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July 28, 2023 - Whatever Podcast
02:51:15
Abortion Debate | Whatever Podcast #9

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To a special debate edition of the whatever podcast.
I am your host and moderator, Brian Atlas.
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Without further ado, I am joined today by Destiny, famous internet personality, live streamer, and political commentator who will be arguing the pro-choice side, or as he prefers, the pro-abortion side.
And we have Trent Horn.
Trent earned master's degrees in the fields of theology, philosophy, and bioethics.
Trent is an adjunct professor of apologetics at Holy Apostles College, and he's the author of nine books.
Trent will be arguing the pro-life side.
Thank you guys for joining me.
Appreciate it.
I think a good jumping off point for each of you, and if any of you wish to further introduce yourselves, otherwise we can just get right in.
What is your basic stance on abortion?
And Destiny, why won't we have you start?
Yeah, so I think that the typical pro-life argument is the idea that we say that life begins at the moment of conception.
I believe that there is some kind of life that begins at the moment of conception, but the thing that we're interested in protecting is the human conscious experience.
Whenever we talk about a person, we're not usually talking about a body or a collection of cells.
We're talking about some other conscious, sentient being.
Whenever we're talking about pain, suffering, harm, happiness, joy, any of these emotions, we're usually talking about somebody that can experience them as such.
When we look at the end of life, the instructive moment is when the person no longer has or is capable of having a conscious experience.
So I think when we look at the beginning of life, we should also start at the same point, which is when that conscious experience forms.
So my argument is abortion should be illegal at the moment that the fetus is capable of having all of the parts communicating that can deploy subconscious experience, which I've read is anywhere from 20 to 28 weeks.
So legally, I say probably at about 20 weeks would be the safe point to start protecting that person that's now developed in the womb.
All right.
Right.
And so my position would be that your value comes not from what you can do, but from what you are, that human beings acquire and lose different abilities throughout their existence.
And many of our abilities are also shared by non-human beings that don't have a right to life.
Like when it comes to consciousness, there are animals that exhibit levels of consciousness beyond what many humans exhibit, like infants, for example.
There are many non-human animals more conscious than them.
So I don't think that it's consciousness that makes us valuable.
What makes us valuable is that we're members of a kind, of a rational kind, and every member of that kind has equal intrinsic value.
So I just think that every human being has equal rights, equal dignity, and that this phrase, every human being, would include every member of the human species.
So that begins at fertilization, and then that would end when someone dies, when their body parts no longer function together as a whole.
So when their body parts, you begin to decompose, when your body starts to fall apart, that's when you stop existing.
You start existing when your body parts work together to allow you to grow and develop, which biologists would agree happens at fertilization.
So that would be the pro-life, anti-abortion position.
And then I guess a little thing on my background too.
I also host a podcast called the Council of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L.
If you're Catholic, you'll get the joke, and that's available on YouTube.
You'll want to go and check that out.
Okay, rock and roll.
And we have the lit, everyone's links are in the description.
I think we have your podcast linked in the description as well.
So just a point of clarification for Destiny.
At what point, because I know I think you have a time limit on it, or not a time limit, but you don't think abortion should occur after when or how long?
I'd say legislatively, I'd say 20 weeks.
Okay.
Okay, gotcha.
And for you, is there any circumstance where abortion is justified?
Well, I would say that I would agree with states that have laws that allow you to use medical interventions to protect the life of the woman.
So I believe that we should treat unborn human beings, human fetuses, human embryos, like we would treat born human beings.
And there can be cases where if a born human being, even an innocent born human being, threatens the life of another innocent born human being.
Like if somebody, their drink gets spiked at a party and they go crazy and they grab a gun and they're going to shoot people.
You might have to use lethal force to protect other people.
But I believe that most abortions are not meant, they're not meant to protect someone's life.
They instead are meant to protect elements of one's lifestyle.
I don't mean to put it crudely, but social reasons, economic reasons.
I think just as we don't kill toddlers just because they might be in a difficult situation, like their mom, dad's left, mom lost her job, we don't kill toddlers in a really bad situation to try to make it better.
We shouldn't do the same to unborn human beings if they have the same value as a toddler does.
Okay, got it.
So I think another good jumping off point is when do you each believe that personhood begins?
Between that 20 to 28 week point, whenever the there's a part where all of the structures in the brain are in place and then they begin to communicate with each other such that you would have some conscious experience.
I would say that's your personhood.
Okay.
Yeah, and I would say that personhood, though, you don't necessarily, what's interesting about the pro-life position is you don't have to believe a human embryo or human fetus is a person to be against abortion.
There's actually multiple arguments to be against abortion.
Now, I think that all human beings, all living human beings, are persons.
Now, they might be injured, so they might be disabled persons who can't function rationally.
They might be in a coma.
They might have Alzheimer's or dementia.
But I think every human being is a person.
But even if you didn't believe the unborn were persons, you can even sidestep the personhood question.
Because you could ask this question.
Why is death bad?
Why is it bad to cause the death of an infant or the death of you or me?
But not bad.
Most people agree it's not bad to cause the death of like a pig.
Even vegans don't want to usually don't treat the death of a human infant like the death of a pig.
So why is death bad?
I think most people agree that death is bad because it's deprivational.
It deprives us of something.
It's bad when humans die, not because they have necessarily a desire to live.
Animals don't, like infants don't have that.
But what makes death bad for humans is it deprives a human of unique experiences.
Like if an infant dies, they lose a future like ours.
That's why it's so tragic when an infant dies.
It also makes sense why it's sad, but not as tragic if like a 99-year-old dies, because they don't have as much of a future.
So then it would follow.
And then of course, the reason we have pork chops and burgers, or at least don't treat them as the same as killing humans, because animals don't have a future like ours.
So if that's what makes killing so wrong, well, human embryos and human fetuses, they do have that.
Even if you're not consciously aware of it, they have that.
And killing them deprives them of that really valuable thing.
And so that's why another way to think of abortion being wrong, even if you don't have the personhood element there.
Do you have a response?
Do you find that when you use that argument of future experience, can you run into trouble with people challenging you that that future experience might be horrible enough such that it could actually justify an abortion?
So for instance, let's say in the case of like I think tay-sex disease is a really rough one where I think children can die, I think off before the age of five, right?
Right.
If your defense of abortion is bad because it's depriving somebody of a future experience, I think baked into that assumption is that the future experience is on a whole like a net positive, right?
Right.
So doesn't that kind of make your point, that point like conditional on a positive future experience, which would justify the pro-choice argument of you should abort people that might end up in horrible circumstances?
Well, I think that the future like ours argument, I consider it a secondary argument for my position.
So it may not show, I agree with you that it doesn't show that all killing is wrong.
Like if your boss is dying of a heart attack and you shoot him, like you don't really deprive him of a valuable future, but it's still wrong for you to do that.
So I don't think that it shows all killing is wrong, but I think it shows many, many acts of killing in general are wrong.
And there are far more healthy unborn children, or even infants, for example.
Like you might miss the Tay-Sachs diagnosis and now you have an infant who has Tay-Sachs.
But most people, even in that case, most people wouldn't directly kill that infant who they know is going to die in a few years.
So there, I think the other argument would be, well, all human beings have this intrinsic value.
They're all persons, due respect, even if they might be disabled or dying.
But I think that the future like ours argument has the benefit of explaining why the vast majority of human killings are wrong, but also why it's not wrong to kill animals, even if you have a pretty smart animal.
Like, pigs are pretty smart.
They can play video games to earn treats.
They can beat a lot of infants at things.
But we turn pigs into pork chops.
We don't do that to infants.
And I think only if the future like ours argument or the fact that just humans are persons by their nature can explain that.
If we go with your view that, well, it's consciousness that matters, I don't think it works.
And if you bracket it to say, oh, I'm talking about human consciousness, then I think it gets arbitrary.
I would agree to some extent that it gets arbitrary, but arbitrary in only the ultimately skeptical sense of like all morality absent a religious justification can arguably be arbitrary.
So I can half agree with you there, but I think we both probably agree that the human conscious experience is significantly altered or different than the animal conscious experience.
I have had some people bring up the argument that like, well, if you're defending conscious experience, what about conscious experience of pigs or dogs?
You know, a two-year-old dog might have more of a conscious experience than a six-month-old or six-week-old child.
My understanding is human development doesn't happen that way.
I don't think that we, at like six months in the womb, that we have like a lizard consciousness and then we're born and we have like a horse consciousness and then we're like one year old and we have like a primate consciousness and then it becomes like a human consciousness.
My assumption is once all the parts are in place, you have to gather kind of these quality of these experiences in life.
You see things, you experience things and your mind kind of grows.
But the development is done.
Now it's just the acquisition of experience and then kind of like the connected neurons and everything.
I don't think that our conscious experience significantly changes such that it's evolving from like one animal to the next.
I think these are probably all stages of like human conscious experience.
And then I would go back to it sounded like you kind of said earlier that there's kind of this like ontological category of like human and then at all stages you protect that human thing from fetus to end of metabolic activity.
And then I would agree with you except I would bracket that inside the conscious experience part.
Right.
And the reason I don't bracket that is because there are two reasons.
I think you're going to include non-human animals or arbitrarily disqualify them, or you're going to exclude some human beings.
Well, I guess let me ask you just a question here.
So, I've got this, this is a cool book, actually, if anyone wants to get it.
It's called A Child is Born by Leonard Nilsson.
He is actually pro-choice.
He doesn't let pro-lifers use these pictures in their books and stuff.
But he pioneered in utero photography back in the 50s and 60s.
He died in 2017.
So, like, this would be a 26-week-old fetus.
And so, that would fall under your definition, requires legal protection, right?
Yeah, but not because of what it looks like, but yeah.
I'm just showing the thing.
I think it's important in this ab like this is an ab.
I understand these things are remote, and I'm fine showing actually from all the stages.
So, if you want to bring me back up here, like, this would be first trimester.
So, that's about we actually go back.
So, this would be an embryo.
It's about four weeks old.
Most abortions happen right after this point, but you can see the heartbeat, things like that.
So, that'd be the first trimester.
Then we go forward a little bit more.
We've got eight weeks.
So, that'd be an embryo at eight weeks.
Then, this would be, well, a fetus at eight weeks, I should say.
Then this would be 12 weeks, is what we have here.
And then, right before the cutoff, right before Destiny is cut off, would be this would be 19 weeks.
And then, so my question, though, is this at 26 weeks, let's bring that up here.
My question would be: why is the killing of this thing so bad that it ought to be illegal?
Can you just explain to me the badness?
Like, what's happening here that's so bad it ought to be illegal?
Without getting ultra-fundamental, I think that probably every constructed human moral system on the planet agrees that we're all probably afforded a negative right to life, that for somebody to infringe on our right to life requires a big hurdle to surmount, right?
So, if I'm trying to kill you, if I've done some violation of a law, you know, where a state's decided to put somebody to death, that for the most part, if governments exist for any reason, one of the most fundamental reasons are protection to life, quite literally, that negative right afforded to us.
So, as long as all of us are humans, as long as we're all social creatures and we've all got some agreement to live and work and exist with one another, that negative right to life ought to be protected at all stages of when a person exists.
So, it's like a social contract.
Essentially, yeah.
Would a society be incorrect if the social contract included all biological human beings, so every human embryo or fetus?
When you say correct or incorrect, what do you mean by that?
Would it be a morally bad or evil contract?
For example, 150 years ago, there was a social contract that said some human beings could be enslaved, for example.
Throughout most human history, social contracts have excluded certain groups of people.
Were the social contracts in those societies immoral?
So, immoral is kind of in a way begging the question of which moral system are we're using.
Obviously, insofar as theirs were concerned, it wasn't.
For me personally, I don't believe in any sort of like moral realism.
I don't believe in any kind of like moral fact.
So, I don't think I could evaluate from some objective frame of reference this thing is absolutely morally correct, or this thing is absolutely morally incorrect.
As far as I'm aware, I don't believe that we have any organs to allow us to perceive any sort of moral fact in the world.
So, I think that moral systems are invented by people.
I think that we all have kind of shared intuitions.
And so when we're writing like any kind of moral system, I think what we're doing is we're kind of leaning into the intuitions that people have, and we're trying to write rules explaining kind of why people feel the things they do.
As an analogy to that, did you ever take any musical training?
Yes, I was in the seventh grade, and I was an idiot, and instead of picking the guitar, I picked the trumpet.
Okay.
It turns out girls like the guitar more than the trumpet.
True.
So for music, there's something called music theory, which is a theory of explaining how music sounds away to a certain person.
A music theorist can't write and say, this is going to sound good to you.
All a music theory person can do is say, well, these things tend to sound good.
Let's figure out the rules for why they do and why they don't.
And I believe that morality is constructed in the same way.
So I'd be like, probably like a non-cognitivist school of thought under like a moral anti-realism, I guess.
So to go back when you ask me, is something like objectively right or wrong?
I don't believe that there is an objective right or wrong.
Just like I don't think there's like an objective beautiful or an objective best song or an objective anything like that.
So like I would say it's evil to rape someone.
It is wrong to do that.
And it is a fact that no one should ever do that full stop.
Would you just say rape makes you feel bad?
You don't like it.
You'd prefer people don't do that.
Yeah, that's essentially the non-cognitivist position, right?
Because I don't think you can, I don't believe there's a fact to be observed.
My challenge would be is, how do I observe a moral fact?
Well, I just think that we have a sense of observing morality just like we have a sense of observing the natural world and it's not the matrix.
We have an intuitive ability to do that.
And I have no reason to deny that that ability to exist, that that ability exists.
I just, just as I know the world around us is real, even if I can't prove that, I know that it's an objective fact that it's wrong to rape children, for example.
So let's say that you had two people and they came together and just we were observing the natural world and two people had a disagreement over if I dropped this cup, you know, will the cup go to the ground or not, right?
Do we believe in gravity, essentially?
I think that if there was a disagreement between those two people, I think that we can run tests that appeal to our faculty where we can...
God damn it, Brian!
There's a motorcycle outside.
Is it a leaf blower?
No, who knows?
There's sense data that basically we can acquire from the real world and then it can, assuming none of us are psychotic or delusional, we can come to an agreement over whether the cup will fall or not.
If two of us were to analyze a situation, we can say like the rape of kids because that's a pretty obviously wrong one for most people.
But if we go into hairier situations, like say Kyle Rittenhouse defending himself, there's a disagreement there over whether or not you might have a right to kill somebody based on them attacking you.
How do you observe the disagreement?
Like how do you reconcile who's right or wrong if there's a moral fact there?
Well, just like in general, let's say there are facts of history.
Just because we might disagree about which historical facts are true or not, we might not have access to all the information or make inferences, we can still say that, you know, it was a fact that the civil war happened, for example, even if we disagree about what exactly caused it or something like that.
So when it comes to morality, even if we disagree about some, the fact that there is disagreement about moral issues, I think that shows there's objective morality.
Now, as a religious person, I do think there is ultimately a universal moral lawgiver, what people might call God, that ultimately explains that.
But even if you didn't believe in God, and there are many moral realists who don't, you could believe that, well, the fact that we talk about abortion, we're not talking about abortion like we talk about sports teams or talk about fashion.
Does this look good?
Does that look good?
That's very subjective.
But it seems like when we talk about abortion, we can make moral progress.
We can get closer to having a better position.
Like, I think America has made moral progress in getting rid of slavery, giving women the right to vote, things like that.
But if there were no objective morals, you couldn't call it progress.
It would just be change, just like how fashion changes.
Yeah, I agree.
But I mean, moral progress is begging the question that there is an objective morality, right?
In order to make progress, there must be something you're progressing.
So let's get out of the basement and go back to abortion.
Well, I do want to say one thing because you said you can have a disagreement over historical truth.
Again, that truth are empirical things.
Like, I could uncover archaeologically some item that disproves or proves another theory.
That's fundamentally different, I think, than a disagreement over a moral fact.
For instance, two people, somebody, a woman says something slightly rude to her husband, the husband strikes the woman to discipline her.
Two people come together and they say, I disagree on whether or not that's right or wrong.
Where is the moral fact?
How do you actually determine concretely who is right or wrong?
Because for historical fact, the answer is there, right?
Somehow there's some piece of evidence you could find to prove, yes, this did happen or no, this didn't.
But for a moral dispute, how do you reconcile that between two different people who disagree?
Well, I think what you would do is you would start with the most basic intuitions that we can see are correct.
Like just starting with, you ought to do good and avoid evil.
It's wrong to rape and torture someone because it's fun for you.
Courage is better than cowardice.
And these are just basement level things that people can see are true.
Just like we can see the natural world around us, we can see the external world.
There might be some colorblind people who can't see it like we do, but that doesn't take away from the objective thing.
let's go back i want to wait this is so i understand we can't go back but these i think these parts are pretty important because it's going to inform a lot of this okay let's let's put a pin in it because i want to i want to talk about your view about abortion though because i think okay when it comes i think here's what i i think honestly happens in these just it doesn't have to just be abortion It can be any moral dispute.
We'll say is, all right, here's moral issue X. You have your view, I have my view.
And we critique, and a lot of the ways we critique each other's views is your view leads to these crazy consequences.
Yeah, but your view leads to crazy consequences.
So then we kind of say, okay, whose view leads to kind of less crazy consequences?
And that may be the more reasonable view we all told.
I think that happens a lot in moral discourse.
So your view then would be this.
And then I'll talk about the consequences and I'll talk about just the overall, what I think is wrong with the view.
That a person exists when you lose the immediate ability to be conscious.
I guess you permanently lose it.
Like if you're in a persistent vegetative state permanently, you're no longer a person.
When you lose consciousness, you're not a person anymore.
When you lose it permanently.
So you start to be a person when you gain it.
Prior to 20 weeks, there is no person.
There's no one there with a right to life in the fetus.
Correct?
Your view?
So I have a few questions then.
Would it be wrong to cause a healthy fetus to become permanently unconscious?
No.
Okay.
So would it be wrong to cause this permanent unconsciousness to use, let's say you could keep growing the fetus into an older body, to use it for organ harvesting, maybe as a kind of sex doll even?
As long as it never became conscious or didn't have the fact that never became conscious.
Okay.
Related question, but we'll circle back soon.
What are your thoughts on fake child pornography using AI or virtual images?
Fake child pornography.
