something of which it is an embryonic instantiation, and there is no obvious argument which will take us there.
He argues this only by analogy. An acorn is not an oak tree, not exactly, but if planted, it won’t produce a pine or a maple or a duck. It’ll produce an oak tree. The question is whether that makes the acorn an oak simpliciter. (Simpliciter is a legal term meaning in a simple way and without qualifications.) I would say it does, he would say it doesn’t.
That’s not a logical disagreement. He claims it is, but it’s not. He declares victory by declaring Jones illogical: “Thus nothing logically commits us to calling a human embryo a human being.” We don’t disagree about the logic of the argument. We disagree about a fact. What logic commits us to depends on what we believe.
In another comment he says: “I see no reason for holding that it is a human being, as such, though undoubtedly a developmental stage in what could in time become a human being.” That he doesn’t see it doesn’t make it illogical or a logical jump. He may be blind, as I think he is.
His Real Commitments
Image Courtesy https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46982949%5B/caption%5D
He goes on to make more substantial arguments, but they don’t work any better. In them he reveals his real commitments, though he keeps insisting he’s merely being logical. He’s a pro-choice ideologue.
For example, he argues that the embryo isn’t a human being because many embryos are lost to miscarriages and abortions. He treats his conclusion as obvious, as logical, but it doesn’t follow from the fact that a creature has his life ended before his birth. This man himself wouldn’t say that the 22-year-old who dies in a car accident wasn’t a human being because he didn’t live as long as the actuarial tables predicted. We need some other criterion for being a human being than avoiding premature death.
The question always comes back to what is that creature in the womb at any stage from blastocyst to fetus, but that’s the question these specious appeals to logic are intended to avoid. The pro-life Jones is supposedly writing nonsense and failing in logic. His commenter, in a classic pro-choice way, tries to rule out his argument before it can be made.
It turns out, as it always does, that the man who tries to win the argument by claiming that Jones writes illogically, imports into his supposedly objective claims some dubious beliefs. If he had been aborted, he says, “I would never have developed into a human being whose life mattered (to me).” Murder is only murder because it takes a person’s “life in terms of having values and goals.” He concludes:
To point at a photograph of an embryo and say, “This was you before you were born,” only has a reference because there is a “you” there of which this is now true. The embryo is not sufficiently developed—is not yet a human being—to whom the reference “you” is applicable.
So to be a human being you have to have unique characteristics, and be conscious of them, and think your life matters. You have to be “sufficiently developed.” Jones and I would deny this, and offer a different definition of human being. Our conclusions about the right of the unborn to live would follow quite logically from that definition.
I suspect the popularity among pro-choicers of this claim that the pro-lifers fail in logic comes from a simple fact: They don’t want people thinking about that creature in the womb. That’s when their argument is weakest, because the commonsense answer most people give is that that creature is a human being. The embryonic me was the same creature as the me watching the Giants beat the Cowboys. Some portion of those will then insist that he has the right to live. You can’t kill me, don’t kill the embryonic me.
How much easier for the pro-choicer not to argue but simply to declare that we’re talking nonsense and making claims with no logical value. Anything to keep people from looking at the unborn and seeing a child.
David,
A acorn is an oak tree. It as a stage of development in the life of an oak tree, but it is an oak tree. It is not as useful to us in this stage of development, but without the acorn you can’t build the ship.
If by “tree” one means “a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground,” then a seed or acorn which lacks a “permanently woody main stem or trunk” is by that definition not a tree, even if it has the potential to develop into a tree. Likewise, if by “human” and “human being” one means “a member of the species Homo sapiens,” and if by “species” one means “the major subdivision of a genus or subgenus, composed of related individuals that resemble one another and ARE ABLE TO BREED AMONG THEMSELVES, etc.” then unless embryos “are able to breed” with human beings, no embryo is human. Alternatively, if we use the term “human embryo” similarly to how we use the term “human fingernail”, that also does not necessitate that any embryo or fingernail is a human being. Even if we choose to include so-called “human embryos” within the definition of “human being,” there would still be significant differences between “human embryos” and other human beings, and accordingly, reasons for treating them differently.
