Pro-Life? Pro-Choice? Stefan Molyneux discusses the complexity around the subject of abortion. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| So, I've been asked a number of times about my thoughts with regards to abortion, the extremely challenging philosophical topic. | |
| So, I will share some thoughts. | |
| I will not put these forward as any kind of cohesively worked out philosophical position. | |
| I will get to it at some point, but I would share some of the thoughts that I've had about this thorny subject, and hopefully it will be of some value to you. | |
| So, the first thing to recognize is that all who are alive have benefited from not being aborted, assuming that they want to be alive and so on, in which case they're here talking. | |
| All who make arguments for or against abortion should, I think, in the interests of honesty and basic integrity, recognize that they have enormously benefited from not having been Killed in the womb. | |
| So, I think that's a really important thing. | |
| So, it's sort of like people who have inherited $10 million who are arguing about the inheritance tax and saying, well, there should be a 100% inheritance tax. | |
| Clearly have some challenges in the conversation, because if you've inherited $10 million and that's given you the leisure to make arguments about 100% inheritance tax, you would at least need to reference the fact that you have $10 million, which you wouldn't have if there were 100% inheritance tax. | |
| Now, it's not a perfect analogy, but I think it at least needs to be, like, I'm glad I was not aborted. | |
| And everyone who's alive, who has not committed suicide, we assume, is happy to have not been aborted. | |
| And not having been aborted is a prerequisite for having any discussions on abortion. | |
| So that, I think, is really important to understand. | |
| If you've benefited from something, you at least need to acknowledge that benefit prior to talking about this topic as a whole, which is why I so often go on and on about bold privilege. | |
| Anyway, so that's number one. | |
| Number two, I think, is that the initiation of force becomes very complicated when there are hostages. | |
| So if a man has a woman clutched to him and a gun to her head and, I don't know, in his hand he's got some tripwire bomb that if he's shot it will release and blow up things and so on. | |
| Well, that situation needs to be dealt with in a different manner than a man who's in an open field pointing his gun at some sort of security personnel. | |
| And so the presence of a hostage vastly complicates questions of self-defense and questions of the initiation of force. | |
| Can you get a clear shot without harming the hostage? | |
| Well, that's problematic. | |
| Most hostages would rather you didn't shoot the guy and take their chances with a more peaceful resolution to the situation. | |
| And we know that because they're not currently elbowing the guy and trying to run away in his exact pattern or whatever, which according to Generation Kill does nothing, I think. | |
| But... | |
| The person who is the hostage would much rather live. | |
| And to initiate force against someone who is holding a hostage is very complicated. | |
| Now, just putting aside the question of whether a fetus is... | |
| We'll get to that, but it's, I think, important to understand that this is enormously complicated by the fact that the woman contains within her body what is, in a sense, a hostage. | |
| In other words, we can very clearly initiate the use of force against someone who is about to murder. | |
| So, to take an extreme example, just for issues of clarification, a woman who is about to throw her baby off a cliff, or, no, let's make it a little easier, a lady who is about to push a pram with a child off a cliff. | |
| If the only way to stop that woman from killing the child is to shoot her, then one would be morally justified in shooting her. | |
| In that, in order to prevent a crime, the initiation of force by a third party is morally legitimate. | |
| In that you are acting as the baby's Self-defense agent, right? | |
| So if a woman was about to push me off a cliff and really had me going backwards, I would be able to use violence even up to lethal force if that were necessary to prevent myself from spinning off a cliff. | |
| And for more on this, you can check out my book on universally preferable behavior and my essays on right to self-defense. | |
| You can get all these at freedomainradio.com. | |
| So if... | |
| If a baby is about to be killed by a mother, it would be legitimate to use as minimal amount of force, but up to and including lethal force if it were the only way to prevent the crime. | |
| We would be able to use lethal force to prevent the mother from killing the baby. | |
| But in this case, lethal force can be used against the mother without directly harming the infant. | |
| Unfortunately, when the infant is inside the mother, one cannot use lethal force in the prevention. | |
| And I'm not saying we would. | |