I'm not going to have a strong opinion on the action itself.
It's going to be consequential in nature in terms of what are the impacts of doing it.
So say you create a bunch and people stop actually abusing children.
I'd probably be in favor of it.
Say you create a bunch and it leads to an increased harm of children.
I'd probably oppose it.
You have a practical objection, not an in-principle objection.
No, that wouldn't be like a no.
Yeah.
Okay.
So then it circles back.
So let's say we had people who took fetuses, made them permanently unconscious, and made them infant toddler or child sex dolls.
So we have, you know, so we have unconscious infants and toddlers.
They were never conscious.
They're used as child sex dolls.
Your only objection to that practice would be if it caused more pedophilia among other consciousness.
Correction.
Yeah, because I would say there's no person is being harmed there.
Okay.
So child sex dolls could be on the table.
Okay.
Kind of.
Although I would fight the framing of this because child is intuition pumping the idea that it's a fully formed, developed human, and I would never call a brainless thing child.
Yeah, so then I would say human.
A human body lacking a brain.
I would say you can do whatever you want with it.
A biological human organism that proceeds through the child stages that is never conscious.
Sorry, there we go.
All right.
Would it be wrong to kill a newborn who has never been conscious?
Assuming it lacked the ability to be conscious?
Sure.
It's not, or you can kill it.
There's nothing to kill.
You could end the existence of whatever that is, yes.
Well, suppose it didn't permanently lack the ability.
If we gave it drugs or something like that, or maybe it'll naturally come out of it in a few months.
When you say come out of it, we start to get into an area where you're kind of disintegrating my concept of consciousness.
So I consider conscious experience to be an emergent property of the underlying structures of the brain communicating with each other.
So if you're telling me, what if you had all the underlying structures, but you didn't have that conscious experience?
It's a really hard one for me to conceptualize.
Just to say the structures still have to develop, I guess.
Sure, then it's an undeveloped.
Yeah, then I would say it's free game for whatever.
For example, I think this came up a little bit in your dialogue with Lila.
You have an anencephalic child who doesn't have an upper brain, someone like Jackson Buell.
People can look that up online.
Doctors said he'll probably die.
Most anencephalic children, the upper brain does not develop.
So you just, the neural tube fails to close.
So you just have a lower brain.
And Jackson lived to be about five.
Now, his parents claimed that he did exhibit signs of consciousness.
Some other people might debate that.
I don't know.
But you would say that if a newborn didn't, you know, never develop consciousness, I mean, I guess it's like a fetus and never developed it.
The structures haven't developed yet in the brain.
Okay.
Here's one that'd be interesting.
Suppose we had a drug that could take the anencephaly case.
Normally, if you don't grow your upper, if your brain consciousness doesn't develop, it's never going to develop.
Suppose we had a drug in the future that could allow an anencephalic fetus to develop consciousness.
But if we don't give it the drug, it'll never be conscious.
Does that human fetus, that human being, biological human being, would they have a right to that treatment?
I don't think they would have any rights yet because rights, I would say, are only afforded to persons.
I don't know if fetuses are afforded any rights.
So, no, it would not have a right to it.
So even if we had a newborn who could be conscious if we gave them medicine, they don't have any kind of right to that treatment.
And I guess although again, I would fight.
I would fight on the optics for me because when you say newborn, we're intuition pumping a normal, healthy nine month fetus that's now delivered.
But I would fight that whatever you're describing is a very inhumane.
Well, it is a newly born human being that has a brain injury.
Or a lack of parts of a brain.
Right.
It is a newly born human being with a congenital cerebral defect.
Okay.
And we could give this human being medication for them to have a normal and healthy life.
But you're saying this human being would have no right to it.
And I guess their parents wouldn't have a right to say this child ought to be treated any more than somebody who has a dog that's injured would have a right to similar treatment.
I mean, you have a right to treat your animals, right?
But the question of whether we as a human society will treat this infant will be a very important thing.
So then, like, is there some moral compulsion on a healthcare system to provide emergency services or something?
Yes, yeah.
Yeah, no, I would say no.
Okay.
So not provide no duty to provide medical care to newly born human beings who have a brain defect.
Kind of, although again, I'm going to fight because when you say newly born human beings, you're intuition pumping a normal, healthy.
What do you think?
When I say intuition pump, what I mean is it's like, do you think it's okay to rape a person that doesn't have a brain?
And then if I say, well, I guess it's not barely a person.
You're like, okay, so it's okay to rape people with brain injuries.
I would fight.
And I would say, well, when you say people or person, the intuition is when somebody thinks of a person, they think of like a normal, healthy, functioning person.
And then you're plugging in like all of the normative baggage of raping somebody, which is ordinarily, we would all agree, is an unethical thing to do to a person.
Sure.
Or I could be in describing it accurately, a newly born human being, because human being is a biological category.
Most people have a deep intuition that newly born human beings are persons, even though they don't.
Where does that intuition come from, though?
It comes from a moral sense that we have, the same sense we have that people are persons regardless of their skin color.
No, I disagree.
I think it probably comes from us seeing human beings that are born and the vast majority of them being healthy, right?
If it was the case that only 5% of human beings that were born, you know, come out with fully functioning brains, that intuition could be markedly different.
So that's the only reason why I fight on the newborn child with a brain injury.
We're talking about an exceptional, kind of like when pro-choice people argue about abortion to save the life of the mother.
And they're like, shouldn't this be legal?
Pro-lifers will usually point out, well, that's an exceptional circumstance, a very rare case of abortion.
I would argue that whatever you're talking about would be a 0.000001%.
This is a very rare.
I don't even know if these types of brain injuries exist when people are born, except for like the hydrocephalus.
Well, anencephaly is a real condition.
What I'm talking about is a hypothetical example of we develop medicine to treat it.
And that's not as far-fetched as a brain transplant or a teleporter.
I mean, 150 years ago, a hip replacement would be science fiction.
And now we can do that.
That is true, but I don't know if we've made any progress in terms of brain regrowth or transplants.
But I mean, who's to say it could happen in the future?
Right.
I do have a concern, like when you say I am intuition pumping.
I agree with you.
People can have misleading examples.
I'm trying to keep the language very clear here.
But I would say the way you use the term makes it sound like intuition pumps are bad.
That's not traditionally how the term is used.
So for example, the term comes from the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
So he coined the term, I think, back in the 80s.
He wrote a book in 2013 called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
He says this.
I coined the term in the first of my public critiques of the philosopher John Searle's famous Chinese room thought experiment.
Some thinkers concluded I meant the term to be disparaging or dismissive.
On the contrary, I love intuition pumps.
That is, some intuition pumps are excellent.
Some are dubious, and only a few are downright deceptive.
So I agree with you.
Someone could create a thought experiment that's deceptive in its nature.
But the fact that I'm just describing what is happening to members of the human species, I don't think that's deceptive in any way.
Sure.
And I partially agree.
So for instance, if somebody says, why would you hit your own wife?
That makes about as much sense as keying your own car.
We could argue that there is a pump there that I think is like the fact that you would compare your wife to a car maybe demonstrates that there's another issue going on with the world.
Well, yeah, I would say that the example has a mistaken set of assumptions built into it, which you can do for any thought experiment.
But the only reason why I'm fighting on this particular point is because oftentimes when we say a person or a child, there's a feature in our mind of what a future complete person or child is.
But when we say a person or child absent things that are typically essential to that person or child, it feels a little iffy at the end to say, okay, so you'd be okay doing this to a person or a child.
I'm okay with it.
I'm only marking it for the audience because I know that the way that you're phrasing it makes it sound a certain type of way, and I want to fight the rhetorical.
Here's another question then.
Now, you would agree, though, that infants have consciousness.
They're aware of things.
We'll talk about the level of consciousness.
So it'd be wrong to kill them.
What if a human being was injured and because of their injury, they had permanently were at the level of consciousness of a newborn?
Would you say that that's still a person?
I believe so.
My understanding is that once those parts in the brain are communicating and you've got some level of conscious experience, it's there.
Again, like I said, I don't believe that you go from lizard consciousness to dog consciousness to ape consciousness to human consciousness.
Once it's there, it's there.
It's got to be in that bucket of human conscious experiences, even if it might be relatively subdued.
Do you think a three-year-old human being is more conscious of the outside world than a newborn infant?
Whether or not it's more or less conscious, I don't know if that's as much part of the development of the brain versus the acquisition of sense data.
So if you take a one-month-old and for some reason it's like a little bit developmentally delayed in terms of like it's the brain growth, but it can still collect and accrue a whole bunch of experiences, then that level of development might be enough to gain a surprising understanding of the world.
I mean, obviously it's going to be cognitive impairment, but I don't know if like the three-year-old is more conscious because they have a higher level of consciousness or if they've just been spending more time collecting data about the world.
Like I'd say a 25-year-old is probably more conscious of the world than a 10-year-old, but I don't know if that's because the 25-year-old developmentally or consciously from an experience is more mature because they've collected more data information.
I agree with you.
A 25-year-old will have more conscious experiences.
But I'm talking about the very act of perceiving the outside world.
I would say that a five-year-old and a 25-year-old, it's pretty similar.
Time might run a little bit slower for the five-year-old.
They haven't been around as long.
That's why summer break felt forever when we were kids, and now it goes by fast and we're parents.
But I mean, I have three kids.
I've seen the infant stage all the time.
They're basically eating machines, pooping machines.
They can't recognize you just by sight.
Would you agree that an infant and then a one-year-old, their brain has to get bigger and develop more neurons and synaptic connections to have more different kinds of experiences, wouldn't they?
I don't know if I would say it's like, I don't think I would call them an inhuman conscious, though, prior to that.
This is probably just like part of the development of a conscious experience.
But my understanding is that even in the womb, I believe children, whatever you would call it, like a third trimester developed thing can identify differences in languages, for instance.
So I don't know.
I think I take issue sometimes with the framing that like a one-month-old is like the third trimester fetus hears different sounds can differentiate different languages.
I believe that like on newborns, I think the city was like, I think they tested it, it was like one, three, and five days, I think.
But you can test like the, I think it's, they hook something up to the head and they see the differences between the native language, a non-native language, and then gibberish.
And I believe that newborn, like within a week, can already differentiate different sounds that are not part of the native language.
So I don't think like a one-day-old is like just a blob that has no constant of anything.
I think even in the womb, like fetuses are already starting to accrue data about the outside world.
I agree with that, but do you think a dog could probably understand, like dogs can understand the content of words like sit and stay?
I don't know.
I'm not entirely sure about that.
I'm pretty agnostic on the conscious experience of animals.
I feel like human conscious experience is a really sophisticated sapient thing.
I don't know if I would say that animals have anything even resembling our experience.
I'm not entirely sure.
I agree.
It's not like you or me.
But have you ever had a dog?
Lots, yeah.
Did you ever train them with commands?
Yeah.
Okay, so it seems like an infant, they don't recognize like verbal commands.
It'd be great if they did.
Or like the example I gave with pigs.
People can Google this online, pig plays video games.
They have pigs, they have to move the cursor to get it onto the blue dot, and they get a treat, and they can do that more than just what random chance would allow.
Like pigs seem pretty smart.
I think it'd be fair to say they have more of a conscious awareness of the world than what a newborn infant has.
I don't know if that's true.
I think that smart is a word that we use, but I don't know if the ability to problem solve or do Pavlovian associations is the same type of thing as having a robust sapient experience that humans have.
I do agree that dogs and pigs and dolphins especially can learn really complicated, intricate patterns, but I don't know if they have the same semantic understanding of the world or type of conscious sapient experience that humans do, even if they can't do really complicated pattern recognition, essentially.
Yeah, because this is what I'm trying to figure out here: is that, so let's say someone's permanently at the newborn level, so they're very disabled.
So in that case, do you think there's people if that person might be on a feeding tube because they might be really hard to manage?
Imagine a 35-year-old who acts like a newborn, might have to restrain them, maybe can't spoon feed them, might put them on a feeding tube.
People in that situation might be very difficult, and they're not going to have rational experiences like you or me.
Do you think a lot of people would want to withhold food in that case?
Possibly, but I think probably social contract and everything with the agreement that we have, we wouldn't do that to old people that need a lot of help with themselves.
We don't do that to people with extraordinary mental disabilities, so like low-functioning autistic people or something.
So this would probably fall in the category of protected people due to the rights that we afford everybody's discipline.
And so you don't have a principled objection against the social contract being widened to include unborn human beings.
You just personally don't agree with it.
Would I have a problem with it being widened?
I mean, I would because I would disagree with the widening of it.
I disagree with the moral justification for it, I guess, or the metaphysical justification for it.
Because I don't think that I don't think a one-cell thing is the same thing as an adult or even a third trimester fetus.
It's not the same.
I agree, it's not the same.
I don't think it's the same thing in kind.
It is, well, it is the same biological kind.
You're saying that it's moral value changes, but as a moral anti-realist, you can't believe moral value exists objectively.
It's just your opinion.
Yeah, but just because you're an anti-realist doesn't mean that you can't have opinions on, you just don't believe that those opinions are rooted in a moral fact, right?
Right.
You're entitled to your opinions, however incorrect they may be.
Correct.
And you're in touch with your opinions, but only if they come to the bottom of the world.
But you can't say they're incorrect.
Well, because you have a, I mean, but if you were to argue with a Muslim scholar, they would disagree, right?
Or a Jewish scholar or any other type of religion, right?
The fact that we disagree shows that there's some kind of objective truth we're all trying to seek out.
That is a total non-sequitur.
There are people that disagree with whether Vegito or Gejito would win in a fight in Dragon Ball GT, but that doesn't make them any more real.
Just because two people disagree over a fictional thing doesn't necessarily mean that fictional thing might be real.
I don't hold people morally blameworthy based on the position they hold of who would win in a fight, Superman or Goku.
I would just like to point out, I think.
No, whatever you're going to say is wrong.
Well, I'm pretty sure Dragon Ball GT is not canon.
Just letting you know.
That's an objective fact.
Just letting you know.
Well, but if we argue over whether it is or isn't canon, apparently it becomes an objective fact.
Well, I reckon we ought to stick to the abortion topic.
But no, no, but I will take issue because you said that a couple times now.
Just because two people disagree over something doesn't necessarily mean it's an objective fact of the matter, right?
I agree.
But also, it doesn't follow that just because people disagree that there is no objective fact.
Well, no, I never used that, though.
What I said was the inability to reconcile a disagreement means that there might not be an objective fact because there's no sensory organ that we have to perceive moral fact.
Again, to the one example, husband hits a wife.
How can anybody agree or disagree whether that ought to be a way that we discipline people?
For instance, you said the situation you described is underdeveloped.
I'd ask why did he hit his wife?
How exactly did he hit his wife?
If he hit her because she's gone crazy because of some kind of drug and is going to attack the people.
She hits him.
He hits her because she disrespects him in public.
She says something like, my husband doesn't make the bed in the morning, pisses me off.
And then he slaps her in public.
And I would say that that is wrong even when society once said it was right.
But then another person disagrees with you.
Sure.
How do you reconcile the disagreement?
Well, we would go, and once again, I want to get too far away from abortion here, but we would go back to our basic framework for understanding morality.
So if you look at natural law, for example, or just even basic intuitions, we say natural law.
Yeah.
Well, natural law is just things have a nature.
They have a way where they flourish.
We can see a good tree versus a bad tree non-morally.
Sure.
Do you get worried that you run into weird naturalistic fallacies or assumptions there?
For instance, it's natural for very young people to have sex before marriage, naturalistically, right?
Sure.
So how does natural law, how do you reconcile that with biblical law?
Well, I'm not even bringing the Bible into this.
So like when I would look at, let's say, like what our organs are for, I would say, okay, well, what is sex?
What does it do?
Yeah, it creates these pleasurable feelings, but it also involves the exchange of gametes, and that creates a biological human being.
And people are going to guess disagree when it has moral value, but allowed to continue to develop.
Normally it will develop.
And it's a very needy human being.
Nearly everybody agrees that when it's born, this needy thing is going to die unless somebody takes care of it.
I agree.
But backing up, there's a lot of other manipulations of sexual organs that don't involve the creation of a child.
Sure, but I don't want to derail us into talking about sexuality, though that is an issue when it comes to abortion.
I do think.
I will, real quick, just because it's a little, because I understand that you've set up a lot of questions for, I will say, intuition pumping that kind of make my position sound insane.
You can ask me questions, too.
That's my question.
Well, but these are the questions that I'm more interested in because you come from a position of moral authority where you believe that you have a set of objective facts that you want to argue in favor of.
But my argument to you would be: I don't believe that you can ever prove an objective fact without diving into the Bible.
There's no way that we can reconcile moral fact disagreements because we don't have a sensory organ to perceive it.
We can argue over color, we can argue over gravity, we can argue over things we can perceive, but morality we can't perceive.
We just have how we feel about it.
And I don't think that's a satisfying answer for a lot of people.
And I would just say if that were true, there's really no point in us talking about this at all right now.
Like, you'd have to say it's not an objective fact.
Like, is it an objective fact that the state should allow women to have abortions?
Is it an objective fact that the state should?
Well, that should is doing a lot of work there, shouldn't with regards to my purported morals.
I would say, yes, it is, that they should be allowed to have an abortion.
Well, it's, but it's not objective.
You're just saying, I would really like it.
It should be without them being objective, right?
Or no?
Well, what you're saying here is that you would just like if the state did what you thought was good, correct.
But what you agreed with, what you're not even what you thought was good, because that's a factual category.
What makes you feel good if the world were that way?
Correct.
Okay.
That's an opinion.
It is.
Okay.
That's why we argue with each other.
But I believe at the end of the day, we're engaged in the same game.
It's just, I think that you feel like you're standing on more solid ground than you actually have.
I do think so.
Here's another question.
Do you think post-abortive women who think they are murderers or women who mourn miscarriage like it's the death of a baby that they're deluded?
Not necessarily.
No.
Do you think I think that when they're I think that when they're mourning, I think that they're mourning a missed opportunity rather than the thing itself, I think.
But if you asked them women who've had abortions and say, I'm a murderer or a woman who miscarries, this is my baby died.
I think most of them wouldn't phrase it because some of those women may have also gone through periods of infertility.
And I'm sure they would say their period of infertility was different than the loss, than the death of the human being that was residing in their womb.
