In this episode Trent breaks down the arguments he used to defend the pro-choice position in his recent “Devil’s Advocate Debate” and then explains why those arguments ultimately fail to support the pro-choice position.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today I want to do a kind of debrief and deconstruction, if you will, of the arguments that I made in my recent devil’s advocate debate with Ben Watkins on the issue of abortion. Now, I said at the beginning of that debate, why I did that devil’s advocate debate and what a devil’s advocate debate is. I’m going to briefly summarize that. Then I want to get into the argument.
Trent Horn:
Devil’s advocate debate is where you defend a position you don’t normally hold. In this debate, instead of doing the pro-life side, I did the pro-choice side. I put forward a very particular argument and the reason for that, normally… I didn’t like doing this debate. I felt kind of icky and I don’t like it, but I thought the debate had utility, because I was able in the position I defended it was a one that’s popular among certain philosophers, but most of the general public would recoil at it.
Trent Horn:
I do believe it is the logical consequence of abortion, that it’s the only consistent view you can have on abortion, if you’re, pro-choice, at least one of the most popular, consistent views that you could have. But it’s morally repugnant to most people and so that’s why I thought it was worthwhile, and from that position, I was able to criticize other common views. Like saying, “Oh, well, abortion’s okay up to viability or up to birth,” and because this debate I argued for personhood and I said, “Look, you’re not a person, unless you can act like a person and be rational. Even infants are not persons and so infanticide, it’s not morally wrong.” That was a position that I took, that one inspiration for it, Peter Kreeft the Catholic philosopher, Peter Kreeft, tells a story once, he was explained to a group of feminists, how abortion and infanticide, there’s no moral difference between them.
Trent Horn:
They’re both… Abortion entails infanticide. These feminists told Dr. Kreeft, “Wow, you really changed our mind.” He said, “Oh, are you pro-life now?” They said, “No, now we’re pro and infanticide.” There’s always a risk, right? There’s a risk I could do this, and someone’s like, “You know, Trent, you’re right. Now I don’t think can infanticide is wrong.” Yeah, that’s a risk. But I think most other people will say, “Wow, abortion leads to infanticide. I can’t be in favor of abortion, if that’s the road, it naturally takes me down to, the conclusion it takes me to.
Trent Horn:
I felt it was justified and I thought Ben did a good job. As I said, though, in the previous lay up, I thought he was a tad too technical in it. I thought that he could have pressed me on some other points, but he raised some very good objections going through. I thought he did a great job. I think he did a good job defending the pro-life view. One of the other reasons I was willing to do devil’s advocate debate with him.
Trent Horn:
But what want to do now, is I want to go through the arguments and some of the examples that I gave and show you why I don’t ultimately buy what I was selling in that debate. What was my primary argument? My prior argument was, “It’s only wrong to kill persons, fetuses are not persons, abortion kills fetuses, so abortion’s not wrong.” I defined a person essentially as somebody who has an immediate capacity, someone who can act like a rational individual, though I wasn’t entirely clear on that. I said, “You got to have the ability to engage in rational thought beyond what non-human animals can do.”
Trent Horn:
Ben pressed me. He said, “Well, in a rebuttal, well, the unborn do have that ability. It’s latent. It’s a second order capacity. It’s something they will develop later on. I tried to rebut that, but I’ll show you where my rebuttal falls apart. I think the problem is that was my definition. A person is someone who has the immediate capacity to act like a rational individual beyond a non-human animal. What’s wrong with this? Well, number one, as I said, it entails infanticide. If you think infanticide is wrong and you’re not going to be shaken by that view, then you can’t hold to this position.
Trent Horn:
I think that’s a justifiable position. For example, if there was a moral philosophy and it led to the conclusion, it’s not wrong to rape people, I think many people would say, “Wow, that moral philosophy is bad. I’m not going to… I can’t believe in it if it leads to the conclusion, rape is permissible or racism is permissible,” and you’d be justified in many cases holding that view. I think we could say the same for infanticide.
Trent Horn:
There was an actual symposium on infanticide. I think in first things, a while back, it was when the Oxford Journal of Medicine published a article by Minerva and Giubilini, I think is their names. It was defending after birth abortion, infanticide. Robert George, Catholic, new natural law professor says, “You know, I don’t need an argument. Infanticide is wrong. Suck it.” I mean, he doesn’t use those words, but that’s basically what he says. I give George a lot of credit there, but there’s others. Dr. Chris Kaczor, in his book, The ethics of Abortion, he makes arguments against it. In persuasive pro-life, I included an appendix on infanticide, I was worried the debate was going in that area.