| I'm just saying that logically, it's a hostage situation because the baby is inside the mother. | |
| And therefore, if you use lethal force in the same way that you would with a mom pushing a pram off a cliff, you would harm the baby and probably even kill the baby if the baby was... | |
| Young enough, right? | |
| Like if the baby was like three months old or whatever, two months old. | |
| So that doesn't work. | |
| Someone else can take care of a baby, but nobody else can gestate a fetus other than the mother. | |
| So this complicates matters considerably. | |
| And I think it's really important to understand that distinction. | |
| And please understand, again, I'm not making any prescriptions here. | |
| I'm merely pointing out that these are the biological and moral facts Now, in most cases, we prefer the most peaceful resolution to a situation. | |
| So, for instance, if a mother was pushing some baby in a pram, in a stroller, off a cliff, And you shouted to her, I will pay you $50,000 to not do that. | |
| I'm pretty sure, at least I feel, it's not an argument, that would be preferable to shooting her. | |
| Now, of course, the goal is not to create a phalanx of women pushing babies off. | |
| That's not going to happen anyway. | |
| Maternal bonds and so on, right? | |
| But... | |
| Where you can pay someone to not harm someone else, in general, that is preferable to them harming that other person. | |
| So if you pay $50,000 to everyone who takes a hostage and then there's no punishment, then lots more people will take hostages because you're subsidizing the taking of hostages with no particular punishment. | |
| So I recognize again that there are limits to this interaction. | |
| But, in general, it's better to buy something from a store than to steal it, and it's better to use money to prevent crime than to have the crime occur, because, of course, the amount of investigation and legal conundrums that would accrue to someone who shot a mother who he thought was pushing a child off a cliff would be far in excess of $50,000. | |
| And, of course, you end up with $50,000 in the hole, so to speak, but you end up with an alive mother and an alive child. | |
| And we would also, I think, assume that a mother who was pushing her baby off a cliff would not be in the greatest mental shape and may not, in fact, be morally or criminally liable for her actions. | |
| Again, this would all be worked out after the fact. | |
| But I would certainly, just in my heart of hearts, again, I'm not saying this is any kind of rigorous argument, but in my heart of hearts, I would more than chip in to someone who paid some thousands of dollars to save a child from death rather than shoot the mother. | |
| I would consider that highly preferable. | |
| So... | |
| If we say that we prefer a monetary transaction to a death or the initiation of force, the initiation of force doesn't always mean death, but there's absolutely no point deploying the initiation of force argument and then not have it escalate until compliance or death. | |
| I mean, I made that argument before. | |
| Self-defense includes all necessary force required to preserve your life and health. | |
| It's not like, well, you can fire a warning shot, but after that, forget it, right? | |
| Because the moment that became known, then people would just, you know, know that the warning shot meant nothing and self-defense would mean nothing. | |
| So self-defense means an escalation of force, hopefully using the minimum force necessary or the minimum force necessary. | |
| Conceivable in the situation, but it must include escalations to lethal force, if it is to be self-defense. | |
| So, a woman who is pregnant and who wants to have an abortion... | |
| It's going to be ending a life. | |
| Now, admittedly, a blastocyst is very early on in the life cycle and a fetus is early on in the life cycle, but it will grow to a human being. | |
| Let's at least be clear about that. | |
| She's not stepping on a tadpole. | |
| She's not squishing a worm. | |
| She's not squishing a caterpillar and thereby depriving the world of a butterfly. | |
| She is, well, ending what will grow into a human life. | |
| She is killing what will grow into a human life. | |
| Now, the degree to which that can be prevented is great. | |
| And the degree to which the killing can be prevented is great. | |
| You know, prevention, non-violent intervention, is always better than the death. | |
| Now, there is, of course, 10% of couples, I don't know if you knew this, but 10% of couples experience significant fertility problems and or are just plain infertile. | |
| I mean, women's plumbing generally tends to be more complicated, but any number of things can occur that would result in infertility for a couple. | |
| And so you have, in the marketplace, again, we're assuming a free society, you have in a marketplace women who have an excess of fertility and women or couples who have a deficiency of fertility. | |
| We'll say couples. | |
| A couple who has an excess of fertility and a couple who has a deficiency of fertility. | |
| In the same way that Toyota... | |