So I guess, let me put it to you this way.
What I'm saying is, I think if a woman miscarries or if she has an abortion and later comes to have regrets about it, I think that the feeling she has is probably not like, oh my God, there was that three-week fetus and I terminated it.
She's probably thinking like, there was a baby that could have existed.
I could have delivered a baby.
I would have had a child.
There was a person there that's now gone.
Do you think those women ever say, I killed my baby?
Not something will happen.
They probably, yeah.
Probably say that.
Do you think a woman who says, I'm a murderer because I had my period and I expelled an egg from my body, she's like, I murdered a human being.
Do you think she's deluded?
If you thought you murdered a human being because you had a period?
Yeah, you passed an egg.
It didn't get fertilized and that egg died.
She's probably is a loaded word, but I say she's probably deluded, yeah.
Why is she deluded?
I'm not even sure what she, I mean, periods are part of normal human menstruation.
Are you crying every month because you're murdering?
My point is that I agree.
But I would also, I would take the same intuitive answer, and I would say, does a woman cry or feel bad when she accidentally has a slightly rougher period?
She doesn't even realize that she's miscarried?
Because there's a lot of miscarriages happen early early on when women don't even know they're pregnant yet.
No, I agree.
I am not saying that because an unborn human being is a person, that everyone who miscarries will react properly or react with intense grief.
There's lots of born people that die we don't shed a tear for at all.
There's people dying right now as we're talking.
And, you know, okay.
But my point is that if the unborn, if a human embryo prior to 20 weeks, would you agree that it has the same moral status as an ovum, an egg?
Same, I mean, they're different things, but yeah, roughly the same, I guess, yeah, as a no moral status, yeah.
Okay, so then I would say that if a woman is, we would consider her deluded or off the reservation or, hey, there's nothing to get worked up over here.
It was just an ovum, you're operating with a really mistaken sense of the world.
It seems like under your view, we should have that same mentality towards post-abortive women prior to 20 weeks.
But I think my view better aligns with most people's intuitions that the death of a human embryo or fetus is far, far different morally than the death of an ovum.
But they're not valuing that fetus.
They're valuing what it would have become.
And again, I agree with what you're saying, but I think that you're skipping over really important steps.
If I steal $10,000 from somebody, did I steal $100,000 from them?
I didn't.
But if I steal $10,000 from somebody when they're 20, maybe when they're 25, they're like, oh, God, like if I would have invested this or 27 over seven years, maybe I could have had $100,000.
So when they're 25, they might feel really bad.
They feel like I should be $100,000 richer.
But that doesn't change the fact that seven years earlier, I only stole $10,000, not $100,000.
So if somebody loses a fetus, they might feel bad because now they're missing the child that could have been.
Much the same that if somebody would have connected with the right person earlier in life, maybe they could have had a wonderful marriage, but just because they're mourning the fact that they didn't meet a person at the right time doesn't mean they're suddenly divorced.
The marriage never happens the same.
So you're saying when somebody grieves over a miscarriage at, let's say, you know, 12 weeks, that's the same grief as like misconnections on Craig's list.
Like, oh, he could have been the one.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'll leave it up to our listeners to see if that is plausible.
And the last one, I guess, just to make sure you're on the record of this, do you agree with laws that would make it illegal to kill wanted fetuses?
Like, let's say a woman's pregnant, she's really excited, her boyfriend is like, I wanted you to get that abortion, and he slips her a drug, or he like kicks her in the stomach or something to kill the baby, kill, sorry, to kill the unborn human being, and that human being dies.
Or he kills the pregnant woman, and this 12-week fetus dies along with her.
In like 35, 38 states, and under federal law, that would be homicide for killing that unborn human being.
Do you not agree with those laws?
Prior to 20 weeks, no.
Okay.
All righty.
So, and like I said, and I'm fine to pitch back over to you.
I have more for you, but you can interrogate me also.
I want to recap your view and what it leads to.
Well, just to recap, it's permissible to kill infants who have not been conscious yet, to kill toddlers.
Oh, yeah, what if toddler loses all of his memories and they're not going to come back?
He's at the same stage as like a 19-week fetus.
And it's impossible.
That's like asking me, like, are you killed when you teleport on Star Trek?
I don't think I have an answer for that.
I don't think that's a very difficult hypothetical.
I think it challenges the concept of identity, but I don't know if that gets into like a human life or not a human life.
We're talking about deleting somebody's memory and resetting their brain to 19 weeks.
But why does it?
Because I guess, well, I guess here is, what if I gave you this argument?
Hold on.
Let me have here.
Because the symmetry argument you were making, I feel like it is, I can make a better one that runs on the same principles.
So what about this argument?
A person stops.
I don't endorse this for everything, but let's just do it for this discussion.
A person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual.
Okay.
Do you agree with that?
When future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual.
Yeah, they lose the ability to have a conscious.
Yeah, sure.
All right.
So a person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual.
Number two, a person exists as long as future conscious experiences are probable for that individual.
Well, and they had one prior, yes.
Because otherwise that sentence is meaningless.
Why don't I add this writer to it then?
And any conscious experiences they have must be psychologically connected to any previous experiences.
Maybe.
It's just the sentence that you gave.
A person exists as long as future conscious experience is possible.
So you've got the future conscious experience on there, but when you say a person exists, that person, I think, begs the conscious experience.
Because I don't know what it means for a person to exist if there is no conscious experience yet.
I'm just trying to do the exact same symmetry argument you're doing.
That if you stop existing, if you are an individual, and you stop existing when for this individual, future conscious experiences are impossible.
Correct.
Then why can't we say, then the other one would be for this individual, this individual is a person as long as future conscious experiences are probable.
Yeah.
As long as you, but when you're making the graph in the math thing, you have to have the filled-in circle and then the ray.
It's just saying, like, look, this person, future conscious experiences, they're impossible.
You are not a person.
Correct.
So the symmetry for that, and in fact, I'm actually being generous, because the symmetry would not be improbable.
It'd be possible.
Sure.
So my point would just be then, if a person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible, why can't we say a person exists as long as the future experiences are possible and a person starts existing at the first moment those experiences are possible?
I think that is my position.
It isn't because I would say, so for example, if somebody ends up in a persistent vegetative state, they've lost their immediate capacity to have conscious experiences.
But some people do come out of persistent vegetative states.
Okay.
All right.
So the point is not that they're able to have conscious experiences.
It's just that at some point in the future, they will be able to do that.
Okay.
Okay.
So then, wouldn't it follow then for that individual, even when they were an embryo, they're in the same position.
At some point in the future, they'll have conscious experiences.
I feel like your rejoinder is just going to be: the PVS person has the machinery for it, the embryo doesn't.
But I just don't see how that's relevant to the symmetry here.
Because when you say the fetus will in the future, it hasn't yet.
There's no person yet.
A person in a vegetative state or a coma, there is a person to speak of.
If I have a coma right now, you can say Stephen was a person, and he might have a future conscious experience.
If I haven't even existed yet, there's no Stephen to even speak of.
Right.
But nothing there to speak of.
But every being with conscious experiences will have a first experience.
Correct.
And I think that happens at 20 to 28 weeks.
Do you think a one cell organism is having an experience?
No, it's not.
But a 20 cell organism is having an experience.
But I would say what makes you a person is not the moment you have the experience, but that you're the kind of being who can have those experiences.
Just as someone who is brain dead is the kind of being who will never have those experiences.
What's the difference between an embryo and a corpse?
A corpse, the difference is a corpse is a human organism that has lost organic unity.
The parts don't work together for the good of the whole, and so it will decompose.
It will lose composition.
It will fall apart.
An embryo is a living organism.
Its parts work together to grow other parts.
When it becomes sophisticated enough, it will grow a brain to take over to keep development going.
That's only with the help of the mother, though, right?
Well, all of us need our mom's help when we're little.
We need to be fed.
We need to be past birth needs to be connected biologically to another thing, right?
So whatever definition you give of the zygote, the single cell, the union, I would argue you could give that same definition for a sperm or an egg.
You can argue that a sperm or an egg on its own will never develop anything.
The sperm or the egg need an egg or a sperm.
However, the fetus will never develop into anything.
It needs the sustenance from the mother, right?
Here's the difference.
I believe that something is an organism if you can give it time, nutrition, and a proper environment, and it has the capacity to develop into a mature member of a species.
And it only needs those three things.
Time, nutrition, proper environment.
That's great, but that's entirely arbitrary.
Why?
Because I could.
It's a definition of an organism.
That's why sperm and egg and cancer cells, they are body parts.
You give them time, nutrients, and environment.
They'll always be that same type of thing.
They cannot develop.
It depends on how we define environment, right?
Because a sperm put in the environment of an egg will eventually join and become, as it grows inside the womb, into something like a human eventually, right?
Right.
But I would say that when the sperm and the egg combine, the sperm and egg no longer exist anymore.
They've undergone a substantial change.
They're defined as being.
What do you think is more different?
A sperm or a one-celled organism from a nine-month baby?
What do you think is more different there?
Wait, come again.
Yeah, there's one sperm or one egg.
What's more different?
The one sperm and the one egg to the zygote or the zygote to the nine-month fetus?
They are different in a myriad of ways.
Sure, but your argument, you're saying that that nine-month fetus is more in common with the single-cell zygote than a sperm or an egg has with a single-cell body.
A nine-month fetus and zygote are the same kind of thing because the words zygote and fetus, if you look them up, would say this is the stage of development in the life of a human being.
So a nine-month fetus and a zygote are very different.
One's going to have billions of more cells, for example.
But a sperm, an egg, and a zygote, the difference there is greater because we're not talking about degree.
Like a zygote and a fetus, they're different in degrees, more cells, more abilities.
But the sperm, egg, and the human embryo, they're different in kind.
These are organs.
They're body parts.
They're not a whole body.
I understand what you're saying.
I just, I don't know if I'm pushing you on the arbitrariness of your saying a difference in kind, because that single-cell organism is nothing in kind.
It's got genes, it's got a genetic profile.
But without the nutrients from the mom, it'll grow into two, four, eight cells, and then what, die?
So in your world, the in-kind of that.
If you don't give nutrients to an infant, what will happen to them?
The infant could die as well.
Could or will.
But that conscious experience is already there, so it escapes my issue.
No, but I'm saying that the point you're making, I don't see how it shows that the embryo is not a person or doesn't have moral value just because you have a strange definition of time, nutrition, and proper environment, and then you are drawing an arbitrary border around.
I'm saying that's what makes something an organism.
Yeah, but we're not arguing over something being an organism or not, right?
We're arguing over when something gets personhood.
Yeah, and I'm saying persons are kinds of organisms.
A person is a kind of being capable of rational existence.
Well, it's a kind of being capable of rational existence, but though that stops when the being is dead.
Correct.
Right, because the being doesn't exist anymore.
It's gone back to body parts.
it does exist or what do you mean it doesn't exist i would say that what part stops existing The organic unity.
So when you are dead, so if you, when I die, however you want to define that, let's say it is important.
Just because we can't define the moment when somebody dies, we know the difference between dead people and living people.
Dead people, their bodies start to decompose because their blood's not being pumped, it's not being oxygenated.
The parts aren't working together for the good of the whole.
From fertilization onward, a human organism has this.
My point is just that human organisms are persons because they belong to a rational kind.
I guess, let me put it out here.
This is what I think when it comes down to the abortion debate.
I think there's really only three defensible views, and yours is not one of them.
Just to be clear on that, just real quick, because you say human organisms are part of a rational kind.
I agree with you.
Yes.
We're just fighting over if the brackets extend to the 20 weeks to zero weeks, basically.
Like, I do agree with that statement, but the statement is begging the question of what is a human organism.
I am saying you don't need the immediate capacity.
You don't need the immediate capacity to be conscious, to be a person, because I think you're still a person, even if you have a brain injury and you've lost that ability temporarily.
I believe, and just what the examples that I gave earlier, I think that most people would say it is wrong to take a healthy fetus, permanently make them unconscious.
and do God knows what with them.
And I think the only thing that can explain why that's wrong is because that human fetus has a right to properly develop in virtue of being a person.
And I think it's a very strong moral intuition most people would share.
Sure.
Do you think if it was the case that a fetus were to grow 8, 16, 32 to 64 cells in size, and then it had some kind of deformation or it wasn't able to develop past that point, do you think we have a moral obligation to deliver the 64 cell organism and then keep it alive in a dish for as long as we can, assuming we could deliver it?
I think we have a moral obligation to provide medical care to sick humans.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's why I gave the example, like we provide spina bifida treatments, even I think we could do it possibly before the 20-week cutoff.
Like we could start having medical technology for fetuses before 20 weeks.
Sure.
I'm not, to be clear, I'm not talking about any of that.
To be very, very, very clear.
What I'm saying is a woman is having trouble.
Maybe the pregnancy is not going okay.
But we have the ability to keep any organism alive in a petri dish for as long as you want.
You would say there's a moral obligation to safely deliver using a microscope and tweezers or whatever, a 64-cell organism and put it in a petri dish and then provide nutrients and keep that thing alive until the end of its natural medical.
No, I think that we should provide proportionate medical care.
So for example, when my wife and I were dealing with miscarriage, like our child almost miscarried, we rushed to get progesterone to inject her with it.
It's thick as concrete.
It's rough to administer.
But we were doing that to save the life of that actual child, who might have been only a few cells, more than 64, because most people figure it out.
It's a lot older than that.
Actually, I have an interesting question.
Wait, I'm going to ask a question, write it down.
Because you used a word here to escape that.
Wait, on the book, can you show me what the one-week thing looks like?
Yeah, sure.
Or what's the earliest picture?
The earliest picture?
Yeah, sure, I've got that right here.
Here.
Yeah, this would be this guy.
So I'm asking if you have to deliver that.
So this would be a notice.
Yeah, this is a new human being.
Yep.
Right here.
So if we had the technology to deliver that, and the care was quite simple.
You just water the dish and maybe put a couple of nutrients in the dish and you could keep that alive for five to ten years.
You'd be just as morally obligated to keep that alive in a Petri dish than you would for a child that might be born a little bit unhealthy, keeping that alive.
I don't know if we're morally obligated to sustain the life of a human being by putting them essentially in a freezer.
It's not a freezer.
It'd be a petri dish.
You could play music for it if you want.
Probably wouldn't do very much good at that stage, but the music, I would say.
Sure.
But your position, because now you're, because you're relying on human intuition a lot, you're trying to say that it's so obvious if there's a life, but now when I've challenged you to putting that thing in a petri dish and watering it, if I were to ask you the same question about, let's say a child is born and it's only going to live to be six months to one year old, I'm a parent, you're a parent, both of us would probably say, yeah, do everything you can for it.
You can't just kill it, even if it's going to die at an early age.
Now I'm asking you for the 64-cell organism.
We have the same obligation to put that in a Petri dynamic.
Yeah, but you could have all these examples where we don't know what to do.
What if they said, you know, hey, Destiny, if you're your child, we don't know if we can save them, but if you put them in this cryotank in 200 years, we think they'll come up with a cure.
I agree, it would be hard, but that's why, to quote you earlier, it's just a hypothetical.
So earlier you asked if we had a child born missing parts of its brain that we could inject a drug to give it more of a brain in the future.
That's a pretty crazy hypothetical.
So now I'm asking you, an equally crazy hypothetical, a 64-cell organism is born.
Do we have an obligation to keep it alive in a Petri dish indefinitely?
Some hypotheticals are going to be closer to reality than others.
Brain transplants and swaps are pretty far away.
Cryogenetics is closer, but still not quite there.
The example I gave is just: is it wrong to take a healthy fetus and cause them to be permanently unconscious?
That's pretty, I mean, we lobotomize born people.
It's not that far out of the room.
Lebotomies do not mean a loss of consciousness.
When you say healthy fetus, it implies healthy functioning brain function.
So I'm introducing a lot of fun.
But if it's before 20 weeks, there's no person there you could destroy the brain, the developing brain.
Correct.
There's no problem.
Yeah, but in your world, if a 64-cell thing was born, it needs to be kept alive in a Petri dish until natural metabolic functions cease.
No, we should provide medical care for human beings prior to birth.
We might disagree about what kind of care that is.
Let's take, for example, though, fetal alcohol syndrome.
Okay.
Now, under your view, here's what I'm curious about.
You've given the analogy before that drinking while pregnant, that doesn't harm an individual, it harms a person in the future.
Like if you hang a piano and it's got withering wires and it's going to fall on Bob in three days, it's bad because it's going to fall on him in three days.
And I guess the analogy there is like when the child's born, eventually they're going to figure out, why am I not like the other kids?
The harm is later, I guess, instead of when you were drinking before.
Correct.
Okay.
Is a woman, let's say a woman's diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and this human being has killed the woman?
Yeah.
Not the woman, the child.
The human fetus has fetal alcohol syndrome.
Is she morally obligated to abort that fetus and start over?
Is the fetus past 20 weeks?
No.
Is she morally obligated to abort a pre-20-week fetus?
Knowing if she does nothing, a human being, under your view, with fetal alcohol syndrome will come into existence.
I would lean towards no.
Why?
But it would be close.
Because I don't know under what circumstances would you be morally obligated to terminate a pre, I don't think that's a level of harm that justifies it.
Like, for instance, if a child was to be born with any number, maybe it could have Huntington's disease or Tay-Sachs or anything else, would we morally obligate people to abort or Down syndrome or any kind of, I don't know if you could morally obligate people to abort those things.
I think that's, I think that gets into a weird territory that I've already said.
But do you think it's wrong for someone to is it wrong for someone to drink to excess because they don't care if the fetus gets fetal alcohol syndrome?
Yes.
Then what's the difference?
If that's wrong, why wouldn't it be wrong to refuse to abort that child, human being?
I mean, you can do future harm to something and it's wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that thing has to be terminated.
Like, I think these two things are disconnected.
Right, but I'm saying that in both cases, the end result is the same.
You do something, and it causes a being with a disability to come into existence.
And you're saying, well, yeah, it's wrong to drink.
Well, I guess we say here, is it wrong to cause a fetus to have fetal alcohol syndrome if you're planning to get an abortion at 12 weeks?
And he does.
Okay.
So it sounds like there that...
That'd be to make the piano analogy.
