All Episodes
Previous Next
May 28, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
16:19
Face The Mob | Abortion Is Worse Than Slavery

Join us for a heated digital debate with Michael against the leftist mob. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Thank you to everyone for joining, especially to the people who disagree with me.
Much as I love flame wars on Twitter, it is usually not possible to resolve complex moral issues in 288 characters.
So I figured it would be better to put the memes and the insults and the one-liners aside and face the people in the replies, mano a mano.
The other day, I said inventing a constitutional right to abortion is the single worst thing America has ever done.
Someone angrily replied, asking if I didn't think that perhaps slavery was worse.
I said that abortion is much worse than slavery.
Slavery deprives people of liberty.
Abortion robs them of life.
Our nation is predicated on the idea that our Creator endows us with certain natural rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But these rights are not equal.
Rather, they depend upon one another.
We cannot pursue happiness unless we have liberty.
We cannot have liberty unless we have life.
If life and liberty come into conflict, it is incoherent to choose liberty, or a pale perversion of liberty as we see in the case of abortion, over life since liberty cannot exist without life.
So it seems pretty clear to me that abortion is much worse than slavery.
Which I tweeted, and then all hell broke loose.
So thousands of responses later, memes, insults, even death threats, I figured I would invite anyone who was interested on to show me the lie.
So thanks for coming on.
What did I say that was wrong?
Hey, Michael.
Hello, how you doing?
Doing good, doing good.
How do you see both of them?
How can you make a comparison to both?
One would be a child in the womb that we should protect, but the other one is the inferiority of another human being.
So I'm not suggesting that slavery is good, or that, you know, we can only pick one of these things to protect babies in the womb or to not enslave people.
But I am making the claim that abortion is the worst thing that we've ever done.
And we can compare things, even things that are a little bit different.
I can compare different kinds of laws.
I can compare different kinds of crimes.
And that's what we're doing here when it comes to abortion and when it comes to slavery.
So I can compare vandalism and rape, both bad things.
But rape is worse than vandalism.
And rape is treated more seriously by the law than vandalism is.
And rape should be more seriously policed and discouraged than vandalism or even some lesser crime than that.
And in the case of abortion, abortion is much worse than slavery.
So are you using a moral side to this?
Are you saying that the intrinsic value of this unborn baby should be more protected or is worse than slavery?
because that enslaved person can get out I think that human beings have the same intrinsic value.
I'm not saying that the unborn baby is more valuable than someone who is enslaved, but I'm saying the crimes are different.
So I think forced labor, which is what slavery is, is very different from murdering somebody.
And I think that any of us here today, if we were told you can either work for someone against your will for some Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hi, Mike.
How are you?
I'm better now that I'm talking to you, Riley.
Is the argument that abortion is more of a moral stain on the individual or society?
I'm saying both.
I think it is immoral at the level of the individual, but also immoral at the level of a society.
And my specific claim that led to this whole hullabaloo is that abortion is the worst thing that America has ever done.
So I was speaking specifically about the country and the Supreme Court in Roe v.
Wade.
But of course, that which is wrong at the national level is wrong at the individual level too.
One moral quandary I sort of wrestle with would be, would it be better...
For an individual to engage in abortion and, say, have a measure of repentance later on rather than a person engage in the act of slavery and have no moral repentance.
That, I think, breaks the comparison because then you're comparing things with an extra variable in here that therefore can't really be compared.
It would not be better for the baby for someone to have an abortion and then repent of it I think we're
good to go.
There's no question.
Abortion is much worse than slavery.
Thank you.
We're going to bunk next.
Bunk, I want you to deep-dip bunk my argument.
Hi, Michael.
How are you doing today, buddy?
I'm doing well.
Yeah, so why ought I value the principle of life as you were defining it?
Well, you clearly do, I guess, is what I would say.
I would assign value of life at the point of a conscious experience, a sentient experience, to be more specific.
So should we be able to kill people in a coma?
Should we be able to kill people in a comatose state?
No, because they would have stated their given preferences before the comatose state, and then we ought to preserve those from when they wake up from the comatose state.
That seems like an unworkable system.
What if we don't know that they're going to wake up from their comatose state?
Well, it's kind of hard to say that we just don't know.