| I don't know why I pronounced it that way. | |
| Toyota has an excess of cars and other people have a deficiency of cars. | |
| In fact, Toyota makes more cars than they could possibly use in order to have the excess to sell. | |
| I have an excess of words and you have a deficiency of words, at least mine, while you're listening. | |
| So, in the marketplace where someone has an excess and other people have a deficiency, And there is need or preference, then there generally is a market transaction. | |
| And what that means is that it would be within the realm of the market and contract to turn the woman with the fetus she does not want to bring to term and raise herself. | |
| Sorry, she wants to bring to term, she doesn't want to raise it herself. | |
| It's certainly within the scope of the marketplace to match that person up to a couple who wants a child. | |
| And that is the role of, I think, a productive marketplace. | |
| I mean, you can already in many countries hire a surrogate to bring a child to term. | |
| Now, to me, if something's legal, it doesn't particularly matter when you enter into the surrogacy agreement. | |
| You can already adopt a child that is born, and why not be able to adopt a child in the fetus? | |
| Sorry, in the womb, a fetus in the womb. | |
| So in that situation, there would be the couple with the excess of fertility and the couple with a deficiency of fertility, and they would simply trade. | |
| And you would pay the woman $50,000 or $25,000 or whatever it was going to be in order to have her provide you with the child, with the baby after she gave birth to it. | |
| And it's funny, you know, because people feel, a lot of times, they feel a little horrified about this. | |
| Like, you're trading babies, you're buying babies. | |
| It's like, well, yeah. | |
| But it seems to me that your moral values, if this is how you feel, and again, I understand this. | |
| I mean, I get it, too. | |
| It seems a little sacrosanct. | |
| But the alternative is what? | |
| For the fetus to die, for the baby to be terminated, to be killed in the womb. | |
| And, you know, a non-violent solution that preserves life is preferable to a violent solution that ends life. | |
| I think that's kind of indisputable, and if you really want to dispute that, then this may not be the right show or venue or Continuum for you. | |
| So as far as the solution to abortion, the initiation of force against the woman, you can't shoot her if we're going to have an abortion because that will kill the kid. | |
| Especially if it's early on, which it generally is. | |
| So you can't really take the shot if you're going to kill the hostage. | |
| It's not your choice to make. | |
| The hostage would rather survive, and the baby would rather survive. | |
| You could, I guess theoretically, You could kidnap the mother who was going to go and have an abortion, and you could restrain her, and you could force-feed her, and so on. | |
| But the problem is that stress is not great for a developing fetus. | |
| And so, again, you are harming the fetus by engaging in acts of confinement and aggression against the mother. | |
| Now, of course, the other option is that you put the mother in jail And, of course, that's... | |
| I mean, these are all options to be discussed. | |
| That she, knowing the end of the life of a future human being, and therefore is liable, and therefore should be thrown in jail. | |
| And, of course, this is how it was in the past. | |
| And we'll get to that in a sec, because I really wanted to get back to prevention. | |
| Now, abortions have... | |
| Well, it's hard to say exactly, but there's a lot of them. | |
| Tens of millions of fetuses in America have been terminated since Roe v. | |
| Wade. | |
| And that's a crazy amount. | |
| And so the question then becomes, well, why? | |
| Why are so many abortions occurring? | |
| And some of it would have to do with the welfare state. | |
| And The welfare state is one of these great tragedies, and you can check out Charles Murray's Coming Apart book for more on this. | |
| The welfare state is one of these great tragedies because what it does is it withdraws community from the policing of social norms. | |
| So, a guy was interviewing Charles Murray from Uncommon Knowledge, and he was talking about, he sort of said, paraphrasing, he said, you know, back in a previous life, I worked on a small TV crew, and we were delayed, waiting for a trial to end. | |
| And so, the cameraman who was from Staten Island took me to his neighborhood, and we walked around, and he said, you know, back in the day, you know, when I was growing up, back in the day, you couldn't walk down this neighborhood without the curtains shifting directly. | |
| And someone looking at you, and if they didn't know who you were, they'd come out and ask you what your business was there. | |
| And, you know, maybe that seems kind of intrusive, but as I think Charles Murray points out, on the other hand, your children can play outside in safety, because everyone had kind of the same values. | |