Is it wrong to put a piano in a building for it to fall over in three days if you don't think a person is going to be underneath the building?
No.
Well, let me give you the piano analogy.
Suppose you have the piano.
The only way to keep it from hitting Bob is to cut the wire early so it drops on Bob's shopping cart.
Yeah.
Bob's a homeless man, pushes shopping cart around.
So it's either going to destroy, because that's more like pregnancy then.
The piano is either going to destroy, harm Bob the person, or harm the non-person, the shopping cart.
It seems like you only have two choices there.
Would you say there, you're obligated to destroy the shopping cart?
Where does the obligation to destroy the shopping cart come from?
I don't understand that part.
Bob is pushing, he's pushing his shopping cart.
And you hung that.
Well, here, we can, even without the analogy, okay, because I'm following you on the fetal alcohol syndrome thing.
We can agree that it's wrong for, I think we both agree, it would be wrong to cause harm to a future person by drinking alcohol while you're pregnant.
Well, let's say that right.
The only alternative, I'm using the piano example.
We can still keep with it.
Okay.
If in the piano, because you seem pretty clear here, if in the piano example, we only have two choices: we do nothing and it injures Bob, or we do something and it destroys Bob's shopping cart.
You seem pretty confident we should injure the non-person.
Correct.
And yet you don't feel that way where a woman who has fetal alcohol syndrome, she has two choices.
She does nothing, baby is born, has FAS, or you do something and the pre-viable fetus is destroyed.
Yeah, okay, maybe we're off.
The part of your analogy that's, or the part of the hypothetical game that's challenging, is the force her to do something.
So let's say it was the case that a woman was drinking and then she gets a pregnancy.
It's like, oh shit, I'm pregnant and I'm 16 weeks pregnant.
Yes.
And she's like, I'm going to have an abortion because I don't want to harm a future person.
I think that's totally fine.
The question is you originally posted was, which should we obligate her to have an abortion at 16 weeks?
That gets a lot harder, I think.
Should we obligate destroying the cart instead of hurting Bob?
That's the thing, though.
It's destroying the cart versus hurting Bob.
Like fetal alcohol syndrome is often not lethal.
It's not like the life is completely hard.
Let's say it's a light piano that's going to cause damage.
It's still going to make Bob messed up for a while when it hits him in the head.
I don't know if you can obligate, because at that point, then, shouldn't you obligate the termination of any fetus that might have certain types of conditions?
I'm using the word eugenics and I'm not sure.
Well, not under, and once again, I'm trying to tease out your view because under your view, it is impossible to harm a fetus prior to 20 weeks.
It is, but there's a harm to the mother and to the autonomy of the mother if you force her to have an abortion.
Like, there is a harm in losing a future person, much the same that if I steal $10,000 from somebody, in 30 years, it might have been $100,000.
The difference is when I take that $10,000, I'm not taking $100,000.
But a lot of times I could deprive somebody of a future person, and they could actually experience a deprivation of the future person.
But killing somebody's 16-week fetus is not the same as killing their two-year-old two years later.
That's the difference.
Right.
But I would say that we force people like parents all the time to do or not do certain things so that their children don't come to harm.
You know, we restrict even things like secondhand smoke, for example, in really restricted situations with a child.
I think parents get obligated all the time.
Sure, but we would never say that like a child exposed to heavy secondhand smoke should we kill him before he has lung cancer or something, right?
We would never make that.
Now, my view, of course, is that anybody with a disease or a genetic defect or a condition, we should help that person.
We shouldn't kill them, regardless of their stage of development.
Okay.
All right.
Sorry, we can.
It's always weird.
I mean, I'm not sure.
Do you want to go anywhere else?
Actually, well, we have one super chat we could read here really quick.
We have Alan Granna.
Hey, thank you, man, for the super chat.
Appreciate it.
No, say, no, pay.
If you can't force her to become a mom, then you shouldn't be able to force him to become a father and pay for something he doesn't want.
Fair is fair.
I believe this is in reference to a specific term for it.
I think the financial abortion.
I think that's not the preferred term, though, from people who are actually advocating for what it is.
I think it's deadbeat daddism?
No, no, no.
I've heard of male abortion.
I think It's evading me at this moment, but I think it's something like paternal legal paternal surrender, I think is the desired term by people that advocate for it.
So, in essence, if a child is born, because in certain states women can get abortions, they're advocating that, well, if the woman, in the instance that the woman opts to keep the child, that the father could surrender all legal obligations from custody and also from having to pay child support.
Right.
I don't know if you guys, it's semi-related to this conversation.
I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that.
Are you in favor of I think that if the state could theoretically provide everything, then fine, but insofar as the state can't, usually questions regarding child support are made in the best interest of the child.
If you want to talk about what's fair around child development, you're never going to get a good answer because it's not fair that women have to deliver kids and men don't.
So it's kind of a silly proposition to say, well, what's the most fair about child support?
Because there's nothing fair about delivering a kid, right?
Yeah, and I would just say that mothers and fathers have equal, though different responsibilities.
They're both equally responsible to care for their children, but they're going to have different responsibilities because men and women are biologically different.
Women intimately provide food, shelter for unborn children, and men typically provide by expending calories to work to provide resources for the mother and child.
So that's, I think that's how I would go through there.
Gotcha.
I actually do have one question for you, Trent.
Okay.
From a legislative perspective, so would you like to see abortion made illegal?
I would like to see the fetuses that are wanted.
So the fetuses that are wanted, I would just want the unwanted ones to be treated the same way.
So in places where we say, yeah, if a guy kills a pregnant woman, that's so sad.
She wanted that baby.
We need justice for that.
Or we protect those children or we provide medical care even before 20 weeks even to help these children.
I would just want the law.
The law already provides protection for wanted fetuses.
I would just want it to extend the same thing to the unwanted ones.
Do you think it'd be fair to give a woman the death penalty if she had an abortion for her twins?
Well, I don't believe in the death penalty in general.
Do you think it'd be fair to put her in jail for life?
Maybe.
It depends.
I guess I might say maybe the penalty we give for an abortion.
Well, for example, there was a woman in Nebraska a few weeks ago.
She got an abortion at 29 weeks.
And she texted her mom.
One of the reasons she did it was because she was really excited to be able to fit back into her genes again.
So do you think she should be legally punished?
For 29 weeks?
Yes, sure.
How much?
Whatever infanticide the punishment would be.
I would say the same.
But you would say the same for one week.
Yeah.
Well, I would say that the punishments that we give at one week, we can't even get an abortion at one week.
Five weeks.
I would say that the law and how we apply it, it's going to be different based on, like in that example, that woman seemed very callous, very uncaring.
Another woman in another case, she might respond differently.
Sure.
I'm talking strictly in the case of murder, not a, or no, even in the, well, give me the other example.
I'm curious.
Because whatever.
No, go ahead.
I'll let you.
What was the other example you're going to give?
I don't think I would.
I mean, I wasn't giving another example.
I'm just saying there's going to be a lot of different cases.
But in any of these cases, would we excuse the murder of a one-year-old child?
No, we wouldn't.
But I would say that we do end up giving different punishments.
I know that people who kill five-year-olds or 10-year-olds, sometimes the punishment there is different than like a newborn infant, for example.
So I don't know exactly what it should be, but I do think that we should treat the deliberate killing of human beings before birth that can be established even early on, let's say five or six weeks, we should treat it with serious gravity, even on parallel.
I'm asking should be the same as a five-week old abortion, I think, should be treated the same, in your view, as a five-year-old child murder.
Yeah, I think that they should both be treated the same.
Yeah.
But I think that even if our even if pro-lifers were mistaken about what kind of punishments that we would give, it wouldn't show that the pro-choice position is incorrect.
Someone could believe in animal rights, for example, and be inconsistent on how to punish people for what they do with animals, things like that.
Even if someone were inconsistent, and I don't think that it's inconsistent, it should be treated with a certain gravity.
Though I also think that the laws that we pass now, right now they do tend to focus more on the abortion providers because we live in a weird time.
But I'm just asking, like, wait, what do the two cell thing look like again?
The Zygote.
I want to see the thing.
Sure, of course.
Okay.
So a woman that takes plan B to get rid of maybe something like this would suffer the same legal penalty as a woman that murders her five-year-old child.
Yeah, I think there could be who murders their five-year-old child, like, out of the womb.
I think a jury might find things to be a little bit different.
It's a first-degree murder of a human being.
Plan B, it's literally premeditation.
You go to take the pill, you really want to fit in your genes, versus one with a five-year-old who's just like tired of it.
They're too annoying.
They don't want to deal with it anymore, murders a child.
So that thing and then the five-year-old child are treated the same in the eyes of the law, the plan B versus the murdering of the child.
No, because I would say that even among born people, based on the level of indifference that required, the level of knowledge that a person has, even if you look at among born victims of violence, would you agree that among born victims of violence, the punishment that is given, it's going to be different based on the motivation.
I think all of these are, I think it's an equivocation here.
I think that very clearly, if somebody says, do you think that the penalty for murdering a 10-year-old and a five-year-old and a 25-year-old should be the same?
I would say, yeah, it's murder.
Of course, they should be treated the same.
Now, are there going to be aggravating or mitigating factors in any murder?
Of course, but substantially, I wouldn't change the difference between the murder of a five-year-old, 15-year-old, 25-year-old, and you would agree, but it would be 25-year-old, 15-year-old, 5-year-old, and 5-cell organism for you.
It would all be treated the exact same as you law.
Do you think a woman who gives birth at prom, prom baby birth, and throws in the dumpster, should she get the same punishment as someone who deliberately kills their 25-year-old husband to get his insurance policy or something like that?
So you added a lot in that.
Okay, fine, fine, aggravated.
No, no, no, no, because there's aggravating factors, deliberately kill somebody for an insurance policy versus mitigating factors of like delivers during a prom or whatever, right?
There can be aggravating or mitigating factors that influence how we view a particular crime, same as the killing of two of the same five-year-olds.
But I'm saying like a plan B, plan B is the same as going to the store, buying a thing of bleach, going home, force-feeding it to your kid, and then watching the brain.
We don't know that exactly because plan B has multiple ways of acting.
It could stop the egg from ovulating.
It could prevent it.
It could stop implantation.
Yeah, I would say that'd be more like grave indifference, like if you chuck a rock off a freeway overpass or something like that.
Well, no, hold on.
When you take plan B, it's not the hopes that potentially maybe blah, blah, blah.
Like you're very specifically trying to effect a certain outcome.
Much the same that it could be.
It would be like throwing a rock of an overpass at a kid.
No, the outcome could be just preventing yourself from ovulating.
It could be.
Yeah.
It's just to not become pregnant.
But the chance of that could also be the preventing of the implantation.
So the fertilized egg just goes out, right?
Yeah.
But I don't think, I feel like we're working, these kinds of questions I feel like work backwards.
So it's like, is this individual a person?
Like there's two questions.
Is this individual a person?
And what should the punishments be for harming this person?
I feel like we don't answer the first, we don't.
Answer the punishment.
We don't get the answer of the person question by answering the punishment one first.
We answer, is this a person or not first?
And then we figure out everything else.
Otherwise, we're working backwards with our intuitions.
I kind of agree, but I would argue that you were working backwards from intuitions as well when you presuppose a human body that exists, when you presuppose a human body that exists without parts of its brain, which I would argue is not even necessarily a human, that you can probably remove enough parts of a person and you ship a theses them into another type of organism.
So if you want to work backwards from that, then obviously I'm going to ask you similar questions and work backwards from intuition around like our ability to harm people, right?
Because I actually think, even though it sounds strange and it sounds like it's working backwards, I actually think it's hitting at the core of the issue.
When we think of harming, we think of a conscious experience that's being harmed, that's being hurt, right?
If I harm a person, I'm not thinking of like poking a person that is a corpse, right?
But people could have massively incorrect intuitions.
I remember a scene from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Huck, I think it's Aunt Polly, he tells her in the book, oh, there was a steamship that exploded.
And she said, oh, did anyone die?
He said, no, just a few Negroes.
Well, that's, you know, that's not exactly what she said, but you get the point.
And Aunt Polly says, oh, good, I'm glad nobody got hurt.
So people can have massively incorrect intuitions.
I don't think they can in your world, though, because you told me that you're a moral realist who relies on people's intuitions.
And you're saying that any two people's intuitions should be sufficiently similar enough to agree on objective moral fact.
No, that would be on basic intuitions.
So now there's different types of it.
Yeah, tell me the different types.
Sure, there are.
Like, just to say that we ought to do good and not evil.
That's the most basic intuition of them all.
That's begging the question.
The things we ought to do are by definition good.
A good thing is the thing you ought to do.
It's like saying murder is unjustified when murder is defined as the unjust.
There are things you ought to do irrespective of the consequences to you, for example.
Even if you end up suffering a great deal, in some cases there's things you ought to do or refrain from because it just is good.
You know, things like that.
But then, like, for example, you ought not directly kill an innocent human being.
Like, that's just a general intuition everybody shares.
But can you kill human beings in war, for example?
Because you don't mean to, but you're trying to destroy an enemy base.
There's going to be, it's going to be a little bit more difficult in the applied cases, but we have the most basic intuition.
So for me, if the basic intuition is that we don't kill infants, we don't kill adults.
We don't kill disabled humans.
We do kill pigs and cows and other non-human animals.
Why is that?
To me, the only explanation, it cannot be rooted in consciousness.
Because what is the relevant difference between those non-human animals and the human beings?
I know you say human consciousness, but there's a difference between human consciousness and a human who is conscious.
Right?
Yeah.
I just think that some of these intuitions that you're hitting at for taking such a solid, I guess, realist position on morality, it feels like we can find even fundamentally.
Somebody could argue, for instance, in the animal world, if I think I saw a video of a cheetah where when the babies are born, they lick them, they try to get them to kind of like move, and sometimes the baby can't move, so the cheetah will just abandon the baby and walk away.
Right.
So who's to say if a person says, well, I think intuitively, if a kid can't walk, then the kid isn't entitled to anything.
Like if you have to retreat from an area, if you need to go hunt and gather, if a child can't walk, then you leave them.
What if somebody comes at you with an intuition like that?
Say there's a tribe where those intuitions exist.
How do you figure out whose intuition is correct?
Well, we look at how we've come to understand human beings, and there might be really rare cases where you only have enough food to feed certain people.
It's not what I'm talking about.
I'm just saying.
Are you saying they're killing the child?
They just leave them there.
Yeah, they abandon the child.
Why do they abandon the child?
Because they're not able to care for the child?
Because the child can't move.
So they feel like until the child can move and acquire resources for itself, the child's not really worthy of participating in the social contract, participating in that tribe.
Up until the child can move, you know.
They're wrong.
We would call that barbaric.
Okay, but why, under what objective ground?
On the objective ground that all human beings have dignity no matter.
And in fact, that was the difference.
In ancient Rome, 2,000 years ago, the Romans did place disabled children in the wilderness for them to be eaten by animals.
And Christians went and rescued them because they recognized all human beings have this dignity regardless of what they can do.
But I'm asking you, how do you resolve that difference, that disagreement and intuition?
I don't think you can.
You can say it's wrong or barbaric.
But that's the same thing.
You could have somebody who says, look, I think that marriage just means you have 24-7 access to your wife.
Hold on, we don't need another analogy.
Just on that example, somebody says, if it's a disabled child, if they can't walk on their own, I should be able to just leave it and carry on because the child's never going to be able to walk or whatever.
Why are they wrong?
That's their intuition.
and intuition points there.
The reason why I'm highlighting this is because you told me earlier that you made it seem like...
Because then we could use reasoning.
We could say, look, when you as an adult, when you get injured, we try to help you out.
We don't abandon you.
So then there's an example where we might apply moral reasoning to help them see they're being incoherent, for example.
Why wouldn't you apply this to someone who's just a younger version of you versus the same thing?
Yeah, but they'll say, I can walk again.
What about for disabled children?
You said the Romans did this.
They left a disabled child.
Right.
And the person, and then you, what if you say to the person, well, you know, you wouldn't want this to happen if you were disabled.
And they're like, yeah, that's part of the agreement, actually.
If I was disabled, I would expect to be left.
Yeah, I would agree.
And that's, and like I said, there's going to be cases where people have a consistent, horrifying morality.
They're going to end up.
And all is absolutely begging the question.
I'm not asking.
Yeah, I think it's horrifying to leave children just because you can't stand the side of their disability and you think they're not worthy because that might be the case, but they might argue that it's horrifying that maybe they come to America and they say that's fine, but they say you've got a society where there are people that are able-bodied, that are capable of helping in society.
You don't have the medical resources for them, but you're spending billions of dollars on disabled children.
They're going to die before they hit nine years old.
Why do you have homeless people on the street, but you're spending money on disabled children that are going to die in a few years anyway?
They might be horrified about that.
Then my question goes back to you because you told me earlier that intuition is how we determine moral fact.
And what I'm saying is morality is the only qualia, I guess, that exists where we can only reconcile it with arguments.
I don't have to argue with you about gravity.
I don't have to argue with you about the color of something.
I don't have to argue with you about how loud something is.
But for moral fact, this is why I believe it's subjective and not objective.
You can never reconcile disagreements between two parties.
That's different intuition.
People do this all the time.
C.S. Lewis, the Christian author, gave lots of examples of this.
That when people have a disagreement, they'll appeal to universal norms.
They'll say, I was sitting in that seat first.
It's not fair for you to take it.
I helped you with this.
You ought to help me with that.
When people have moral disagreements, they don't just resort to their mere opinions about the matter or what they like or dislike.
Most people appeal to some kind of universal norm to apply, and they assume it to be true for everybody.
Yeah, but people would appeal to those same universal norms in a time period where women couldn't vote and black people were slaves.
So what does it say about the appeal to that universal norm?
It doesn't seem to be a universal norm they're appealing to.
Well, it seems to me it's actually, if anything, I would argue it's the non-cognitivist position where they pretend to appeal to a universal norm, but really it's what do I prefer?
Because I bet somebody's used that phrase of like, you can't take my seat.
That's not fair.
But they would say somebody like Rosa Parks should always be in the back of the bus.
Right.
And then that's where you have people like Abraham Lincoln who made great arguments to say, if you think a black person can be enslaved because they have a darker skin than you, you are now going to be a slave to the person whose skin is lighter than you and apply the moral reasoning.