Trent Horn:
I tried to offer you some reasons I said in the debate. By the way, all the reasons and things I offered were mirroring what I’ve read in pro-choice philosophical literature. I said, “Well, maybe infanticide is wrong, not because the infant is a person, but because it’s like burning a Picasso painting. It’s rare and invaluable. Why would you go and do that?” That doesn’t really capture our moral intuitions about infanticide. When you throw a Picasso in the fire, we feel bad because for the rest of us not having the painting, we don’t feel bad for the painting. If you throw an infant into the fire, sacrifice them to Moloch or something, we feel bad for the infant. Not, and even if they were anesthetized and didn’t feel pain, we would recoil at the loss of this life, that this individual deserves to be treated better than that.
Trent Horn:
You can’t compare them to a valuable painting, a painting has extrinsic value. Nearly everyone agrees infants and human beings have intrinsic value. Not based on whether people want them or not. There’s other arguments that people give, “Oh, infanticide could lead to a general disrespect for human life.” Well, so can abortion. Then that’s an argument against abortion too. It’s so close. It’s Bonnie Steinback and her book on abortion says, “It’s so close to being a person. We just treat it like it were,” that’s a totally arbitrary one. It’s just completely arbitrary. What do you mean by close? If you think that personhood arises really late, like 12 months or 14 months, like let’s say yeah, 12 months, let’s say you’re not a person until you turn one. If at birth, you’re not even halfway there, it’s been nine months.
Trent Horn:
You’re not even ha halfway in 21 months, it’d be like at two months you would be halfway to being a person under that view. If it’s nine months as a person, you’re just barely halfway. It just seems totally arbitrary to me that people eventually, you have to just admit “Well, infanticide is just wrong because we don’t like it. But if we stopped not liking it, it would be okay. I think that’s a position most people don’t want to take. Also… And it’s not just a moral problem. People say, “Ah, Trent, that’s just a moral, emotional argument.” Well, most morality is about emotional arguments.
Trent Horn:
I think though, another flaw is one I referenced earlier, the immediate capacity argument, I said you have to be able to function like a person to be a person. You have to have rational abilities. But what does that mean? You look at me now recording this podcast, “Oh, he’s a person, he’s being rational.” Hopefully you think I’m rational. But when I’m sleeping, let’s say I’m in a deep sleep. I’m not rational. Do I stop being a person when I sleep? Mayhill might say, “Well, no, you don’t stop being a person. You still have the abilities. It just takes a second to turn them on.” But it seems like, “Okay, you’re going to tolerate I’m a person, even though I have to undergo a biological change to act like a person. With sleep, I need certain hormones to be administered in my body and nerve endings to conduce, to be rational.” I have to wake up. Right? Some people are in really deep sleep. You got to shake them to rouse them from their slumber.
Trent Horn:
Okay, but still you have to undergo a biological change, something, even at the hormonal level or the nervous system level to act like a person. But we [inaudible 00:09:10], “Okay, yeah. It’s just a minimal change.” What about a coma? What if some is in a coma and are they still a person? I waffled on that in the debate, but I think it’s a good question. Especially, let’s say someone who’s in a reversible coma that is going to come out of it in a few months. Are they a person? Well, what if the only way they’ll come out of the coma is that there has to be minor healing in their brain. New neural pathways have to form for them to come out of the coma. Their brain has to heal. What you’re saying here is this individual is a person, but their brain has to grow more before they can act like a person.
Trent Horn:
Well, why should I believe that? Well, they used to… The pro-choicer might say, “Well, they used to act like a person.” Well, so what? Pro-choice people are going to say that someone in a persistent vegetative state used to be a person, but they’re not a person anymore, because they’ll never act like a person again. But if the reversibly comatose person is still a person, because they could do that in the future, be it act in personal ways, then the same applies to an unborn child.
Trent Horn:
Now, because it’s interesting, they’re willing to say… Now you can’t say, you might say, “Oh, before the coma, they had interests, so it’d be wrong to kill them in the coma.” That’s a separate issue, but you’re not justified in saying, “Well they were a person and in the coma, they’re still a person, even if they can’t act like one,” and more importantly, remember their brain has to grow.