| And the welfare state has relieved people of the responsibility to confront wrongdoers within the community. | |
| And since, for a lot of people, confrontation is quite uncomfortable, even those who don't benefit from the welfare state or those who pay for the welfare state like the welfare state because it means they don't have to be out there policing what goes on in their neighborhood. | |
| So, for instance, in the past, if a woman was divorced, if a woman said, I'm going to get divorced or whatever, like way back in the day, before the welfare state, then... | |
| One of two things would sort of result. | |
| One is that, well, maybe she just chose a really mean, abusive, bad guy, in which case the entire family and clan would be thrown into disrepute because, I mean, I keep asking people this on my show. | |
| I say, oh, I married the wrong woman. | |
| She was a terrible woman. | |
| It's almost like, well, what did your mom and dad think of her? | |
| What did your aunts and uncles think of her? | |
| What did your brothers think of her? | |
| I mean, don't your potential marriage partners get vetted by your extended clan, for God's sakes? | |
| I mean, where the hell was everyone when all of this was going down? | |
| And their answer is, oh, well, you know, nobody really said anything and this and that, right? | |
| And that's partly happened because of the welfare state and because of child support and alimony laws. | |
| Because beforehand, if a mom divorced the dad, then she would move in with her parents, and they'd have to support her for the next 10 or 15 years or whatever, and they'd have to babysit, and so she would boomerang back into their house. | |
| So they'd have a very strong incentive to make sure she wasn't going to marry a jerk. | |
| And, you know, the old... | |
| Cliché of the shotgun wedding and the dad grilling the boyfriend while sitting in a darkened room in some sinister Liam Neeson fashion. | |
| I mean, this is all fallen by the wayside because if the kids get divorced while she gets alimony, child support, free school and welfare and so on, and so the parents don't end up having to take her in and take care of the whole situation. | |
| So this policing of potential partners has really gone by the wayside and has become this sort of hoary old cliché. | |
| And it would be men because men would vet the women who'd marry their sons and the men who'd marry their daughters because it was the men's resources and the moms too, but the men would have to pay for all these kids prior to the welfare state. | |
| And so when you get the welfare state, and I'm just using this as a proxy for a lot of government programs, just consider it a general catch-all. | |
| Oh, how convenient for me. | |
| But still, I hope you understand. | |
| But the welfare state has brought in a significant lack of responsibility among the young with regards to sexuality. | |
| As I said on this show before, sexuality is a big person's game that makes real people. | |
| And it used to be very tightly policed by the community. | |
| And if you got divorced, your entire clan would be thrown into disrepute for letting you marry a jerk. | |
| Or if he wasn't abusive or a jerk, then you'd be viewed as an incredibly shallow and destructive person. | |
| Who was destroying an entire family for reasons of mild discontent or some boredom or you'd just be viewed as a complete jerk as a woman or a man if you were ending a family. | |
| And I think it's about 50% of people really regret being divorced or regret getting divorced. | |
| And so you just kind of knuckle through and usually it works out for the better. | |
| And so you'd be shunned if you were divorced. | |
| You would not be welcome in polite society. | |
| And shunning people is uncomfortable for people. | |
| They call you and you've got to hang up on them and you've got to break friendships. | |
| So the welfare state is a huge relief for a lot of people. | |
| It just tends to mess up the only place where social rules can ever really be enforced, which is at the community level. | |
| As they say, you get rid of all the big rules. | |
| You don't end up with no rules. | |
| You end up with a near infinity of tiny rules. | |
| And that's what's called very tragic, right? | |
| So, the relevance of this to the welfare state and to abortion in particular is that... | |
| Control over sexuality, over possibilities of pregnancy, was significantly enforced by society in the past. | |
| There were chaperones on dates. | |
| A woman in a room had to keep at least one foot on the floor in a bedroom, and doors had to be kept open at all times. | |
| And there weren't these sort of unsupervised... | |
| Parties of the young going and doing whatever they wanted, and there was significant shame to being an unwed mother, to having an abortion. | |
| In the past, you would go and, quote, visit relatives for a couple of months, and then you'd come back, and nobody would ever talk about it again, and it would be something of great shame, and the family would have to keep it quiet, even if everyone knew what was going on, and so on. | |