But let me, about the objectivity, do you think in the past 2,000 years human beings have gotten better at mathematics and our mathematical knowledge has grown?
Yes.
Okay.
So our knowledge of mathematics has grown.
We've gotten better at mathematics and math is objective, right?
When you say objective, what can you, what do you mean by that?
We don't determine mathematical truths by a social contract.
Math is all built on systems of logics, right?
It's built on tautologies, right?
One equals one, one plus one equals two, and then from those tautologies, we build out systems of mathematics.
But it's a thing constructed with logics.
I think a priori we all have logics in our head, things like non-contradiction.
But it's all objective.
It's objectively true, even if it's built on these axioms.
Objective with respect to systems of logics, yes.
Yeah, but we don't create the systems of logic.
We discover them.
I mean, people smarter than me will argue anti-realism versus mathematical realism.
I don't know if there's like an objectively correct answer there.
Well, there's a difference between whether the mathematical objects exist or not.
That's, I mean, but my understanding is mathematics is built on tautologies, that we label something as something else, and then we build it using logics that a priori we're all gifted with.
All humans have some basic logics of identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle.
There's like very basic, like we can't fathom something that it has contradictory properties, or we can't fathom one thing being another thing, right?
And then based off those basic logical faculty, we build that.
Let's get back to brass tacks.
Okay.
Whose view on abortion leads to more unusual cases of killing or exploiting beings?
Because I asked you a bunch of questions about, and you admitted that you can create unconscious human beings, harvest their organs, make them sex dolls, kill newborns who have never been conscious.
You're not sure about one-year-olds who've lost their memories.
There's no obligation to give medical care to an encephalic child if we discovered it.
I think your view leads to a lot of counterintuitive views that lead to a lot of killing and exploitation.
People would disagree with.
Would you agree that there's more of that in your view than my view?
No.
Okay, can you give examples of where my view leads to weird cases of killing or exploiting?
Killing or exploiting?
I would argue that the exploitation is forcing women to gestate and give birth to things that aren't even persons yet.
So basically mandating that women, as soon as they think they might even possibly be pregnant, that they have now a moral obligation to find out if they are pregnant, and if they are, that they're forced to carry that thing to term, regardless of how many precautions they took to prevent getting pregnant.
I also think we're placing a very high burden on our medical system where we now have an obligation to care for every single zygote up to the moment metabolism terminates.
So if a woman feels like she might be having a miscarriage, that woman can't go to the bathroom and miscarry.
She needs to go to a hospital immediately, even if it's six weeks old, even if it's 10 weeks old.
That miscarriage needs to be dealt with the same way that you would operate on any living human being.
You need to extract it.
You need to put it in a dish and you need to feed that and keep it alive for as long as the metabolic functions will carry on.
Well, why can't I just say hospitals are required to give a woman progesterone to help her child?
We don't have the technology yet to extract animals.
You're asking me to give you the potential harms in your world.
Now you want to reframe it in the best possible light, but I'm just saying in your world, there's hospitals and hospitals and hospitals dedicated to keeping alive potentially these 64, 128 cell organisms that may never even develop into people.
So you're saying that the weirdest thing about my view is that we might care about human beings too much.
The weirdest thing in, well, that's one way to phrase it, but I would argue that you're not caring about the women human beings.
Caring about the 12-cell organisms that now need to be indefinitely cared for in hospitals in Petri dishes.
Well, under my view, what about those women who want those children to live?
Shouldn't they be able to go to the hospital and get help?
In my view, they can go to the hospital and get help.
And I agree.
That's what makes it really worth it.
Nothing about what you just said is exclusionary.
No, because your view isn't actually applied.
Most people in the world outside there don't hold your view.
They have a schizophrenic view.
They give respect and care and legal protection to unborn humans that are wanted and then create justification to kill the unwanted ones.
That's crazy.
I mean, you can ask them about their schizophrenic views, but I think I'm pretty consistent through and through for all of you.
Right, and I agree.
That's why people, both of our views, I think people should abandon their schizophrenic view and pick one of our consistent views.
And I think McGrain is more humane.
Sure.
And I don't like the one where a woman that has an abortion of a whatever that was or takes plan B might be charged with first-degree murder.
Fine, charged with something else.
But it would be first-degree murder.
Why not?
Because I think that if a woman pre, if she determines that she wants to go and murder her one-year-old, I think she should be charged with first-degree murder.
I don't think that should be the same penalty.
Sure.
After the Civil War, all the Confederate soldiers could have been thrown in prison for treason or hung.
We're talking about after the Civil War.
No, very easy.
We don't even need an analogy.
It's very basic.
Lots of people.
Now Plan B.
It's a simple.
It's so simple.
It's simple in your view.
If a person has an abortion, they're murdering.
That's a really simple thing.
But we have a widespread, we live in a society that has a widespread disagreement about that.
And so to come to a national consensus about how we treat the unborn, we're going to have to do that in compromised legal ways, just like America had to do in Reconstruction after the Civil War when there were massive disagreements in our country.
I think we're at a similar crossroad.
That's fine.
We can argue that, but that's like a sophisticated political legal argument.
And your moral argument, your ideal political legal world is one in which a woman who has an abortion, twins at 14 weeks, is charged with double homicide, double first-degree murder.
We can both do the intuition-pumping thing that—because here's the problem.
Both, you could say, like, oh, yeah, like, there's the two-cell embryo.
That's crazy to charge that with murder.
Well, under your view, killing this thing is not murder.
Whereas that's going to really mess with a lot of people's intuitions when they see that.
I think less people's intuitions than those that would say that having a miscarriage.
So for instance, here's another thing.
You would agree that every single miscarriage should probably demand an investigation for a potential homicide, correct?
No.
We don't do that even for born children.
We absolutely do.
If a born child dies, you don't think CPS or investigators are automatically involved in that?
Not necessarily.
Almost every one-year-old child dies in a house?
Right.
Of course.
Well, you're going to, here's the problem here.
We have, when a child dies, we have the technology to take a newborn and do an autopsy to determine what happened to that human being.
Okay.
When it comes to a first trimester miscarriage, we don't do those investigations because we don't have the technology.
You absolutely can do those investigations.
How?
A woman comes into the hospital and she miscarries, right?
You mean she is miscarrying or she has?
She's miscarrying in the process of Miscarrying, right?
She has intense stomach pain.
She goes to the hospital.
Sure, she goes there, wants progesterone.
We should pull the baby.
First thing we should do is we should pull some tubes of blood.
We need to check for blood alcohol content, right?
Make sure she's not drinking at all.
Could probably send somebody to the house to check for, I don't know, any type of thing she might have there, any sort of evidence of foul play.
It could be hangers.
It could be, you know, whatever else she might be using.
But this is an investigation that needs to be done every single time somebody is miscarrying.
So you would subject every single woman that's having a miscarriage to a full-on police investigation the same way we would for a one-you mentioned that, well, for a one-year-old child, we get an autopsy.
An autopsy is an investigation.
We're having an investigation to figure out cause of death.
I think that would be a harm that would exist in your world that I think you should fully acknowledge.
It would be a harm that we, but here's the thing.
Prior, when abortion was illegal, and even now in cases where it is illegal, we don't do those things.
Most people don't share that intuition that we need to do that in order to protect unborn human beings.
But you would want that for, you should want that, though, shouldn't you?
Yeah, I think that's fine, but you can't determine.
No, no, no, no, not fine.
You're weaseling out of that.
It's not that it would be fine.
If somebody said, do you think we should investigate when two-year-old children are killed or when two-year-old children are dead?
My answer, and I don't think your answer would be, yeah, that'd be fine.
You would say, absolutely.
I wouldn't want that to happen, right?
Yeah.
But your moral standard needs to be the exact same for the six-week fetus.
But here's the other problem.
We would have to make sure that in our zeal to look for crime, we don't over prosecute parents.
So for example, when prosecutors will investigate SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, or shaken baby syndrome, a lot of times they'll get those things wrong, for example.
So we would have to put the burden very high so as to not falsely accuse people of manslaughter.
Because you're familiar with the people.
Yeah, but nothing you just said perclude.
You should still investigate shaken baby syndrome.
I agree, but we don't have that.
We do not have the tech.
Maybe as a future hypothetical, yeah, sure, fine.
But we don't have that now.
We have the body of that.
Everything I just said, you can totally do right now.
If a woman is miscarrying and goes to the hospital, you pull a tube of blood to see, check her blood alcohol content.
If she's intoxicated.
That doesn't prove that caused the miscarriage, though many people are intoxicated and they give birth to babies, and many people miscarry who are not intoxicated.
So that doesn't prove anything.
Sure, but you could look at it as a- That wouldn't pass in a court of law where you need beyond a reasonable doubt.
Hmm.
If you have a child at home and you're neglecting the child, it might be hard to say for one way or another what caused the death of the child, but at the very least, you can start getting up to like manslaughter charges if you've neglected a child.
But how do you tell what exactly, what part of neglect actually killed them?
Was it the lack of water, the lack of medical care?
Well, you could just say you have a, you know, you have a seven-year-old that weighs 28 pounds and you then get testimony.
Why do they weigh 28 pounds?
Well, because we feed them once every four days.
There you have your evidence.
You don't have anything similar for the wanton destruction of human embryos or things like that.
But once again, I'm going to go back to the main.
We have to get back to the basement here.
Because whose view of personhood makes more sense or not?
Like, there's nothing improbable about my view.
Like, I would say my view makes the most sense, even if you do talk about the future like ours or the person view, that the re, and once again, I don't think you can answer this question, really.
Which one?
I feel like I answered all your questions.
You didn't answer any of my, but I answered all of yours.
I have answered.
I answered your questions.
You didn't like my answers.
Well, because you didn't really answer that, but go ahead.
But I'll answer any hard question.
Give me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A baby born missing, which part now?
No, it's going back to you're grounding it in consciousness, but only for humans who are conscious.
Because it's a human conscious experience, yes.
I think a human conscious experience.
Can you describe what a human conscious experience is like?
Probably not.
I don't think anybody can.
But there seems to be a conscious experience that we have that all humans share.
Why do human conscious experiences matter than other conscious experiences?
Because we have a more sophisticated form of sapience that is different than the kind of experience that every other animal on the planet has.
How do you know that?
Well, how can you describe what they're like that you, how do you know that?
How do I know that?
Because I have a sophisticated, because we can do cognitive testing, we can test for types of socialization, we utilize language in ways that animals don't.
We utilize tools, we have abstract concepts that we can acknowledge, we can acknowledge things like that.
Yeah, it's like a million different ways.
Your consciousness matters more than the consciousness of a pig because you can do things pigs can't do.
Well, I'm a kind of thing, a human that is different, that my conscious experience, that kind of conscious experience, is a lot different in kind to a pig or a horse or a dog or even a seal or a dolphin or an ape.
So yours rises to the level of deserving legal protection.
Theirs don't.
Yes, the human experience does over the pig or the horse or the dog.
Right.
Yes.
But I mean, I just think it would be obvious to anyone who is around animals or infants that this 26-week-old fetus does not have a level of conscious experience that rises anywhere to the level of a pig or a seal or a dog.
But it is a human conscious experience, is it not?
It is a human who is having a conscious experience.
Do you think that is a lizard experience?
Is a lizard an experience?
Do you think that's having a lizard's experience?
Or what would you describe their conscious experience?
It's having a problem.
Diminished?
It's aware of heat, light, cold, familiar sound, unfamiliar sound, pressure.
I think a lot of those come from the brainstem.
Like you can get a lot of awareness of heat and cold and even basic sensory movements with the brainstem.
But this is prefrontal cortex development.
What do you think that 26-week-old fetus's conscious experience is then?
Closer to that of a human than a dog or a lizard.
in what way and that it it all you're asking me to define like the subjective human countries It's difficult.
I don't think anybody can.
It's the hard problem of consciousness.
I don't think I can fully encapsulate what it means to be a human, but it seems to be the case that the conscious experience that we have is markedly different from every other animal on the planet.
You seem to be claiming that a baby's conscious experience is so diminished that it resembles that of a reptile or maybe like a baby dog.
I don't think that we go from lizard to dog to ape to human.
I think we might have a diminished human conscious experience, but it's like growing the neurons and the synapses you said are developing.
And as we grow and develop that, it becomes more apparent, but it's there just to be starting.
Would you agree we have primitive conscious experiences and they become more advanced over time?
Sure, but it's all under the umbrella of the human conscious experience.
None of it is the experience of a dog.
But I feel like you're using the word human there.
Here's my problem with your argument.
You use human in order to get rid of the animals.
Here's the thing.
Here's what I think you're doing.
When you use human conscious experience as a criteria, you use the word human to get rid of animals that are very conscious and aware, can do tricks, have memories.
They don't have a sapient conscious experience like a human does.
None of them do.
Not even remotely close.
To shortcut all this, if you really, if you came with this argument, you wanted to fight really hard and you actually just dominated and thrashed this part of the argument, the only thing you would do is you would get me to move the abortion age later and later later.
It would become a Daniel Dennett abort at two years.
Or it'd be Peter.
It would be infanticide.
Yeah.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
Sure.
And if you want to push it further out, I'm not compelled by any of the arguments you're giving it.
You can, but it's not getting me to a point to where the 12-cell thing needs to be kept alive in a Petri dish or women needs to be charged with double homicide if they have an abortion at 12 weeks and it's twins.
Here's because I think most people will find it arbitrary that you...
So let me finish what I was saying and then I'll go back to you.
You use human conscious experience, you use conscious experience to disqualify fetuses, and you use human to disqualify the animals, even though the human, I think most people listening would say, the time in our development when we have conscious experiences that are richer and more complex than a chimp or a dog is long after birth.
That's why I believe Peter Singer is consistent when he would say what matters is that you have rationality.
You have abilities non-human animals don't have.
So he says infanticide is fine.
However, most people have an unbreakable intuition that infanticide is wrong.
And so in order to keep that intuition, if you're going to protect human infants because they will have rational abilities in the future, even though they don't have them now, you'd have to apply that to fetuses and embryos as well.
Okay.
I completely disagree, but we can loop back on this if you want.
No, why?
What's wrong with this argument?
What we value are rational abilities beyond what non-human animals can do.
That does not develop in humans until sometime after birth.
Therefore, infanticide is permissible.
What's wrong with that argument?
Because what I've said before is there is a kind of human conscious experience.
That kind of experience starts about 20 weeks.
It might be in some diminished capacity, as you said, but that experience has begun.
That at some point, you as a person were that experience at 20 weeks.
That that same conscious experience that starts there, that's the thing that we protect up until the point where you can no longer deploy it.
And you think that, let's say, a newborn who's stuck at the newborn level forever.
When you say newborn.
Newborn, newly born human being.
Yes, it would be a very important thing.
That would be a protected experience, yeah.
And so even if, so that's where I can't understand it.
A newborn stuck at that level forever, newborn infant, disabled.
Person deserves legal protection.
Okay.
Because it's all under that bucket of human conscious experience, yes.
Because it is a human.
No, your argument seems to be because it is a human who is conscious.
I think humans that are conscious are always having a human conscious experience, correct?
If you want to give me an analogy, you take a human and you implant a dog brain into it, then maybe we're having a different conversation.
When a human speaks, do they always utter human speech?
We're getting definitionally, but when a human speaks, it's always a human speaking.
Right.
The argument you're making is a bit circular here.
What makes human speech unique would be grammar, syntax, abstract concepts, idea, language, that kind of human speech.
A human could utter all different kinds of sounds or right.
But what someone would say is, why does it matter that why does a newborn, the fact that you would say, look, a human, someone who's stuck at the newborn level, okay, they are a human who is conscious.
They are a human who is minimally conscious.
Therefore, they deserve legal protection.
For which, for what?
The newborn.
Someone's stuck at a newborn.
They are a human who is minimally conscious.
But an animal who is more conscious does not have rights.
Because I don't, yeah, I reject that comparison that like an animal is more conscious.
They're having an animal conscious experience.
It doesn't resemble a human conscious experience.
Well, you say you reject it, but then you can't tell me like what is that newborn infant's experience so that you know that they a fully formed conscious experience of any animal doesn't reach the level of sapience or sophistication of a human conscious experience.
Like of a human conscious experience like you or I are having.
Correct.
But a newborn, what kind of experiences do they have?
I don't know.
If you take a newborn and stick it there and then train it for a while, I imagine that even their subjective conscious experience can be closer to ours than a lizard or a monkey.
So you think that a human newborn is more intelligent, let's say like a chimpanzee?
Intelligent is not the right thing.
Or more aware of the world.
More having a human conscious experience than yes, than the.
All you're saying is it's more of a genetic human being.
That's true, but so what?
If that's what makes it, if that's what makes you valuable, then all genetic human beings need to be valuable.
The human conscious experience is that you're a human part is doing all the work in your argument.
Well, of course, because I value humans and human beings.
Yeah.
So it's doing a lot for both of our arguments.
And genetics is our definition of human is a certain genetic code.
So, of course, the human conscious experience isn't necessarily going to be deployed by a genetic human, right?
Right.
Humans will have various levels of conscious experience through their lives.
They'll start very minimally.
It'll grow and they might lose it and maybe even temporarily lose it or permanently lose it.
And I do think your position is going to be inconsistent here if someone temporarily loses it and has to regrow parts of their brain to get it back.
Because at that point, they're no longer a person anymore.
But most of us would give them medicine and care to help them.
Yeah, probably.
Here's a question.
Let's look at that analogy from another angle, because I don't think that analogy is doing as much work as you want it to be.
Let's say that there's a person who gets their head chopped off, but we can keep their body alive.
Would you say that the person is still alive if the body is still alive, but the head is chopped off?
I would say that as an organized, so their head is probably decomposing now, right?
Yep.
Crossed in the trash.
It's dead, yeah.
Yeah, I would say that them as an organism, they have died, or we are keeping them, we are keeping the organism alive through artificial life support, like a heart-lung machine.
You say the organism.
So my head, Stephen's head gets cut off, but my body is dead.
Okay, you're dead.
What if there was a surgery where we had developed we could create new human heads and then put it back on with like a new brain and everything?
Would you say that you have an obligation to keep the body alive so that you can reattach a new head in the future?
The obligation to keep a headless trunk alive to put a because that's the equivalent to you talking about the child being born without the brain, but you can give it a drug to the bottom.