Trent Horn:
It has to, let’s say there are new neural pathways. The argument is they’re still a person. They just have to have a little bit of biological growth to act like a person. Do you see though, where this is being traced back, eventually you get to, “Well, how is that different than the person in the coma?” Let’s say they have a traumatic brain injury, they need lots of brain growth and we give them a pill that allows their brain to really grow. We don’t have that yet. Yeah, they just need to heal.
Trent Horn:
Well, what about an infant? An infant goes from 56 trillion synaptic connections at birth to a thousand trillion synaptic connections nine months later. Most people who will say a person has to act like a person, they’re willing to tolerate that amount of growth in the brain. It seems like you can keep stretching it to say in the coma, the sleeping case or the coma case, “Yeah. You’re a person, even if you have to undergo biological change in the body before you can act like a person,” and you apply that then to infants and the radical brain growth that they have. Then why not a fetus?
Trent Horn:
In all these cases, they’re predicated on the idea that a person is a being that has the kind of nature, where they will act like a person, even if they have to undergo biological change to do that. That applies to unborn children as well. The argument, unless I’m willing to say that only people who are immediately functioning, that when you fall asleep, you’re not a person anymore. Or when you’re in a reversible coma, you’re not a person anymore. I think the view ultimately become untenable.
Trent Horn:
What about some of the thought experiments that I offered? What was the one I put here? Imagine a mad scientist has kidnapped you and threatened to destroy your mind and body, or only destroy your mind, which would you choose? The idea here is, “Well, if we are only minds, we won’t care which option. We think they’re both equally bad. If we’re only minds, then we only show up after birth, we become a mental person or whatever. But if we are a physical organism, then we shouldn’t care. At least our body would survive. At least our body would survive and shouldn’t we just immediately pick that one? No, because these thought experiments don’t necessarily reveal coherent, moral intuitions. They don’t tell the whole story. Okay. Because we might be choosing, they’re not what does it mean to be a person, but we’re deciding what kind of life is that we would want to consider worth living or one we would prefer to have. There are, people say, there are some fates worse than death.
Trent Horn:
Now, I don’t believe in euthanasia, obviously. I don’t believe we should directly kill innocent people, but there’s many people who would say, if they’re in a given situation, they might prefer to die rather than remain alive. That does not prove that remaining alive, you’re not a person or anything like that. Imagine this other example, here’s a parallel case. Imagine a mad scientist has kidnapped you and threatened to either destroy your mind and body or only destroy your body by leaving you locked in. Which option would you choose? A mad scientist says, “I’m going to kill you, or I’m going to make you locked in.” Locked in means you are awake. You feel things, but you’re conscious and alert, but you can’t move your body. Maybe you can mentally move your eyes. Not even that. You’re awake. You’re conscious. You perceive things, you think, but you cannot move your body. It’s the ultimate form of paralysis.
Trent Horn:
Now, which would you prefer? I think a lot of people would say they would rather just die, instead of being in a state of being locked in. What does that prove though? Would that prove, you might say, “Oh, well, we’re not really a mental collection of person. We’re not really a mental collection, because we wouldn’t want to live in a locked-in state.” No, that doesn’t prove… That would not disprove the pro-choice position, “You’re just a bunch of mental states.” It would just be a hard thought experiment, much like the thought experiment where only destroying your mind or your mind and body. A lot of us, I don’t want my mind destroyed. I’d be like, “Well, what would my body be doing later, and if I’m not there to take care of it? I’d be concerned about that.”
Trent Horn:
But that concern would not mean that I think I’m only my mind. Okay, so these thought experiments come from people like Michael Tooley and others. I just don’t think… They’re not helpful in using them to determine what our true source of identity is. Whether we are a per… Whether we are an organism, which I would say we are, or whether we are just a mere collection of mental states. However, our mental states are an important part of our life. We are a rational animal. Losing that rational part of us is a really, really big deal. But it doesn’t mean that that part of us just is what we are, and we also aren’t essentially animals, organisms, embodied beings.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Then the mind upload example, that one really doesn’t work. Say, “Oh, which would you rather have, your mind uploaded, or I kill you?” I’d say, “Look, there’s no difference there. You upload my mind, that’s a copy of me. That’s not me, because suppose you uploaded my mind to a computer and then I wake up and you didn’t kill me. Am I in the computer and not in the computer? No, that’s not me in there. That’s a copy. I haven’t survived the ordeal.”
