Last week, LiveActionNews published an article from Olivier Lindor called "Four Non-Religious Reasons to be Pro-Life". In that article, Lindor made the claim that science is all you need for the pro-life argument. Philosophy is (presumably) unreliable as a source of truth. Science is the only reliable source of truth, so science should be the standard we turn to when we make public policy. He gave three other arguments, but my purpose for this article is to specifically respond to Lindor's first argument from science. To be clear, I enjoy LiveActionNews. This is not a diatribe against them, but merely my intention to respond, as a pro-life educator, to an idea that I find detrimental to the pro-life argument and worldview, in general.
Lindor is right that there is a significant non-religious portion of the pro-life movement. He is also right that we do not have to specifically present a religious argument to justify the pro-life stance. However, he does not have to throw philosophy under the bus to do so.
Lindor asserts that while personhood is an abstract concept, life is not. But this is mistaken. Life, too, is an abstract concept. After all, you can't point to life anywhere and say "there it is; that is life". You can point to living things, that is, things that instantiate the property of "alive", but you can't point to life, itself, as you can point to a human being. Life, too, is an abstract concept. It just so happens that scientists have a list of criteria that make a living thing alive, and human beings, as scientists have discovered, fit the bill from fertilization.
Second, in saying that personhood is an abstract concept but life is not, and that there is undisputed science regarding when human life begins, Lindor seems to be saying that philosophy is unreliable in giving us truth. But why believe a thing like that? Take the abstract concept "triangularity". There is no dispute that a triangle is a polygon with three sides and three angles. While there is a debate about whether or not abstract objects exist in reality (I'm a realist when it comes to abstract objects), there is no debate that any polygon with three sides and three angles is a triangle. Similarly, just because personhood, like life, is an abstract concept doesn't mean there cannot be a consensus on what personhood is. Additionally, as I have just shown, life is an abstract concept and there is scientific consensus on when human life begins. Just because there is disagreement on what personhood actually is does not mean there is no right answer, just as the fact that there is disagreement over whether or not abortion is morally permissible means there is no right answer.
Finally, another major problem with this view is that it leads to extreme pacifism. If all that is necessary in the moral equation is that they are biologically human, then we cannot justify killing anyone, even in self-defense. How does Lindor get from "this entity is biologically human" to "we cannot kill this entity"? Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. Would Lindor oppose removing a brain-dead person with no hope of recovery from life support? He would have to, given his argument. You just can't derive a system of ethics from science. That requires philosophy.
So I definitely appreciate Lindor's wanting to take a stand against abortion, and I appreciate his desire to make a non-religious case against abortion. I would just suggest he not disregard philosophy in doing so.
"Lindor made the claim that science is all you need for the pro-life argument. . . . However, he does not have to throw philosophy under the bus to do so. Lindor asserts that while personhood is an abstract concept, life is not. . . . Life, too, is an abstract concept. It just so happens that scientists have a list of criteria that make a living thing alive. . . . just because personhood, like life, is an abstract concept doesn't mean there cannot be a consensus on what personhood is."
ReplyDelete1. If I understand correctly, you agree with Lindor that the idea of "life" is science because "scientists have a list of criteria." Once science develops the "such a consensus" about personhood that you say is possible, that is, once scientists have a list of criteria for personhood, then won't "personhood" be science as much as "life" is, and therefore if you want to make a pro-life case based on personhood, can't you do that within Lindor's prescription "science is all you need" -- ?
Another way to put it -- if Lindor had made his same essential point by saying, "For 'life' there is presently a list of criteria and for 'personhood' there presently is not, so life is, presently, a better pro-life argument" -- without using the term "science" and seeming to belittle philosophy -- wouldn't you have agreed with him?
2. Lindor did not intend to write a complete, shortcoming-less essay on "reasons to be pro-life," but I will just mention the biggest shortcoming that I do see in it in terms of such reasons: he has only listed points of empirical evidence. Points of empirical evidence, alone, cannot add up to reasons to be pro-life, because being pro-life involves "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts." Science and other kinds of empirical evidence can tell us what is, but not what should be.
But then, I don't think that logical, discursive philosophy alone can tell us "should" or "shouldn't" either without appealing to something that is neither science nor philosophy -- our pre-logical, pre-verbal moral intuitions.
Once under your "Why Personhood Ultimately Doesn't Matter" SPL article I commented, ". . . any moral principle can only be based ultimately on pre-logical intuition . . .," and you replied:
"I don't think it's true to say that moral principles can only be based on pre-logical intuition. Many thinkers down through the ages have used reason to establish moral principles."