I would say that if you cut off somebody's head and you have their trunk there, the organism may be alive.
I would say the organism probably isn't alive.
You're keeping all of the organs alive.
Like if you keep someone who's brain dead on a heart-lung machine, they're not going to stay alive indefinitely.
They're only going to stay alive maybe for two to five days in order to harvest organs.
They're still going to decompose.
You can feed them, right?
No, not if somebody is.
As long as the brainstem isn't true, but persistent vegetative state can be fed with a tube indefinitely.
That's different.
Someone with a persistent vegetative state is a disabled human being.
So they are.
There's brainstem activity.
Yeah, there's brainstem activity.
They're wakeful.
They can digest food.
Well, I don't believe so.
I think they need to be fed the tube and everything.
They can digest it.
Oh, oh, okay, sure.
A brain dead mastication.
A brain dead person cannot do that.
It's just going to sit in the gullet and they're going to decompose.
But they're a person still.
Okay.
Albeit they're a disabled person.
Do you think that people in persistent vegetative states, assuming you know they're never going to wake up, should they be kept alive indefinitely as well?
I think they should be, I think that they should be given food, water.
They should be given comfort care.
So they should be alive indefinitely.
No, not necessarily kept alive indefinitely because there might be interventions that aren't as helpful for them.
I think there's a difference between, I think that we should never dehydrate anyone to death.
Sure.
So a person who's 22 years old, persistent vegetative state, they could live to 75.
They're always going to be in bed.
Should that person be cared for for the remainder of their life?
Well, we don't know that they'll live to 75.
But I'm going to say we could.
That's why it's a hypothetical.
Well, no, you shut down a lot of my hypothesis.
I did it.
And I answered every single hypothetical.
No, you complained about a lot of things.
I did complain.
No, no, I complained because there are intuition pumps, but tell me one of those I didn't answer.
No, you could.
No, no, no.
Tell me one of those things.
I watched you put a check mark next to every single one I answered.
I saw you do it, so I know I answered it.
Complained about a toddler, for example.
I did complain, but I answered it.
So you can complain about mine, but you have to answer it.
A 20-year-old can be kept alive till 75.
Do we have a moral obligation to keep feeding them for 55 years in a hospital bed?
You can complain about it, but you should answer the question.
There's two ways that I could respond to this.
One would be my view, and two would be another pro-life view.
Well, I want to know your view because I'm talking to you.
Well, someone could defend a position, might say, you know what?
I don't care about someone.
I want Trent's answer.
No, because I want people to be pro-life, even if they don't agree with everything I believe.
Okay.
But I'm asking you, right?
That's fine.
I think we should never starve.
I think we should not starve somebody to death.
I think that in some cases, food will not help someone because they can't digest it.
We're not talking about those cases.
I'm just saying we could keep somebody alive from 25 to 75, 50 years in a bed if we feed them and water them.
Yeah, I don't think we should starve disabled people to death.
That's my answer to that.
But number two, if you don't agree with that intuition, you could just have the view that I laid out earlier, which is that you are no longer a person if it is impossible for you to be conscious in the future.
So that means you are a person whenever it is possible for you to be conscious in the future.
And that would apply for nearly all unborn human beings from fertilization onward.
So even if someone didn't agree with me about PVS, they could still agree with you about withholding care for PVS, but it's different because there's a difference between someone who will never again be conscious and someone who will be conscious at some point.
There's a difference there.
True.
But I mean, like, a sperm, given the right conditions, like being in an environment with an egg, will also at some point exhibit consciousness, the same way that a single-cell organism connected to a mother.
Because a single-cell organism will never develop on its own.
Sperm never becomes conscious.
Even if it is a single-cell thing, it has to be connected to a mom on its own.
The organism that was once one cell does become conscious because there's continuity there.
The sperm and eggs.
There's no continuity between a sperm and a zycho?
Were you ever once a newborn?
Yeah.
Well, how could, let me ask you this.
Like, if you took a car and replaced 90% of its parts or added 90% new parts, is it the same car?
I don't know.
It's a ship of the question.
I'm not sure.
Right, but you might have 90% new parts from being a newborn.
But you're still the same newborn.
You're still that same person.
Sure.
Why, though?
That's a really interesting question.
It is.
It's probably because of the continuity of the conscious experience.
I would say it's because you're the same organism.
No.
Yeah.
No, it's the continuity of the conscious experience.
Do you remember being a newborn?
Nope.
Not a lot of continuity there.
Because I don't remember, there's no continuity?
Am I not a person when I'm blackout drunk?
Well, you might not remember things, but it seems like you're lacking some of these elements.
It seems very, very weak that that's the continuity.
And also, people with Alzheimer's are no longer people?
No, I believe that they are persons.
They are the same living being.
My problem is if you're going to want to say, oh, well, having the same psychological experiences, that's what makes you the same person over time.
Well, then you get really like you wanted to cut off heads and put them on other bodies.
Well, what if we take your brain and split it in two and then put it into two corpses?
And they both have your psychological connections.
Are they both you?
It's a really tough one.
Maybe you split into two you's, but that seems like a contradiction that you could do two contradictory things at the same time.
They can't both be you.
You can't be identical to more than one thing.
Well, if you want to fight there, we're not fighting over human conscious experience.
Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty of human identity.
What you are as a conscious experience might not even be one coherent conscious experience.
There might be 10 or 15 different things running under the hood.
If you take enough drugs, you can visit all of those parts.
Let me ask you.
But that doesn't get us any farther or closer to like a bunch of people.
Is it possible for the brain to have more than one person in it, more than one conscious experience?
It seems like there's some research exploring that.
Maybe it's possible, but I don't think we perceive it that way.
Right?
Because there are a split brain or what's it called, like the corpsum, corpus callosum, corpus callosum that once, if that's divided or split for some reason, you can do a split brain experiment where different halves of your brain seem to be aware of different things.
So potentially, it could be.
We're just not aware of it, I guess.
Right, so I was going back to the beginning here.
I'm rejecting your view that sperm and egg are us.
Those are things that became us, and there's an explanation for that.
My explanation relies on the fact that you are the same living organism that organisms maintain their identity over time in spite of many changes.
You are the same biological human being that was born of your mother decades ago, even though you have radically different parts and abilities now because you're that same living being.
But I would say that you were also that same living being existed nine months prior to the birth as well.
Sure, and I understand what you're saying.
I'm just saying that ontologically, what your position demands is that you believe that a single cell organism is of a kind that is similar to a 99-year-old human being, and that those things belong to the same category, but the single-cell organism is entirely different from a sperm or egg.
Are they both human?
Is the zygote and the 99-year-old, are they both human organisms?
Definitionally so.
So they are the same.
But I mean, a corpse is also a human organism.
No, that's not true.
It is, of course, it is.
What do you mean?
What is a human organism?
I don't know.
We can bring up the dictionary we want, but.
And I would say an organism is a collection of parts that work together for the good of the whole.
A corpse no longer has that property.
Okay, but I mean, neither does a single-cell organism.
It can't work to do anything.
Absent.
How does it grow in the womb?
By getting nutrients from the mother.
The mother's body is probably doing more at that point.
But that's the same as you and I. When we go to In-N-Out and we eat food, we got to do that to keep growing and developing.
It doesn't have to be In-N-Out, but we need nutrients and environment to continue developing also.
Yeah, but I think there's a bit of a difference.
When I eat a cheeseburger, my body doesn't become a cheeseburger.
But a single-cell organism is literally one single cell.
The nutrients coming in from the mother more than even the sum of everything.
Everything is a cell.
It doesn't turn into sugar or glucose.
It creates new cells and it creates new elements of its organism.
Yeah, that the nutrients that are coming in, but there's more, for a single-cell organism, there's more nutrients being pumped into it than there even is an organism.
Right?
It's pretty amazing.
But that doesn't mean that it's not a biological human being, and it doesn't mean that it has less value than you or I have, just because it goes, has much more developing it needs to do.
Sure, I just don't think that a single cell organism is more different than a sperm or an egg than it is similar to a 50-year-old developed person.
And I think we both agree, at least scientifically, they're very different.
It belongs to a different biological category than sperm or egg.
Sperm and egg are body parts.
They're gametes.
An embryo isn't human organism.
And so when we talk about whether persons or rights need to be given, we don't even talk about whether tissue has human rights.
We only talk about whether human organisms do.
I guess using your definition of organism, but I still think we talk, because even if you're talking about rights, if we look at people that are brain dead or people in persistent vegetative states, legally they're afforded different rights than people who are fully cognizant, conscious of their surroundings, right?
Well, it would never be legal to kill a person or deprive a person of food.
That's like a normal thinking, ordinary conscious human being.
But it would be for people in PVS or people who are brain dead.
Well, no, people debate about whether food that is given to someone in a persistent vegetative state is medicine or whether it's food.
I think that people will try to define being permanently unconscious as death instead of disability.
And honestly, many people who are disabled notice this in trying to redefine disability so we don't have to care for those who are disabled.
Okay.
I think that's a fundamentally different argument, but.
No, because there is a dispute.
Many people will care for those who are in persistent vegetative states.
And also, the question that they'll never come out of it is, I'm willing to entertain the hypothetical, but it is that it's a hypothetical.
You have people like Martin Pistorius, for example.
You ever heard of him?
Nope.
He was 12 years old, South African.
He ended up in a persistent vegetative state.
It's a great story.
You should read it.
It's very inspiring.
He has a book called Ghost Boy.
He was in a persistent vegetative state, maybe from meningitis.
And they're like, what do we do with him?
So they fed him, took him to a home where he was cared for.
By the time he was about 15, he became conscious again, but he was locked in, couldn't communicate with anybody.
So they didn't care about him at the group home.
So they just sat him in front of the TV and he watched reruns of Barney every day.
And he thought he was going to go mad.
But he decided, you know what, I'm not going to do this.
I'm going to will to do something to get attention to myself.
And eventually, he restored some motor skills, came out of his persistent vegetative state.
And now he races wheelchairs.
He's a web developer and he's married.
So part of the thing when it comes to caring for those in persistent vegetative states, while yeah, some people never come out of it, some do.
And the prognosis maybe is like two to five years.
Someone lasting more than a decade is very, very rare.
So we care for these people because we're not sure what's going to happen to them.
It's completely different from a brain-dead person.
I agree with everything you just said.
But I think that last sentence just illustrated my point completely.
What do you mean?
We care for those people because we don't know what's going to happen with them.
The question is whether or not they're going to wake up.
It's whether or not they're going to wake up.
I should have rephrased that.
Because we don't care about them in their current state.
It's only based on if they're going to become awake again in that future state.
No, because my view would be even if they didn't ever return from that state, I would say that there is a difference there that they are not foregone like a brain-dead individual who is now decomposing.
We don't give them medical care anymore.
We might keep their body alive to harvest their organs.
Sure.
I'm just saying there's a reason why you gave me the story of a boy that woke up and not the inspiring story of somebody that lived in a persistent vegetative state for 30 years and then died.
Well, so it could be inspiring that you care for this individual and that you don't want to starve them to death.
You don't want to actively kill them.
It could be, but we were leaning on intuitions pretty heavily and it's pretty telling that those stories don't typically exist.
Well, usually we like the people that wake up.
But we have to be careful because I feel like the intuition here is, oh, I wouldn't want to live in that state or we think that that life is not worth living in a persistent vegetative state.
We could easily reach that intuition for locked in, for quadriplegics.
A lot of people make those similar intuitions and I would be very reticent to move that into saying, oh, well, we only care for disabled people if we think their lives are worth living.
That's a dangerous road to go down.
No, it's not.
We do studies.
Even people with locked-in syndrome generally report decent quality of life.
Like we can do empirical analysis on these people.
We can do studies, case studies, broad longitudinal studies.
People tend to adjust to their level and have like a decent quality of life.
But some people do want to die, right?
And if you want to die, you should probably have that option.
But there's the difference between somebody wanting to die versus saying we ought to kill everybody with this type of experience.
But do we do this?
Some people who want to die, we say, that's not a good enough reason.
I know your girlfriend left you, but that's not a good enough reason.
Oh, you have bone cancer or something like that.
Or even you're locked in and you don't want to live.
Fine.
We make judgments there about you're giving me a good reason and you're not.
I think that's a dangerous road to go down to decide whose reason is good enough to help them out of suicide and whose reason is good enough to help them into it.
Okay.
I would disagree.
I would say it's a really dangerous road to compel people to live for the happiness of others around them.
And I don't believe that, I don't believe we should compel people.
I think that's what you're saying.
It's compelling somebody to live.
If you're saying that you're not allowed to take your life, you're depriving them of arguably one of the most fundamental negative rights.
I'm saying doctors shouldn't kill people.
I'm saying doctors shouldn't be killers.
Sure, should a person be allowed to kill themselves?
They should be allowed to refuse disproportionate care.
So they're allowed to jump off a building or a bridge.
No.
So they shouldn't be allowed to kill themselves.
No, they shouldn't be around.
Do you think people should be allowed to kill themselves?
Yeah, I think depending on the circumstances, yes.
Should they be allowed to kill themselves for any reason?
For any reason?
Probably not.
They don't want to live.
Probably not.
Why?
Because I think that oftentimes the desire to kill yourself without a good stated reason is probably more evidence of some sort of mental problem that should probably be alleviated before the person can make that decision.
So it would be an issue of, we would argue, from an informed consent perspective, that you're not capable of making this decision because you're in a mentally compromised state.
But if you take somebody who's 75, they've got stage four lung cancer, they've got six to 12 months ahead of them, they know it's going to be an excruciating experience and they don't have any desire to live anymore.
Do you think that person should be deprived of the right to kill themselves, jump off a building, jump off a bridge?
Because that's in your world, they would have to do that because the doctors don't make judgments that, oh, yeah, you have a good reason to kill yourself.
Because then what about the quadriplegic who says, you're a 75-year-old with cancer?
What about the 20-year-old who will never move their arms and legs again and says, I can't live like this for my whole life?
Should they just be allowed to roll themselves into the pool?
I think that there is plenty of research that shows that people that are even quadriplegics live healthy.
What if they say, screw your research, I don't want to live this way?
If they, then there's, I think it's more likely that there's something unhealthy with them, so they shouldn't be allowed to do that.
Why can't we say that for the 75-year-old?
Because I think that for 75-year-olds, we do know the prognosis with stage four lung cancer at certain stages, and we could say it is going to be bad and you are going to die with six to 12 months.
Right, but if anything, so you're saying that a person who's 75, someone should be allowed to kill themselves so they don't have to go through six months of agony.
But a quadriplegic who might go through 60 years of agony, no go.
Because at the end of the day, I'm making an empirical reference.
I can say, if we look at the pool of people that are quadriplegic at this age, 99% of them live and have decently happy, fulfilling lives.
So you're saying people don't really have a right to make autonomous medical choices.
They only have the right to do what you think the research says.
No, they have the right to make a decision, but whether or not that decision is informed or not is important.
Just like we would say, a 12-year-old doesn't have the right to make certain decisions because we don't think their consent is informed.
We would say the same for a 20-year-old that wants to kill themselves because they might be disabled.
Probably isn't the same as a 75-year-old who does have all the information who wants to make that same decision.
But in your world, you're saying a 75-year-old with stage four cancer is not allowed to kill themselves.
I am saying that I don't make distinctions about who has a good enough reason to kill themselves and who doesn't.
I help anyone who is suicidal to not be suicidal.
Now, if you have an 85-year-old who's 75, a 75-year-old who is experiencing organ failure and they don't want to do dialysis because it might give them a few more months and it's expensive and painful, no, they might not do dialysis.
Or you have someone who is very, very elderly and says, you know what, if I go into cardiac arrest, don't give me CPR.
I think that could be understandable.
All of your examples are very easy ways out.
Sometimes people are going to die in ways that aren't going to be quick.
It's going to be six months.
Right.
So for a person that's going to die in six months, are you saying you're compelled to suffer for that entire six months?
Or it's fine to, well, we're getting away from the topic.
No, no, hold on.
You keep saying that.
Okay, I'm going to force you to answer this question.
I'll answer it, but you're not answering it, though.
You keep aggravating, mitigating circumstances, and then you try to change something else.
I will answer the question, but you'll agree euthanasia is a different topic than abortion.
Well, yeah, of course.
Let's have transformation.
I'll answer.
I just want the answer to this question.
The answer is: I don't think doctors should kill people, especially when that is an option for doctors to do.
It becomes tempting for that to be the prescribed course of treatment instead of more expensive things to keep somebody alive.
However, I do think that you could administer medication and pain medication to ease someone's suffering, even if it has a secondary effect of shortening their lifespan.
Okay, so you would say a 75-year-old who has the prognosis is six months of suffering, he's not allowed to terminate his life.
I don't think we should kill people who are suicidal if he's not suffering.
I don't know why you can't answer that question.
Because it's a I'm not talking about people that are suicidal.
I'm saying a CD he doesn't want to live because his prognosis is six months of suffering.
So people with a prognosis of six months of suffering and then dying, they're not allowed to terminate their life early.
You would deprive them of that right.
I would like to answer the question, and it will sufficiently answer what you're asking me in the way that I am most comfortable.
If someone wants to commit suicide, they don't want to live because life has too much suffering for them.
This person wants to die.
They want to kill themselves because of too much suffering, correct?
Yeah.
Okay.
I am not in the business of saying who has too much suffering or not enough suffering.
In many cases, those who would kill themselves, it's not because of physical pain, it's because of loss of because then there's no stopping points.
Six months, 12 months, five years, 10 years, there's no principle place to stop the gap.
But you also, you can't say that I'm not in the business of, because you are, you're in the business of saying none of you can make that decision.
Right.
I want to treat all humans equally.
So anyone who is suicidal, their life has value.
I'm going to help them out of a destructive decision.
Well, when you say their life has value.
Yes.
But they're not the ones who decide when it has value or not.
You're deciding that for them.
No, I say every human being has intrinsic value.
Yeah, but if there's life.
If part of the value of my life is I should get to decide when I want to go.
I want to leave on my terms.
But you're saying, no, no, no, no, I'm going to decide for you.
You can't do that.
You don't have that right.