It's very easy.
There are plenty of people where we don't know if they're going to recover from their comas.
That happens often.
I'm sure there are people who we don't know are going to recover from their comas.
I think that we ought to err on the side of life in that situation, but that's because there was previously stated preference, right?
So their preference is all that matters.
So if before they go into the coma, they say, you know, let's say they had a bad day at work, and they come home and say, gosh, I don't know if I want to be on this world anymore.
And then they go into their coma.
Then you think we should honor their preference and kill them?
Actually, we have things within the United States of America to allow people to die.
It's called DNR, do not resuscitate order.
And that states that they don't want to be brought back to life.
And I think we ought to respect that preference, yes.
So what you're saying is rather than merely debating the issue of abortion being bad at all or certainly being worse than slavery, you're advocating for the goodness of assisted suicide.
I think that these two things definitely do play into each other, right?
So the idea that we ought to preserve something that has yet to come into existence, right?
The conscious experience and the conscious preferences of a baby.
But I'm not suggesting.
I want to correct your premise.
Please let me finish.
I just want to correct your premise before you get too far down the rabbit hole.
Then we'll get right back to what I was saying.
Sure.
So what you're saying is if you want to preserve consciousness.
But I'm not saying that I'm concerned primarily with preserving consciousness.
I'm saying I'm interested with preserving life and not ending a life.
Whether the life is conscious, whether the life is an adult who has expressed preferences, or a teenager who expresses preferences perhaps with less credibility, or a child who has not reached the age of reason and cannot actually consent to do anything at all.
Or a toddler or a baby in the womb.
So I'm suggesting something more fundamental than consciousness.
So what I'm trying to get at then is that we don't seem to value things that will never have consciousness ever again in the same way that we do value things that will have a conscious experience or have asserted conscious preferences that will have them again.
Would you agree with that statement?
I agree that we tend to regard conscious beings more than we regard unconscious beings.
Frankly, I think that's a little bit part of the problem.
Yeah.
Do you think that we should value things that do not have consciousness, that we'll never have consciousness again?
Do you think we should value them the same that we do a human being?
I'd have to know what you...
Do you mean someone who is brain dead?
Well, I think we should value them.
I think we should value them, but it's perfectly fine to remove their extraordinary medical care because they're not alive by any real definition of life.
But that, of course, does not describe that.
That doesn't describe babies.
That sounds really wrong.
That sounds really morally wrong.
No, they're already dead, is what you're saying.
If you're talking about brain death, you're talking about someone who's already dead.
So I think we kind of circled back on this, but I guess before I let you go, I guess, is there any way that this relates to an unborn baby or to the question of slavery?
The question that we're having right now is, do you value the potentiality of conscious experience?
Would you value that?
I value the potential of all life, including conscious experience.
Because this is a much more interesting branch of conversation.
I'm glad I can interest you.
I think these conversations are very interesting.
I love doing them, right?
They're my favorite thing in the world, actually.
I love discussing ideas.
It seems like you do too, which is actually really great.
But the point that I'm getting at is that do you think we can assign moral value to something that is potentially not existed yet?
Okay, we gotta go.
We gotta move on.
I'm sorry that we didn't touch on the topic at hand, but I enjoyed our interaction.
Yeah, I enjoyed our interaction too, dude.
Have a nice day.
Lena.
Hi, Michael.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
Actually, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this just because I'm not from the U.S. I'm from Canada and in Canada basically there's like no limit on abortion.
You can perform an abortion at any moment during gestation which I don't agree with but I was just wondering since we had like a similar debate in law school and basically the teacher explained that Being pro-life would be just as bad as slavery since they subjugate women in the same way that, for example, black people or indigenous people are subjugated under white men or white people in general.
And then the whole pro-abortion argument was, like, the basis of it was that the fetus is a part of the woman's body and because of that, like, nothing else matters.
Sure.
Well, it's helpful to know that the word fetus means offspring.
It's a Latin word, and it means offspring.
And so when people try to create a distinction between a fetus and the baby, they're talking about a distinction without a difference.
You mentioned that your teacher said that the The fetus, the baby, is part of the mother.
That is manifestly not true.
The fetus has different genes than the mother.