Trent Horn:
I can turn Tooley’s thought experiment around. This would be, I guess if this thought experiment were thrown at me by someone like Tooley, I would turn it around to say, “Look, you’re saying that the destruction of our minds and the destruction of our bodies are equivalent. We’re really just minds. That’s all that we are. I don’t think that’s the case. Imagine your one year old is sick and the doctors… Imagine your one year old is sick and the doctors propose one of two treatments. Treatment one kills your one year old. Treatment two leaves your one year old alive, but they’ve lost all of his, he’s lost all of his memories. Which one would you choose?
Trent Horn:
I would say nearly every parent would pick treatment two. Treatment one isn’t even a treatment. The treatment will kill him. It would be sad. It would be awful, but I would still have my son, even though he is now disabled and requires rehabilitation. This case though shows, “Now wait a minute, if the mind and the body, if they’re identical, like Tooley and others want to say that the destruction of the body and the mind are basically the same thing,” there would be no difference. You say, “Oh well there’s no difference between the two cases.” I would say, “Well, well, no, there is a difference. You would almost overwhelmingly choose only having the child’s mind destroyed rather than the mind and the body, because the child is not merely a collection of mental states.
Trent Horn:
Human beings are not just mental states. We are also embodied people. We’re rational animals. Then just a few of the other examples, my tough cases I threw out there. Ben was right on target when he said that a right to life does not entail a right to be rescued. We might not… Just because you have a right to life, doesn’t mean you’re always going to be saved. If there is a fire and there’s 10 people in danger over here and two people over here and they’re my children, the two people are my kids, I’m going to save my kids, but that doesn’t mean that I would… Choosing who to save is not a right to life issue. For example, if someone held my children, my family hostage, I would not blow up a bus with people on it to save them.
Trent Horn:
I will not murder people to save my family, but I might choose to save my family and not choose to save other people, doesn’t mean that I don’t think I have a right to life. Much the same in the fertility lab case, people might have different reasons why they choose to save a five year old over the embryos. They might emotionally not want the five year old to suffer the pain of fire that the embryos don’t feel. They don’t feel as emotionally connected to the embryos. In some cases, people will save the embryos. If it is apparent and those are their children, they may save the embryos, in that case. The thought experiment, it doesn’t always work. You can change it to support a lot of different intuitions.
Trent Horn:
Pro-lifers don’t care about stopping miscarriages was another one I threw out there. Well that’s like saying imagine 500 years ago, there was a serial killer that was killing toddlers. We were saying, “Hey, it should be illegal to kill toddlers.” Let’s say it was legal to kill toddlers. Right? Let’s say it was legal to kill toddlers, not serial killer. It’s legal to kill kids under five. Let’s say this is 500 years ago. I’m saying, “No, kids under five, they’re persons, they’re persons, we shouldn’t kill them.”
Trent Horn:
Now, imagine if someone said, “These people who say toddlers are persons, half of all toddlers die before the age of five, and yet they’re doing nothing to try to save those children.” I would say, “Well, I do want to save those children,” but it might be really hard to figure out 500 years ago, how to stop child mortality from being 50%, which is what it was. Half of all children did not make it to the age of five.
Trent Horn:
At least that was definitely true 1000 years ago, 500 years ago. It’s still true in some rural parts of the world today. But I would say just because I’m not sure how to save those children, doesn’t mean I should stop from trying to save, make it illegal to kill these children over here, that we can save. It just doesn’t make sense. Also, how are we supposed to get research money to prevent miscarriage? Many people, we’ve suffered from miscarriage.
Trent Horn:
I would very much, most people would very much like to stop miscarriages from happening. How are we going to get money and research? How are we going to get people to care about embryos that failed to implant when we can’t even get our country to ban abortion in the third trimester? Unless there’s a health exception, that’s so wide, anything can qualify. How? We can’t get people to care about banning abortion after let’s say 15 weeks. How will we get them to care about embryos that are miscarried?