I replied taking issue with that. If I were to post the link to my reply here, I think your blog's software would reject my comment, but I could email it to you if you're interested.
In that reply of mine I referred to my blog post "Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate" (can be Googled).
"Just because there is disagreement on what personhood actually is does not mean there is no right answer, just as the fact that there is disagreement over whether or not abortion is morally permissible means there is no right answer."
ReplyDeleteIF scientists agreeing on a list of criteria for personhood constitutes a right answer, it should not be difficult for them to come up with that right answer, because they will be selecting the criteria from among scientifically-measurable variables. But in trying to come up with a right answer about the morality of abortion, they would have to select among some variables that are not scientifically measurable. In any life situation that raises a moral question, there are likely to be relevant variables that are scientifically measurable, but the moral questions themselves are outside the purview of science, at least present science.
Life has more than one definition. It can mean the collection of processes which differentiate a living thing from a dead one, but it can also mean the period of time from when one begins to exist to the present, or to the end of ones existence (He lived a long life), or the existence of an individual human being or animal (the accident claimed a life).
ReplyDeleteThe pro-life argument that "Life begins at conception" is based on a fallacy of equivocation between these meanings, with the pro-choicer believing that they are agreeing that the object (fetus, embryo, zygote) is alive, only to be caught flat footed when the pro-lifer turns around and claims that they have agreed that it constitutes "a life", as in a living human being.
On the topic of fallacies of equivocation, human adjective and human noun are not synonymous either. Establishing something as "human" is not the same as establishing it as "a human".
I remember reading a forum post by someone who claimed they had come up with a silver bullet argument against abortion. "Ask the pro-choicer if the zygote human, and they will say yes. Ask them if it is alive, and they'll agree. Then say "well if its a human, and alive, what right do you have to kill it?"". Obviously this argument doesn't work, as it uses human adjective in the premises and human noun in the conclusion. With that in mind, establishing the zygote, embryo, or fetus as biologically human is not sufficient for proving it is a human being (necessary, yes, sufficient, no).
Also, many people seem unaware that there is no scientific consensus on what the definition of organism should be (there are, in fact, several competing definitions). If someone wants to argue for being biologically human and being an organism as being sufficient condition for being a human being, they need to tell what definition they are using and why they believe it is a sufficient condition for being a human being.
Since the "scientific proof" of the zygote, embryo, or preconscious fetus being a human being almost universally relies on these three misconceptions, I don't think that science actually supports the claim that the zygote, embryo, or preconscious fetus constitutes a human being.
Just my two cents.
Life has more than one definition, but the definition to use (like with any word) depends on the context of the discussion. Saying "life has multiple meanings" is not a refutation for the scientific definition of life beginning at fertilization.
DeleteThere is no equivocation happening here. We are speaking in alignment with the scientific community, which agrees that human life begins at fertilization. In 1933, Alan Guttmacher wrote that today (that is, back in 1933) we know that a human being begins with the fusion of the sperm and the ovum, and this is so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge. The problem is that pro-choice people try to obfuscate the issue by pointing out that there are different definitions of "life", but that's simply a red herring. We are talking about when an individual human life begins, and the scientific consensus being that life begins at fertilization (virtually all embryology textbooks since the late 19th century agree that human life begins at fertilization).
I am not the first one to come up with this "hypothetical" (I read it on a blog some where), but I think it is something to try on a "pro choicer".
ReplyDeleteLet's say there is a pair of Siamese twins who can't be surgically separated without killing the much weaker one (a RARE event, but NOT an impossibility).
What if the weaker, "dependent" twin were to go into a "temporary" coma.
Does the "pro choicer" think, in the light of his stronger status and "control of his body" have the right to then kill the weaker, comotose twin?
If they say "no", ask them exactly HOW that is different from abortion (especially in the later stages).
Of course that is no "silver bullet", but I think it will cause at least a FEW of them to reconsider their positions.
An approach to the bodily-rights argument for abortion rights, other than analogies that elicit our moral intuitions about situations similar to abortion, is to analyze the CONCEPT of bodily rights. This inevitably leads us to identify the psychological sense of body ownership as the core issue, and to study that sense. Everything hinges on the outcome of that study.
DeleteSee --
www DOT NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation DOT org SLASH bodily-rights-and-a-better-idea
-- or Google for "Bodily Rights and a Better Idea" (WITH quotes).