@sacajawea You misapply “able to breed among themselves.” Yes, that is a general definition of a species (mules aside), but (a) you aren’t arguing that fetuses are a different species than human and (b) you are confusing the innate ability to do something with the actual ability to do it, e.g. you would not say that a man is not human because he is impotent nor that a child is not human because they haven’t reached puberty yet nor that a woman is no longer human after menopause. Ergo, your argument is illogical. You do not accept that killing those other humans is permissible (I presume), why would you accept the killing of a fetus?
Michael, I applied the provided definition as written. Apparently you did not: you inserted the word “innate” along with your personal opinion/belief/view as to what is innate. For example, if by “innate” one means “existing in one from birth”, that does not itself define anything whatsoever to be innate to the unborn. In response to your presumption that I “do not accept that killing [impotent, pre-pubertal or post-menopausal] humans is permissible”, I note that you phrased your question with a presumption that the killed are “humans” (whatever that is). Nevertheless, I’ve been told that the killing of an impotent, pre-pubertal or post-menopausal human is “permissible” under a variety of circumstances (e.g. necessary for self-defense, foreseeable but unintended collateral loss for a greater cause, etc). I may also “accept” (i.e. “recognize as true”) anything that is true, otherwise regardless of circumstances. One might even open a “Bible” and read that “everything is permissible” and “Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock”. Indeed, I’ve been told that everything that happens, including physical and moral evil (whatever that is), is “permissible” because God himself “permits” (i.e. “allows”) it to happen (“because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it”).
It’s easier than this, though: “The seed of an oak tree (an acorn) is an oak tree in embryo, but it is not an oak tree.”
He’s right that an acorn is not an oak tree, just as a human egg is not a human being. He’s wrong that an acorn is an embryonic oak tree. A fertilized and sprouting acorn is equivalent to an embryo.
I would say an acorn is an oak. The acorn, sprout, sapling and tree are all stages of development of the oak. When we refer generically to members of a genus of a living thing, we typically refer to the adult members of that genus.
@Sacajawea you say:
“and ARE ABLE TO BREED AMONG THEMSELVES, etc.” then unless embryos “are able to breed” with human beings, no embryo is human.”
What an odd argument. By definition human must be able to breed at this moment in time? Well that rules out infants, children, post-menopausal women, and in fact every woman except 2-5 days a month.
If you would argue that all these people are capable of breeding at some point in their life, then the human embryo is back in play.
Your gambit makes absolutely no sense. And we haven’t even covered the permanently infertile.
Nothing categorically separates the fetus from some other point in human life that is commonly agreed human with the singular exception of its physical location.
A human being, when limiting oneself to the material, comes into existence at conception, and ceases to be alive at death. This is settled science. That this is so, is why pro-choice arguments always contain metaphysical criteria, illogically applied (and especially so when the person making the argument is a materialist).
The problem with all of these pro-choice arguments is that they, at some point or another, invoke an ad hoc argument to attempt to bridge the gap between the purely material, and the metaphysical (The old “these material attributes, at this degree of capability and functioning, make a human being a person because I say so” argument).
The confusion lies in the hitherto unnecessary discrimination between “human being” and “person” (other than the legal domain, where the legal concept of personhood has been extended, as a kind of legal analogy, to groups of persons).
The author points out a very important area of discourse: the philosophy of identity. What makes “you, you”, and how do you retain your identity across the material changes of your body?
The most coherent argument of either side of this involves the concepts of potential (natural capacity) and telos. Francis J. Beckworth does an admirable job of laying out this argument in detail (what he refers to as the “substance argument”) in his book “Taking Rites Seriously”, chapter 5.2.
The most telling point is made by his thought experiment involving uncle Jed, in chapter 5.2A. This argument will be confusing to a materialist, however, as the term “substance” must not be confused with “material substance.”
His points about degreed capability, however, eviscerates every pro-choice argument I have seen advanced to date.
John Stevens, you are the most logical person in the room. Thank you for sharing.
Jonathan, it’s not my gambit or argument. Rather, it’s an argument that consequentially flows from the cited definition found in the public dictionary. As to your belief that “Nothing categorically separates the fetus from some other point in human life that is commonly agreed human with the singular exception of its physical location,” that would depend upon the arbitrary choices involved. Just as words can be defined however way anyone wants, so too can categories be defined however anyone wants to set them up. For example, “are capable” is written in the present tense, and thus does not accommodate future capability. My 7-year old daughter is not capable of throwing a football 50 feet. Perhaps when she is older she might then be capable, but not today.