I'm going to say we both do that because you're doing that with your research, Gambit, to say, no, no, no, no, you with your reason, if it's anything that's not six months left to live of a terminal illness, it turns out you don't have, the research shows you don't have a good enough reason.
Both of us are doing that.
I'm just applying it to every single human being.
You're trying to apply it to just a few, and there's no way you're able to really do that.
I think I can frame that.
If you want, we can dive into that.
I can give you a super clear criteria.
Let's do a couple chats here.
So we have Bendry the Offender.
Hey, thank you, man, for the super chat.
On the topic of consciousness, it is important to remember that it is still not fully understood past its basic definition of awareness of internal and external existence.
Consciousness is still very complex as we have a motorcycle going by.
Thank you, Bender the Offender.
And I don't know if any of you guys have a response to that, but it's just a statement.
I think the brain is still like the most complicated, ununderstood, misunderstood, or lack of understood organism or thing in the universe so far.
Except for maybe black holes.
We have Richie Constitution here.
Hey, thank you for the super chat.
Appreciate it.
Destiny, why do you keep saying force a mother to carry the baby when she knows the consequences of having sex could be having a baby and she knows that contraception is not foolproof?
Is she not responsible for her actions?
I mean, I could counter and say hypothetically there could be rape, but I mean, that's kind of a boring counter.
I mean, it's begging the question, like, the consequence of having a baby is delivering the baby.
I mean, it doesn't have to be.
The consequence could be you can get an abortion.
That's the matter of what we're debating, is what you should be allowed to do.
Well, both of us are forcing someone to carry a baby to term.
Destiny would force them after 20 weeks.
Yeah, of course.
So I would just say, so both of us, I would phrase it this way.
We're both forcing a pregnant woman to not allow someone else to kill or dismember her child.
But the difference is I'm forcing somebody to care about that 20-week picture and you're forcing them to care about the two-cell picture.
Yeah, and I'm saying that human value does not depend on what we look like.
There's AI that looks just like us that doesn't have value.
There are disfigured people who don't look like us.
We evolved.
The problem is that we evolve to care about people that look like us.
That's why humans have a problem with racism.
You know, we evolved in an ability to trust the members of our tribe.
If you don't look like me, maybe you're a danger.
So we have an evolutionary predisposition to not trust people who don't look like us.
Or we think people who are in the uncanny valley, like weird robots, I think that's due to the fact that we stay away from sick people.
They might get us infected.
So we have an evolutionary predisposition to not care for people who look dramatically different.
And I don't think that should guide our decision about whether early human embryos have value.
Okay.
I have a question for you, Trent.
There's something that often comes up.
No uterus, no opinion.
So we do have two men here debating the abortion topic.
So Trent, what would you say to someone who says that people who are pro-life, it's men wanting to control women or control women's bodies?
What do you say to that?
Well, we had two women here last time, and I don't know.
I'm having fun with our conversation we're having now.
I think it's going well, and we can discuss this.
I would say that there's a kernel of truth here.
That, for example, I am not in a, I and anyone else who has never been pregnant, which would include some women, are not in a position to say, oh, pregnancy is easy.
Pregnancy is hard.
If you haven't done it, you're not in that position.
Even people who have been pregnant, you don't know what it's like for other people to go through pregnancies.
It might be harder or easier for them.
So on the one hand, like if you've never been pregnant, you can't really say, oh, it's hard, oh, it's easy.
You haven't gone through it.
But you can say, for example, that child abuse or child labor, making your kids work in a mine or abusing kids, that's wrong, even if you never have children.
Or a white person can say racism is wrong, even if they've never been a victim of racism.
Just because you are not personally affected by an issue, it doesn't follow you can't have a valid perspective on it.
This argument, if it goes to its logical conclusion, transgender women can't have an opinion on abortion because they don't have uteruses, uteri.
Women who are post-menopausal, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, can't have opinions because they can't get pregnant anymore.
Just like I can't get pregnant, they can't get pregnant in the future.
I can't get pregnant in the future.
So I think that the argument that if you are a rational being and you can assess moral reasoning, you can have an opinion on important stuff.
Got it.
And I want to throw this in here, and I've brought this up before, and I know it's kind of certainly must be decades or even longer away from even being a possibility.
Any thoughts on a middle ground compromise between the pro-choice side and the pro-life side being an artificial womb?
And assuming said artificial womb, if you were able to transplant the fetus, not for his position, maybe for others.
But if you were able to put it into an artificial womb and that artificial womb was advanced enough to, you know, it would be as healthy as a baby that would have otherwise been born normally.
Do you think that that could be a compromise?
Well, it's weird.
We basically have artificial wombs that can handle an embryo up to a few days old or a fetus from like 20 weeks on.
So it's like we can take care of an unborn child like going from each end, meeting back in the middle, but we can't really do it.
Well, we can't really do anything from a week or two until like 18 weeks.
We might have some liquids that are oxygenated.
The problem is at 20 weeks, the fetus's lungs aren't really developed enough to breathe.
That's the problem.
Oxygenated liquid, maybe we could do that.
We'll push it back more.
What I would say is that it would only be a compromise if your position on abortion were this.
Yes, it is a human person, but it has no right to the mother's body.
If you're only arguing women have a right not to abortion, but the right to not be pregnant, then the artificial womb can play in.
Because you wouldn't have a right to necessarily kill the fetus.
The only right you have is, I don't want to be pregnant anymore.
Fine, move the fetus to this womb.
Then you'd really lose the argument that I also want the fetus to be dead because I don't want to deal with that child out there.
If your argument is just you have a right to not be pregnant, you can't really get to that.
But if you say that the fetus is not a person anyways, well, if you can kill them when they're, if you can permanently make them unconscious, if you can do all sorts, if you can do anything to them before 20 weeks, which is basically Destiny's position, you can't be compelled to put them in an artificial womb.
Any thoughts on artificials?
No, I don't know why you'd, I don't know how that would change anything.
Well, so let's say a mother who doesn't want to go through with a pregnancy, she could get an abortion.
However, the fetus, baby, whatever, would not be killed.
It would just be transferred to an artificial womb.
Yeah, my position would be that the mother.
20 weeks or after, I guess if you wanted to do that, it could, but prior to 20 weeks, there'd be no compulsion to transfer it to anything.
Well, the compromise would be at any point, assuming we could develop an artificial womb that even from, I don't know how quickly it typically gets discovered six weeks or four weeks, five weeks, in any case, from pretty much any point in the pregnancy, even very early on, it could be transferred to an artificial womb.
If a woman wanted to not go through with a pregnancy, she would be, she'd have to go to, say, a hospital.
It'd be transferred to an artificial womb.
I suppose once the child was born, it would become a ward of the state.
Or if she was so inclined, maybe she didn't want to actually go through with a pregnancy, but she may be prepared to actually mother the child.
Because I think some women's concern when it comes to abortion is it's plausible that some women who get abortions might actually be willing to take care of the child once it's born, but perhaps they don't want to, one of the reasons maybe, they don't actually want to go through artificial materials.
Well, pregnant.
That's why a lot of celebrities hire surrogates now.
Right.
Gestational surrogates.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, what is hard is also, if that were out there, I think that would be better than the child being aborted.
But I still think that a child who comes into existence, if they're a person, they have the right to reside in their mother's womb, the place that is safe and natural for them to live.
Sure.
But I mean, of course, this is assuming that there's certain arguments about, well, what about certain, I'm trying to think, there's a specific term that's evading me.
But what was it with the it slipped my mind, but assuming that you could, in an artificial womb, you could bring the child to term just as healthily as in the mother's womb, I don't know if that's even possible, but let's say it is.
I suppose my only concern with the artificial womb, you know, just looking at it from this one narrow lens of abortion, is what are the sort of other ramifications.
Well, here's the ramification.
If you could deliver at 18 weeks, right now the earliest is like 20.
But we could get there where you can keep an 18-week old fetus alive in an incubator.
So it could be sitting there in an incubator, and for the next two weeks, the parents would have, under Destiny's view, a free decision whether or not they want to kill that fetus in that hospital incubator right in front of them.
Correct?
Yep.
Okay.
So I think many people would find that pretty disturbing.
Sure.
And certainly, I mean, there's other concerns with artificial wombs, like people actually not, it wouldn't be used strictly in situations where perhaps a woman wanted to have an abortion or perhaps a woman couldn't have a healthy pregnancy and or as a family.
Well, I think if I would be very worried about like farming humans type.
Well, if Destiny's view is correct and you cannot harm a fetus before 20 weeks, there's nothing stopping you from using IVF embryos.
Abandoned embryos.
There's thousands of abandoned embryos and cryotanks.
You could just put them into these artificial wombs, do something to their brains so they never become conscious.
Sure.
And you've got organ harvesting, you've got sex dolls, you've got, or even just making them just unconscious.
Use them as cadavers for med students to work with.
I think many people would find that to be really, really awful and counterintuitive that we ought not treat those human beings that way.
And if they are persons, that best explains that intuition.
Sure.
That's true.
But I would also, I would just counter with the thing that Trent said earlier, that sometimes we can have incorrect intuitions.
Sure.
I would say.
Yeah.
All right.
We have a super chat here from Richie Constitution.
Destiny, do you want to read this one?
Our biggest fan.
Destiny, why do you keep saying force a mother to carry the baby when she knows?
Wait, did we already do this one?
Oh, did we do this one?
Yeah, we did this one.
Oh, my apologies.
We do have this one, which I was actually going to ask this anyways, but may as well.
Nerd, for Trent and Destiny, can you, in a couple of sentences, steel man each other's position and explain what is most powerful about each other's position?
Yeah.
And just one thing.
The way I was going to ask this, maybe not necessarily each other's position, but if you were to steel man the pro-choice side, and Destiny, if you were to steel man the pro-life side, Trent, would you like to see?
Well, I would say Destiny's position is that we value, the thing that we value is human conscious experience.
That is something that is unique in the world that we value.
And so we should provide legal protections only to beings that have human conscious experiences.
And his position is that this covers beings from 20 weeks until they permanently lose that ability, like if they're in persistent vegetative state.
If I were to steel man his position, I would just turn it into Peter Singer's position on abortion, which is because I would say that what makes the human conscious experience unique is not merely that a human is conscious and is aware of light, heat, pressure, cold, sour, familiar noise, unfamiliar noise, but that they can reason, they can do things more than what animals can do.
So we value the human conscious experience that is unique to human beings no other animal has.
And we only find that like from nine months after birth until traumatic injury.
So I would just say that for me, the only way to steel man Destiny's position would be to include infanticide based.
I think transposition is essentially a teleological argument.
There is a telos, there is like a design and function and purpose of a zygote from the moment of conception up to the moment of death.
We have one consistent organism with its own genetic code, and the most consistent boundary to draw around the protection of that life is from the moment of its inception, the time that that unique organism is created, which is at the moment of conception, until the time of its death, which is when essentially metabolic function has ceased.
Because the telos or the design of or the ordinary function of that particular egg is to gestate in the womb, be born into a person, grow, develop, and then eventually die as a human being.
That was the steel man of the other side?
I think so, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
We have a chat here from Kyle Whittington.
Thank you, man.
Appreciate the super chat.
What do each of you see as the strongest argument from the other?
I think we kind of just got that.
How about this, though?
Kyle, why don't I do this since we kind of just answered that?
What is the weakest argument you hear from the other side?
The weakest argument from the pro-choice position would just be: abortion ought to be legal because born people will suffer if it's illegal.
I think that is an extremely common argument.
If you brought in a bunch of people who haven't, Destiny's thought about this a lot.
I've thought about it a lot.
If you brought in regular people from off the street out here to defend their pro-choice view, that'd probably be their first argument.
Well, what about women who are raped?
What about poverty?
What about all these issues, overpopulation, whatever.
The worst argument is we need to have legal abortion because born people would suffer without it.
Of course, it's a terrible argument because it ignores, well, what are the unborn?
If you're saying that you can kill a human being in the first nine months of their life because if not doing that, you're going to suffer.
Well, you can think of cases of killing born children.
You know, children who are in foster care, for example, like, oh, they're going to be drug addicts and prostitutes.
Maybe we should just kill them so they don't have a terrible life.
Well, if we don't do that to toddlers, then we shouldn't do that to unborn humans if they're both equally human, have the same value.
So I would say that those pragmatic arguments are the worst arguments.
Destiny, what do you think?
I think the two worst ones are one is the picture argument.
I don't like the, if you show a picture, and it's like, is this right or wrong?
I feel like the best illustration of that was, I don't remember what his name was, but there was a guy that went on Charlie Kirk's show, and he held up like a picture of like a 24-week embryo.
And he's like, is this a human?
And Charlie was like, absolutely.
And the guy's like, this is a pig embryo.
And Charlie's like, oh, and then they got into a fight over that.
I think the second, the most morally reprehensible argument is I don't like, a donor kind of did it.
I don't like the argument from responsibility because they almost make it sound like a child is like a negative consequence or a punishment from sex.
I think that that one gets really loaded because it starts to feel like they're using a child as a form of punishment to attack a woman, which is a really poor way to deal with the woman, and it's a really sad way to deal with the existence of a child.
Like the idea that children are consequences negative of actions you take.
So I think those two things are kind of negative.
But you're not a fan of bodily rights arguments for abortion that say even if it is a person, you still have the right to have an abortion.
I mean, you don't think those arguments work.
No.
Wouldn't the basis of that be if the unborn human being is a person, you can't abort them because you have moral duties towards them?
Yeah, but I think the moral duties, if somebody wants to talk about a form of like moral duties to other people or the de facto guardianship that you inherit over a child because you only provide care, that's one argument.
But the way that it's phrased is oftentimes, don't you think a woman should have consequences for that?
If I agree with you, it can be put very crass and sexist.
There is like a more eloquent way to make that argument.
We're talking about moral duties or responsibilities that I've probably made.
Actually, I did against Dilla Huntington.
I argued against that.
So yeah, I would agree with that.
But oftentimes it's just phrased in a really negative way that makes it changing.
Well, it's like you had sex, you should own up to it.
When it's only levied at women, for example, and not men, that they should support her and the child, then it's done in a sexist way.
Yeah.
All right.
And then we have one sec here.
Especially because those same people will oftentimes make arguments for men being able to financially abort their responsibility too.
So even though it takes two to create a baby more often than not.
Yeah, I say they both have different responsibilities, but equally they are responsible.
Got it.
Sorry, guys, trying to get this triggered once more.
Not that kind of triggered the Stream Labs one we had.
By the way, Destiny, I see you're not wearing a wedding ring, but you are married.
I'm playing with my silicone.
Oh, Kirby, one-third of rats have the conscious ability to hear, see, smell to a great extent, more so than the newborn human.
In these ways, their consciousness is greater, yet they're not persons.
Destiny appealed to human conscious experience as if the fact that a dot dot dot dot, I guess he didn't have enough time to yeah, I just don't agree that a diminished human experience is like similar to like a rat or a pig or a lizard.
I've never seen any evidence or any description academically of that.
But I mean, again, if somebody were to like compellingly argue that, then they would just be pushing me closer and closer to Peter Singer's position, which I think is like abortion up to two years old, I think is his position.
He says 28 days, nine months.
People give different time frames, but it's sometime after birth.
So, yeah.
All right.
And I had another question here.
And I don't know if you were able to fully give an answer, Trent.
But so legislatively speaking, I don't know if you've fully answered.
So you would like to make abortion illegal, is that correct?
To perform, to get an abortion?
Yeah.
I would say that the laws that I think would be most helpful to pass given, I would just go with the laws that are being passed now in states that are making abortion illegal, where it is illegal to perform an abortion.
So that wouldn't reflect on those who seek out the procedure.
It's on medical doctors who should know better.
So I would say that that procedure should be outlawed.
And so in doing that, I don't think that's inconsistent because you can craft laws.
Let's say, for example, you see prostitution as a public health threat, so much so that it ought to be illegal.
It's not inconsistent to simply say, well, to take into account the circumstances of women who are involved, we're going to make it illegal to buy sex, but not to sell sex.
And so we charge the Johns and the Pimps and all these other people.
So I think that you can have something similar.
But I do think that, yeah, I do think that unborn children should be protected from harm in the womb, whether they're wanted or unwanted.
And we do have the two-thirds in the other two chats here from Kirby.
Hold on, let me get these pulled back up.
I think he's just, okay, two out of three of his messages.
Newborn with less conscious ability than a rat is a person because of their humanity, not their extent of conscious.
If less consciousness than a pig, but you're human, makes a newborn or a 20-week fetus a person, then this shows the extent of consciousness is not the person-making factor.
You must therefore either appeal to a future greater extent of consciousness or appeal to humanity in itself.
Either appeal prevents you from advocating for pre-20-week abortions.
Do you guys have a thought on that?
It's the same thing that they're saying that I'm setting a bar that's either too low that animals could jump through it or too high such that a 20-week-old or a nine-month-old fetus couldn't jump through it.
But again, I would argue that a human conscious experience is a kind of conscious experience that's unique from the moment of conception, that is a sapient human experience, not from the moment of conception, from the moment of the conception of the conscious experience.
So from the 20-week period, 20 to 28 weeks, that once that conscious experience starts, that is a unique sapient human conscious experience.
It might be diminished.
It might be developing, but it's something unique from any other type of animal experience.
And I would say that just begs the question.
Dogs have unique conscious experiences.
Birds have unique conscious experiences.
So just because you have a unique experience, it doesn't follow that it deserves legal protection.
No, but a human, unique one does.
Why?
I don't know.
Why does God exist?
I mean, that's a fundamental.
There are rights, I believe, that we afford each other, and one of those is the right to not be killed.
Right.
And to me, I think when the human part of the equation is pressed into service to save one from becoming a radical vegan, I think that more slides into defending the pro-life view that all humans are valuable regardless of whether they currently have conscious experiences or they will eventually have them.
Okay.
And I don't think that we should hold women on trial for murder because they abort something that hasn't even woken up yet.
But you do think they should be on trial for murder for something that has the most minimal consciousness it can have as a human being.
Absolutely.
But they have the opportunity to abort first.
I don't think a woman that takes plan B should be investigated.
They're not murderers if they euthanize their dogs.
Correct.
You can euthanize your dog, yeah.
But I don't think people that take plan B demand murder investigations.
We have a chat here from Gohan Bento.
Thank you for the super chat.