| And that's all gone by the wayside because rules follow self-interest and self-interest follows often financial interest and the welfare state has removed the necessity of parents to pay for their children's illegitimate offspring. | |
| So it just erodes. | |
| I mean, it takes time. | |
| I remember when I was a kid growing up in England, there was a row of sort of council houses behind the apartment buildings that I lived in. | |
| With my family. | |
| And to be on the dole was considered a shameful thing. | |
| It was considered a really terrible shameful thing. | |
| You were just a loser and a failure if you ended up on the dole. | |
| And then, when I got older, it sort of became like an option that was just morally neutral. | |
| You know, I have trouble finding a job. | |
| I think I'll just take the summer off and go on the dole or whatever, right? | |
| And it wasn't considered to be a bad thing because as soon as the rules change, like the financial rules change, the social rules will change and follow. | |
| So, with regards to abortion, There are women who desperately want to get pregnant, and there are women who desperately want to abort. | |
| And the difference generally tends to be being in a stable relationship with someone you love, like being married and all that. | |
| Now, that which promotes female choice and promotes the wisdom of female choice In a partner is that which was going to reduce the prevalence of abortion and divorce. | |
| And we generally tend to choose the wisest when we suffer the ill consequences the most. | |
| And given that a woman can survive and survive quite nicely, thank you very much, on the largesse of welfare plus government subsidies of every kind, including public schools in that, alimony, child support, and so on, then she's not going to suffer in any fundamental way, in any panic, doom, anxiety way, the choice of a bad partner. | |
| And given that in almost, certainly all, I think almost all mammalian species, the man puts on a display, or the male puts on a display, and the female then chooses the male based upon the quality of his display, and simply won't mate with a substandard male. | |
| Or, to put it another way, will mate with the most advantageous male she can get her eggs to, or get sperm out of. | |
| Then a man who parades, you know, he's got a six-pack and he's a player and he gels his hair, well, that's going to tickle a woman's hormones, but it's going to run in opposition to her wisdom, because such but it's going to run in opposition to her wisdom, because such a man, in general, may be a shallow provider, may be a player, may be unsuitable for | |
| On the other hand, a man who's sort of like, you know, maybe not quite as flashy physically, but is a steady provider and a reliable guy and a reasonable guy who doesn't have a big temper and he doesn't drink and he's working towards his accountancy degree and so on. | |
| Is he going to be as flashy and exciting as the Brad Pitt wannabe? | |
| Probably not. | |
| Probably be harder to, right? | |
| And the woman will grit her teeth and say, well, this guy's sexier. | |
| But sexy, don't pay the bills. | |
| He's just a gigolo. | |
| And so she's got to grit her teeth, cross her legs, and realign herself to the guy who's probably a little less flashy, but a heck of a lot better for the stability of her marriage and her offspring and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Now that in turn promotes virtue. | |
| So if women marry virtuous guys, then virtue is rewarded. | |
| And there's only one fundamental reward in the animal kingdom. | |
| That is reproduction. | |
| It's the only reward that matters. | |
| Everything else is completely secondary because that's what selects the genes. | |
| And so whoever men get to sleep with or whichever men are chosen by women... | |
| Those are the men who get the greatest conceivable rewards in society. | |
| And an absence of a safety net, an absence of the welfare state, means that women have to choose more stable and more reliable men. | |
| And in the same way, men will have to choose more stable and more reliable women, which means a fundamental benefit to philosophy. | |
| You know, philosophy is the thigh master of virtuous mating. | |
| You know, it just makes you harder. | |
| So, if stable men and stable women are trying to get with each other, so to speak, then that's to the benefit of society. | |
| It means that abortions are going to be minimized. | |
| And I'm going to make sure I have some really solid arguments for, you know, what about just putting the woman in jail after abortion. | |
| She has the abortion. | |
| So I'm going to break this into two parts and make sure I've got really good stuff. | |
| I never want to give you guys anything substandard. | |
| So thank you so much for listening. | |
| I hope that this is helpful. | |
| Please let me know what you think, of course. | |
| And thank you so much for your support. | |
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