John Stevens, science is never “settled” in the true sense. It is a continuous process for producing knowledge that can always be challenged. Science does not hold that “A human being, when limiting oneself to the material, comes into existence at conception, and ceases to be alive at death.” For example, there are scientists who are working on creating human life without requirement of “conception”. Scientists also do not agree on what constitutes “death”. Likewise, the phrase “human being” has no intrinsic meaning and scientists have no special authority as to what is or is not a “human being”.
In this post you actually make the case for the opposite point of view; that is, towards the preservation of unborn life.
The fact is that moral truths can never be determined solely according to empirical criteria, a proposition with which you appear to agree.
Moreover, by citing research activities of highly questionable morality, you actually seem to be making the claim that no moral considerations need be made at all. Is there no moral limit to what man should do in his laboratory?
The fact is that the answers for right and wrong conduct belong to different disciplines than the empirical sciences.
David, I generally consider claims of “fact”, “truth”, “morality”, “never”, “need”, “should”, “answers”, “right”, “wrong”, “agree”, etc to be “highly questionable”, regardless of whether the claims are made in the empirical sciences or in any other so-called “discipline”. As an example, unless you and I both know beyond question how the other understands the term “moral truths” (and the other words too), then who is to say whether we agree or disagree with your proposition that “moral truths can never be determined solely according to empirical criteria”? I doubt that I’ve met two people who had identical understandings of anything. I question even whether your own understanding of anything is consistent from one moment to the next.
Those arguments if applied further would seem to suggest that a born human that does not meet some criteria for achieved potential would also lack inalienable rights… I seem to recall similar justifications used for legalized slavery.
Francis Beckwith has a formulation that very concisely states this point, which is that from the moment of conception, the new human individual is identical with himself at every subsequent stage of life; however one may measure it.
This formulation appears in “Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice”; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
I find it compelling as it dispenses with the artificial gradations (such as sentience, sensitivity to pain, and the like) that abortion advocates invoke in their attempts to justify the violent destruction of preborn human beings. Regardless of what weight one may attach to these ostensibly objective criteria, the fact is that as prenatal and neonatal science advances their relevance is subject not only to change but even elimination as an apparently valid criterion.
Consequently, the case should be made that under uncertainty, which any objective observer must recognize prevails both now and for the foreseeable future, the benefit of the doubt must go to the preservation of human life rather than its deliberate destruction.
In spite of serious erosion in our social consciousness over the past 50+ years, it remains true that the best measure of a society’s moral health is its treatment of its weakest members. In the fate of the preborn and the advanced in age, we can rightly perceive our moral rectitude or sadly, our descent on our current trajectory towards moral degeneracy.
My favorite pro death argument here is that one must matter to oneself to be considered worthy of even being considered alive. So a scenario where the author of that tidbit goes on to slip on some ice, and renders himself unconscious would thus mean the group of strangers surrounding him would then get to decide whether or not his life meant anything to them. If not, they could decide to kill him. It is the same with abortion. Because the baby cannot even fathom, at that moment, that a group of people are trying to kill him then it’s okay. It is not okay in either analogous scenario.
I’ve heard that argument a lot. “It’s not a human being.” So what is it? I usually ask them. “A cat? A dog? Its DNA is human, therefore, the embryo is human. Then they go into all this rhetoric about its not being a “person” yet. The scary part is that we’re seeing that same baloney now being used in support of euthanasia: “The terminally ill patient isn’t a ‘person’ anymore.” This utilitarian approach is really a slippery slope. Where does it end? I know people who will not go to a hospital because they’re afraid of being euthanized without their consent…and it’s all too real a possibility.
The more we focus on embryos, the less we focus on the fact that pro-choicers support nine month abortion, and that prenatal homicide is legal until birth, for any reason, in every state.
I am a pro-compromiser anti-abortionist, not a pro-lifer, meaning that I oppose second and third trimester baby killings and have nothing to say about first trimester abortions or rape and incest. I say avoid the acorn mess and force the nine month evildoers to address their own fanaticism. I wrote an article in the Review in Winter 2015 that addresses more of this.
Q: Does life begin at conception?
A: Abortion is legal through all nine months – do you support that?