Should a mother be compelled to carry a baby to term if at two weeks it's determined that the future child absolutely will carry destiny out of diamond for saving his League of Legends career?
Absolutely, because there's a future person being saved there, and that's me.
It's about saving a life.
Okay, there you go.
It's not, yeah, I would say that it's not a potential person, it is a person with great potential to help destiny of extraordinary capabilities.
Got it.
And this one's kind of random related to time travel.
So, Destiny.
Why not?
Why not?
Destiny, if your mom wanted to abort you at, say, seven weeks, 10 weeks, whatever, let's say you could time travel back in time.
Would you advocate for or against your abortion?
I think that our, I think that everything starts with fundamental basic human logics.
Some people call these properly basic beliefs.
I've heard other very simple things, but everything starts from these.
From here, we have an understanding of something called causality: that event leads to event that leads to event.
If you want to break a chain of causality and then ask me a question past that, I can't give you any kind of consistent or coherent answer.
If you go back into the past to do other things, then there's like paraconsistent logics and all sorts of weird things that open up that I can't give any meaningful answer for.
I don't know the answer to that.
Okay, fair enough.
I don't know if you had anything on that channel.
I'm pretty.
Time travel is fun in movies.
It's a nightmare in philosophy.
Sure.
One probably should avoid it.
Okay.
And then, let's see, we have a question here for Trent.
So, what would you say to someone who says that it's hard to take conservatives seriously on the abortion issue, considering perhaps not all conservatives, but some are who knows the percentage breakdown?
Considering their social Darwinism on many other issues?
Well, I would say that a person can be correct and still be inconsistent.
So, 150 years ago, there were white people who were saying that black people should not be slaves, but also that black people shouldn't be allowed to marry white people.
They shouldn't be allowed to vote.
So, they were correct about the wrongness of slavery, even though they were wrong about some of the other rights that they should have.
So, you could be right about abortion, and then you're incorrect about other stuff.
You're not applying your worldview consistently.
I also think, though, that the argument is incredibly loaded in that regard.
I think saying that conservatives want social Darwinism is like saying liberals want the gulags.
You know, it's that it's a caricature of one's position.
It ultimately comes down to: I support this social program, you don't want to spend as much as me on it, so you're a social Darwinist.
We're going to disagree about: well, is this the best way to solve this problem?
There are going to be solutions where we're not sure what the right answer is, but I think that there are solutions where we're clear what the wrong answer is.
Like, we may not know exactly what to do with immigration.
We shouldn't shoot immigrants who are coming over the border.
People are going to disagree: how do we treat unborn children if they're persons?
Well, at the very least, we shouldn't dismember them.
We shouldn't directly kill them in the womb.
So, I and I, by the way, the hypocrisy thing goes back to liberals too.
They claim to be all pro-like, what is it?
Reason, or somebody else did a video about this where they went to the Democratic National Convention and said, Are you pro-choice?
Like, absolutely.
Okay, do you believe in the choice to own a gun?
Do you believe in the choice, school choice, or charter schools?
Do you believe in the choice to do this or that?
Oh, no, no, you can't do that.
So, it cuts both ways.
Okay, got it, got it.
And then I had, let me see what else we had here.
Question here for Destiny.
So if it became absolutely clear to you that the unborn child before, is it 23 weeks?
20 weeks.
20 weeks.
Before that period, if it became absolutely clear that it's a living human being, would you then favor outlawing abortion before 20 weeks?
Yeah.
Okay.
But that's not your position, but if it is.
My position has nothing to do with the timeline.
It has to do with the deployment of the conscious experience.
Okay, gotcha.
We have another super chat here from the Joshua Project.
Hey, thank you, man.
Appreciate it.
Should husbands be required to take a paternity test prior to signing a birth certificate and if he found not to be the father, should the mother be charged with fraud?
And should taxpayers be forced to pay for unwed mothers' children?
Well, I would say the children didn't do anything wrong.
So it's like we should still provide care for them.
It's not their fault.
They're in a not ideal situation.
But I would say what's interesting here is this touches on something called the presumption of paternity.
So throughout most of human history, up until very recently, when a child is born, it's really easy to figure out who the mom is, right?
Because she's right there.
Yeah.
But it hasn't always been easy to figure out who dad is.
So that's why throughout most marriage and common law, the presumption of paternity is that if a woman gives birth, the husband is the man she is married to.
And he is the only one who can challenge that.
And so he might challenge paternity.
If you know, hey, I was away at war for a year, and you got pregnant and had a kid.
What's going on here?
But otherwise, that would be up to him to challenge.
And yeah, if there's an issue there, I think the child should just be taken care of, even if the marriage is a bit of a mess.
Sure.
Any thoughts on this, Destiny?
Treat it as fraud, you'd have to prove it's fraudulent.
There could legitimately be a mistake where a woman is dating or casually having sex with a couple people and then has a more formal relationship and then she got pregnant early on and didn't realize it.
Like, I don't know if it would count as fraud if that was the case.
I think, though, that's why also to have a strong familial structure, the best thing for families, though, would be something that's monogamous to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Sure.
But I'm just saying the crime of fraud requires mens-rea as the intent to fraud.
I don't think you can defraud somebody accidentally, right?
Like if I legitimately, you could just be careless.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don't think all forms of mispaternity or incorrect paternity are necessarily fraudulent.
You'd have to prove the willful fraudulent behavior of the mother.
I mean, but would it be fraudulent if there was around the time period where she got pregnant, there was infidelity that was at no point ever disclosed to the husband?
She could be estranged from him, get pregnant.
Well, I guess it would be hard for her to...
Timeline-wise.
Well, also, because you could argue there's a due diligence that's necessary.
Oh, Flan Life.
Thank you for the memberships.
Thank you.
You can argue there's like a necessary due diligence there from the mother's perspective, sure.
Okay.
But you're saying, let's assume that you could prove it's fraud.
Like she knew it's not the baby.
Should there be civil penalties, criminal penalties?
I mean, whatever the normal thing is for scamming the state or another person, I guess, whatever it ordinarily is.
Well, I don't think you can, regardless of who the father is, I don't know if you can.
I think that'd be more of like it's more of a civil matter now to deal with family court about how do we support this child and who is related to that.
I still think that husbands have duties to their wives, even if these things happen.
Infidelity doesn't break the marriage.
This is like a red pill fantasy question of like that all women are trying to defraud fathers with like fake child support is essential.
That's what the question I was saying.
I would say, well, should wives be able to have civil liability towards their husbands if they knock up another girl?
Like, why?
Why is anyone asking about that?
Oh, no, true.
They're not asking about that, you know?
True.
That's because they're red pillars.
But I think perhaps it's a greater wrong because actually, I don't know where I'm going.
I'm going with that one.
But as far as the paternity testing, my personal stance is I would actually be in favor of when the child's born, there's just automatic paternity tests.
That way, there's absolutely no questions.
I feel.
Yeah, I would just, to me, I would say that this it's rare that that happens.
And that's why my preferred option would just be, well, you might, I think people could have the option to ask for that as if they're not married.
But that's why my ideal would be that's the reason we bring children into existence in marriage.
It's not just some romantic option.
Like when a child is conceived, you've got a helpless human being, and whose duty is towards that child?
Really, it's the mother and father.
If they die, we can come up with a decent substitute, but the mother and father are really irreplaceable to that child.
They can never be truly replaced.
It's always almost there.
So we have an institution to make them irreplaceable to each other, which would be a lifelong, permanent, monogamous bond that's socially recognized.
And that's why marriage is so important to society in that regard.
Do we know the percentage breakdown of the incidence rate of paternity fraud?
So basically, or another thing.
It's like 1 to 2% of all families.
I've heard up to 10%.
That's a total fucking lie.
Whoever told it to, you should never trust a single thing to tell you about any data set.
We ought to get it.
They target absolutely.
I like women, and that's where he gets all of his stats from.
www.fuckwomen.com.
Whoever told you that?
Wait, who told you that?
That paternity fraud is up to 10%.
That is 10%.
Yeah, who told you that?
You know what the stat, you know what?
You know what?
I just divined the godjo's fucking direct revelation.
I just got special revelation from God.
I just figured out what he said.
This fucking moron probably read something that said, in the case where paternity is challenged, 10% of them are fraudulent.
I could maybe believe that number.
Well, if you're making a statement that 10% of all paternity is like 10% of every 10 kids.
Oh, it's not really their kid.
That's insane.
I agree with you that it may be the case that when it's challenged.
I mean, look, I do.
But most paternity is not.
Exactly.
So it's probably only challenged in cases of suspected infidelity, in which case I can see.
I'll Google it.
I'll Google it.
Incidence of paternity fraud.
Maybe that's the appropriate prompt for this.
Okay.
So it does look like there's some challenge to this 10% number.
That would just be an insane number.
Well, for all, yeah, for sure.
That would be insane.
According to Wikipedia, which is not, you know, it says that in studies that solely looked at couples who obtained paternity testing because paternity was being disputed, you can bring it back.
There are higher levels, an incidence of 17% to 33% in instances where the paternity is being disputed.
We need the Maury clip right now.
You are not the father.
So that's in a very, that's probably in, if I had to guess, less than 5% of births, probably less than that, of paternities are challenged.
And then of that, less than that percent, 17 to 33% of those might come back as being, yeah.
Let's see.
I'm trying to find another thing here.
Well, in any case, I would be in favor of paternity testing upon birth.
Why?
You know, just what if that, what if there was a false positive of one out of a thousand?
Yeah, I don't believe in mandatory medical intervention unless it's to prevent neglect or violence towards another human being.
So just for this, like, no, that's why we have the presumption.
The only person, if they're worried, the dad can make that call.
Otherwise, there's no need.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Let's see.
Did we get another chat in, Nick?
No, I don't think we did.
Do you guys have anything else?
I might have one or two more questions, but did you guys have any other topics you wanted to touch on?
I think people see our positions and can see which one makes the most sense of everything they believe about the world.
True.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
So I had another question here.
Let's see.
Three hours.
Not bad.
One sec, guys.
Sorry, I lost my place in my notes here.
Oh, if a pregnant woman and her unborn child are murdered, do you believe the criminal should face two counts of murder and serve a harsher sentence?
I suppose I'll open this up to the both of you.
Well, I think more people have been killed, yeah.
So it's more counts of homicide, yeah.
Okay.
And if for destiny, it probably depends on how far along the fetus was.
It was after 20 weeks.
Yeah.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah, it depends on how far along it is.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
One sec here, guys.
My notes are lagging.
Can you liking the vibrational question?
Sorry.
Hold on, let me play something appropriate for this.
Hold on.
I'd love to hear your opinion on this at some point.
Or you want to just be the neutral or you want to be the neutral moderator.
I'll just stay neutral.
That's fine on this one.
But yeah.
Okay, I think that's it.
Did we get any chats or good on chats, Nick?
Was there one more that came in?
What are you looking for, Nick?
I think we're good.
Okay, cool.
Last chance, any final thoughts between either of you before we wrap up?
No, it was, I enjoyed chatting with you about this, and I think these kind of conversations, like, these are really, this shows, at the very least, this is an important issue.
You know, it's a weighty moral subject.
And I think conversations like this, their goal, it's not to, no conversation like this can ever like end the issue.
But I think it can encourage people, you should think about this kind of stuff deeply and think about it to have at least a coherent view and test it and refine it.
So I'm glad at least this conversation with us, if it can get people to think about this, then I think it's a worthwhile discussion to have.
Yeah, I agree.
Okay, very cool.
All right.
Well, I think we are going to wrap up.
Someone said that, I don't know how true this is, but someone said that there was a Stream Labs question.
So I just checked that on there.
Yes, let me check.
There is.
There is.
Thank you for catching that.
We have our final chat here from Jazz.
Thank you, man.
Appreciate it.
Conservatives want to ban abortion, but simultaneously oppose social services for children, lunches in schools, and socialized health care.
Single-parent households have the worst outcomes in terms of education and criminality.
As a physician, conservatives are disgusting.
His words, not mine, don't shoot the messenger.
This sort of almost echoes my question I asked earlier about the social Darwinism component.
But if you'd like to know what's going on.
The other problem with this stuff is it's such a monolithic binary way of thinking.
Like, there are lots of pro-choice Republicans.
There's a lot of, like, we call them like Barry.
I grew up in Arizona.
We call them Barry Goldwater Republicans.
Like, there's a lot of people who are conservative who are actually, I would say, well, it's interesting.
There's a decent number of pro-choice Republicans.
There are a few pro-life Democrats, but it's a lot rarer to find a pro-life Democrat than it is to find a pro-choice Republican, in my opinion.
So I do think that that's just a stereotypical argument there.
There are a lot of, you can be, I would say being pro-life is a very liberal position because the goal of liberalism is to expand the sphere of human equality to as many people.
Nat Hentoff was, you know, he's an atheist.
He wrote for The Village Voice.
He did the consistent life ethic.
There's lots of people like that.
So I would say that it's, you know, it's not a strictly political thing.
But yeah, if you're, what the thing is, like, if you're, I would say the hypocrisy book goes both ways.
It's bad if you care, you only care about children before they're born and not after.
But it's also hypocritical to only care about them after and not before.
And I also think that it's lame to say, you don't care about kids because you disagree with my policy.
Well, people can disagree about what's the best way to help people.
So overall, I think it's kind of a lame objection.
I just, they have nothing to do with each other.
I think like they're like people will, yeah, like the conservative answer is we do care about children after they're born.
We just care about them in different ways because we don't think it's the federal government's responsibility to take care of children.
We think it's community, churches, families.
Or you could say it is a federal government's responsibility, but the question is, where do we draw the line?
Where do they go too far?
Where's too much?
Okay, got it.
And you often hear, perhaps in the other side, you'll often hear them say, the other side's evil in this discussion.
Both sides might say that.
Do you think the other side is evil for wanting?
I think very rarely, it's incredibly rare that anybody's evil.
I do believe that people share 99% the same kind of like moral intuitions.
I think there's just a disagreement of factual matters sometimes when it comes to understanding certain positions.
Now, there are going to be some positions at the edges, so abortion, I think, and veganism are two of them, where there's room for legitimate disagreement because we're getting at the boundaries of human knowledge, like what is a human life or what is a conscious experience.
These are like the hardest questions to ask.
But I think overwhelmingly for most things, we all agree.
Like if we could show somebody that if we all do, if we if we do this thing, all poverty will go away.
If that thing was eradicating the government and living it as an anarchist society, like left-leaning people should go, okay, well, if it really gets rid of all poverty, fine.
And then on the flip side, if making the most socialized government ever that pays for everybody's stuff and everybody's happy and healthy, even a conservative should say, okay, well, if that does fix it, then sure I change my position.
But I think at the same day, we all want the same things.
We just get there in radically different ways.
Yeah, it is a difficult question.
Is the other side evil?
I mean, only people can have the property of being good or evil.
I think that legal abortion is evil.
I think the act of abortion is evil because it kills an innocent human being who has a right to life.
And I think that people who defend legal abortion have different levels of culpability for being immoral, for defending this thing.
Some people could be misinformed, mistaken.
They have used their rational powers in a mistaken way to defend an awful position.
Like I think Peter Singer defends an evil position when he defends infanticide.
But I also think there's a difference between someone who says, you know what, I'm for abortion because even if it is a baby, I don't care.
People should be able to do what they want.
I would say that that is appealing just to evil base instincts and other people are defending this evil with mistaken rational arguments.
Okay, got it.
Where can the people find you, Destiny?
youtube.com slash destiny, kick.com slash destiny and instagram.com slash destiny.
And Trent, what about you?
Yeah, people can find me on YouTube.
Just search for the Council of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L.
So, Council of Trent on YouTube, Google, iTunes.
I'm on Twitter, Trent Horn.
If you like to learn more about this subject, I just released a second edition of my book.
I get a book plug at the end.
Persuasive Pro Live at a Talk About Our Culture's Toughest Issue.
Go to shop.catholic.com to get it.
It should be in Amazon soon to replace the first edition.
But I wrote the first one in 2014, but now that Roe vs. Wade is overturned, I wrote a follow-up that reworked everything.
So people can check that out.
But yeah, Council of Trent on YouTube.
People check that out.
You guys, you have Catholic.com?
Yes, I have.
Where are you affiliated with?
I work for Catholic Answers.
So I do work for them.
And back in the 90s, Carl Keating was the guy who founded the thing.
And so he founded the company back in like 1988.
So in 1992, in the early 90s, he got the staff together and he said, listen, I've been reading the trade journals.
And there's this thing coming soon called the internet.
And it's going to change everything.
You're going to be able to order food on it.
And one of the guys there was like, what, are you going to go to your computer and there'll be a camera and you just get the milk out of the fridge through the camera on your computer?
He says, no, you'll be able to do all this stuff, but everybody will have their own address.
So we got to make sure that since we're Catholic Answers, we should get Catholic.com.
And so he got it in 1993.
Like the one thing that the Pope would be like, we'd really appreciate if you could give us Catholicada.com.
Sorry, that's more Mario than the Pope.
But he's Argentinian.
He wouldn't say that.
If the Pope asked for Catholic.com, would you guys give it up?
We may make a deal with him if he could do a few things for us, maybe.
The Pope.
He doesn't have authority to infallibly make us do that.
It doesn't fall under faith and morals.
Web domains don't fall under his jurisdiction.
Yeah, so Catholic.com is where I'm at.
Would that be like an eminent domain thing, but for Catholicism?
Like, wait, the Pope can make you give him stuff?
Well, back in the Middle Ages when the Pope was aligned with the Emperor and he had a lot more civil authority over things, maybe.
Nowadays, not so much.
Okay.
Got it.
Okay, guys.
Well, guys, last call.
Please hit the like button on your way out.
Thank you for tuning in tonight.
Thank you very much to our two guests here.
Thank you guys.
You could have been anywhere in the world, but you're here with me.
I appreciate that to our viewers.
Thank you to everyone who superchatted, donated, and supports the show.
Thank you to all our chat mods.
Big thank you to Britt, who's helping with time stamps.
We will be live again with our dating talk Sunday at 7 p.m. Pacific.
Hope you guys enjoyed this stream.
07's in the chat.
And yeah, we will see you guys again Sunday, 7 p.m. Pacific.
Hope you guys have a good rest of your day, and we'll see you soon.
Good night, guys.
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