Trent Horn:
Then the legal punishment. Why don’t, and I threw this out there rhetorically, I wanted to be feisty in the debate. They don’t punish women for killing other persons. Here, I would say, and I’ve said this before, if there are laws against abortion, laws against abortion, we should use them similar to laws against infanticide. In other countries like in Great Britain, they have laws specifically dealing with infanticide. The punishments for infanticide are less, because they understand that the mother is not a threat to the public at large. She’s usually under a great amount of emotional duress or stress that mitigates her culpability in that respect.
Trent Horn:
Then Ben was right on this in the debate to say, “Look, we should have punishments that reflect circumstances that make sense,” but I would say, “Look, if the unborn are human beings, we ought to treat them like born human beings.” The punishments for killing a born human being, they widely vary based on the circumstances, but we all agree that those born human beings ought to be protected under the law. The same should be true of unborn human beings.
Trent Horn:
Finally, let me address something I said about potentiality and actuality. I said, “This is rhetorical on my end. Oh, well potential for presidents. Don’t get treated like actual presidents. Potential persons don’t get treated like actual persons.” The argument from Tooley and others, Tooley, Michael Tooley the philosopher makes this argument, “If you have a cat and you have a pill that can make the cat rational, you do nothing wrong in choosing to not give the pill to the cat. All that happens is there will be no rational creature.” Tooley argues with a fetus or an infant, “If you kill them prior to them becoming rational, it’s the same level of harm. None. All that happens is that no rational creature comes into existence.”
Trent Horn:
I would say this is wrong. This makes it seem like we can’t harm infants, because they’re not persons, but that doesn’t seem right. For example, imagine you took an infant and you isolated them from other people and they never learned to be rational. They’re like a feral child. Right? They’re feral and they never learned rationality. That’s happened in rare cases. Have you harmed that infant? Well, how? If I say I take an infant and I never introduce it to human beings and so it’s just a feral child, how have I harmed the infant? I could just say, “Hey, no rational creature developed. It’s like not giving the magic pill to the cat.”
Trent Horn:
Clearly that’s not the case or why it would be wrong to take a, this is an example I like from Patrick Lee, why it’s wrong to take a unborn child, a human fetus, and genetically engineer them to desire to be a slave of other people? How have you harmed them? You changed something prior to them being a person and now they’re a person with this certain desire. What’s wrong with that? If you say, “Well, no, they have a right to develop into a normal person who doesn’t want to be a slave.” Then I would say by that logic, the human fetus has the right to develop into a normal person. I.e., the right to develop at all in the first place. I don’t think the arguments… I don’t think that they succeed in that regard.
Trent Horn:
Oh, I’ll talk about the origami argument, “We are only persons when our bodies are folded up and we constitute persons, but we aren’t identical to persons.” I would say that’s just not how we experience life. I don’t pilot my body. It’s not like I am the homunculus… If you remember The Men in Black, the little guy who controlled the levers, the alien, who is this big and he is inside the guy’s head? The fake body and he is piloting it around. That’s not our life. We are not, we don’t pilot bodies. When I kiss my wife on the forehead, when I leave for work, when I leave for work, I mean go upstairs. I’m not kissing my wife’s forehead. I’m kissing my wife. I am kissing her forehead, or giving her a kiss on the lips, but it’s not like I’m kissing her shell and she’s trapped up in here in the mental part. No, we are persons. We are embodied individuals and that’s something that’s important.
Trent Horn:
Robert George and Christopher Tollefson talk about that at length in their book, Embryo, which I would… I’d highly recommend. Also, I’d recommend Chris Kaczor’s book, The Ethics of Abortion. The chapter on personhood after birth, answering those arguments is very helpful for me in formulating this debate and reaching those individuals. As I said, that’s what I… that’s how I would answer the case, if I had the full ability to do that. If you have other questions, like me to go into more detail, definitely the best place where you can do that is to be a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. I can’t answer every comment under a YouTube channel, but I usually respond when people leave comments at trenthornpodcast.com, especially if they have clarifying questions on things.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, definitely check that out at trenthornpodcast.com. Thank you guys. I hope this debrief was helpful for you all. If you’d like me to do a devil’s advocate debate with somebody else on a different topic, you think it’s actually pretty cool, let me know, leave a suggestion in the comments below, and I just hope you all have a very blessed day.
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit trenthornpodcast.com.