So, while the baby is within the mother's body, the baby is not just part of the mother in the way that, like my My fingernail would be part of me, or the cells of my fingernail would be part of me.
The baby is unique at the genetic level, at the spiritual level, and just physically you can see it.
You can look at it on a sonogram.
Now, to the question of the woman being oppressed by having to take care of this baby, and how this is similar to a black slave in Louisiana in the 19th century, I think there's a big difference here.
here.
I think the obligations, the natural obligations that a mother has for her own child are different than the obligations of a black slave to pick enough cotton for his white master.
I don't think those are the same thing.
I think what the teacher meant when they were talking about the whole slavery argument was that basically by not having the...
Like the decision to choose whether you have the kid or not, it's the same thing as taking off, like taking out the rights of black people.
So just as a practical matter, the mother does have the choice in greater than 99% of cases.
So these issues of rape or incest in abortion account for less than 1% of all abortions.
So, generally speaking, this is consensual sex, and when you have sex with somebody, you are consenting to the consequences of sex.
Whether you want to admit it or not, you are consenting to that act, which is begetting the child.
Then, beyond that...
You get to this issue of even the 1% or fewer than 1% of cases that are not consensual.
And it raises the question, do you have moral obligations that you don't consent to?
And of course we do.
If some homeless, filthy, dirty, rotten beggar showed up on my door dying of thirst, I would have an obligation.
Even though I don't know this beggar from Adam, I would have an obligation to give that beggar water and to care for that beggar and then...
Maybe care for the beggar for a little period of time, and then if I were unwilling to have him become my new roommate, then I would get him some help and someone else could help to care for him.
So I think that's a pretty good analogy when it comes to the baby.
We all know that we have natural obligations to our parents, to our grandparents, to our communities, to our country, and to our God.
And so, yes, if you look at the issue only through the lens of rights and what you're entitled to and your own desires, then you might come to these crazy conclusions.
Entirely or even primarily by our rights.
It's defined, I think, more importantly by our obligations.
Thank you so much, Michael.
Yep, great questions.
Thaddeus, what a great name.
Hi, Michael.
I would want to bring you this scenario in which the left would try to rationalize abortion.
So say you have a society with enslavement.
Would you want to have that abortion where a child Would it be, and that's the relationship, would grow up and be a slave their entire life?
Would it be worth killing that kid without having, like, due to all the misery and trauma that he's going to suffer throughout his entire life?
And I'd like the answer to be, trying to have, like, a non-Catholic answer to it, because being Catholic, it's easy to debunk that.
But I'm just wondering if you could do it from like a purely like rational standpoint on that.
Let's bring up that filthy, dirty, rotten beggar that I mentioned in an earlier answer.
There's a filthy, dirty, rotten beggar.
He's got all sorts of pockmarks from all the drugs that he's used.
He's covered in human excrement.
People walk past him with contempt and disdain.
Even though this dirty, filthy, rotten beggar is probably never going to improve his circumstances.
He's been living like this for 40 years and he's going to live like it for the rest of his life.
Even still, I don't think it's justified to shiv this guy And a less extreme version of this, of course, would be to ask just about anybody.
All of us suffer.
Perhaps slaves suffer more or suffered more than we do, but that's not true for everybody in the world.
You know, everybody suffers.
That's a fact of life.
You have to ask them if it is better to be killed than it is to suffer.
Is it better not to be living?
live, but suffer.
And even the people who answer that it's better not to be living are full of it because they're not killing themselves, because they're here asking the question.
And I'm not daring anybody to do it.
I don't think it would be good if they killed themselves.
But their own behavior is showing that they're being a little dishonest with themselves.
It's a kind of cognitive dissonance between their behavior and the thoughts that they're expressing.
And I think they ought to resolve that cognitive dissonance by observing that their thoughts have gone a little bit awry and there's some wisdom in their behavior and their natural instinct for self-preservation.
Alright, that's it.
Thank you, everybody.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate everyone coming on.
And, you know, the other thing that's really funny is, I guess some people disagreed with me, but the vast majority agreed with the statement.
And yet, the statement went viral for being so outrageous and offensive, and I got all these mean tweets and all these death threats and all this kind of stuff, and then none of those people...
▲
Export Selection