In this episode Trent sits down with atheist Youtuber Shannon Q to talk about the issue of abortion and whether a fetus is a person.
Book Trent to speak at your parish or next event.
Want more from Trent Horn?
- Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues
- Why We’re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, And Love
- Persuasive Pro-Life: How to Talk About Our Culture’s Toughest Issue
- Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Welcome to another episode of the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker Trent horn. It’s nice to be speaking to you because the previous episodes have been pre-recorded because of the holidays, and so now I feel like I can actually catch up with everyone. I want to let you know that we’re really expanding here at the podcast and your support at Trent Horn podcast is what’s making it possible. If you’re not a premium subscriber, I strongly encourage you, even for as little as $5 a month, you get access to propose questions to me, like we’re going to do a pro-life open mailbag here at the end of the month.
The gold level subscribers get first dibs but even people who give $5 a month, you’ll get access to that, other bonus content, and you’re helping the expand the podcast because now Counsel of Trent is on YouTube. We’re a little baby channel. I think the last time I checked there is like 300 subscribers, but my goal is to help people learn how to dialogue. Specifically, I want to teach Catholics how to have fruitful conversations with non-Catholics. I mean, that’s our job, right,? We’re supposed to be evangelizing the world, but a lot of us feel like, I can’t do it. Yes you can, yes you can.
And what I want to do is equip you to be able to do that. And I think the best way for me to do that is to have podcast episodes that equip and explain our faith, but also do dialogues, and so I’ve been doing different dialogues as a way to model how to evangelize, how to share our faith, how to engage those who disagree. And the long form dialogues have been awesome. And I think you’re going to really like this dialogue, I’m sharing with you in today’s episode. But if you go to the Counsel of Trent YouTube page, I’m going to put a link in the description of this episode at trenthornpodcast.com, you’ll see that your financial support is allowing me to add short form video, short four minute apologetic videos, I’m also starting to do rebuttal videos. So, eventually, I’ll ask you all the patrons to submit the videos on YouTube that you want to see me do rebuttals to.
I’m starting now going through Mike wingers series on Catholicism, he’s a Protestant pastor, very critical of Catholicism. He’s a nice guy, but he’s critical of Catholicism. He’s wrong and I gently explain in my rebuttal videos, it’s just a video of me watching his video and then pausing and saying, well, here’s where he’s right, but also here’s where he’s wrong or makes an error. And I want to do more videos like this to show people what the truth is and then share with them how to explain the truth to others, but I can’t do it without your help. This podcast has to be completely funded by you the patron.
So at Catholic Answers everything we do has to be self funded. The magazine is funded by the people who subscribe to it. Catholic Answers live is funded by the pledge drives. And the Counsel of Trent is funded by all of you who are supporters of trenthornpodcast.com. So if you’d like to see me expand even more into YouTube, what we’re doing now, which I’m super excited about, please consider becoming a patron for as little as $5 a month at trenthornpodcast.com, and you get access to the bonus content that we have coming up, all kinds of great things.
And now, a dialogue I wanted to introduce you all to, I think a month ago, I asked for help on Twitter, I wanted to have a conversation, a good faith conversation on abortion, and Twitter came through and they brought me Shannon Q who is an atheist Vlogger, she has her own YouTube page. And I was very happy with this conversation and I’m looking forward to probably doing a debrief on it next week. But without further ado, here is our conversation on abortion with a special emphasis on whether an unborn child is a person, whether a fetus is a person. So here is our conversation. And by the way, this wasn’t like a Counsel of Trent conversation, I appeared on Shannon’s channel so I’ve entered into her domain a little bit rather than having her come on my show but I think it was still a great conversation. And here it is.
Shannon Q: Hello everybody and welcome to Shannon Q. I believe we are live. I am hoping the chat will let me know. I’m looking at the chat right now so that you guys can let me know if you guys can see us. Today I am looking forward to a very interesting and productive dialogue regarding a topic that is not always spoken about productively. So, today I have Trent Horn with me who I’m going to give an opportunity to introduce himself in just a moment but, before I do that, I’ll just let you all know, in case anybody needs to make sure that they are psychologically safe from this discussion, we are going to be having conversations surrounding abortion. So, if this is something that you don’t feel comfortable listening to, please make sure you take care of yourself first, that’s what’s most paramount to me.
So I was tagged on Twitter an infinite amount of times because Trent was looking for a conversation partner where he could have a productive dialogue, I believe it was particularly with a female and/or an atheist or potentially both, that would be a good dialogue partner. Then flatteringly enough, I got tagged in that quite a bit even though this isn’t a topic that I discussed very, very frequently. So we connected with one another, and set a time, and here we are. So Trent before we get going onto the topic, please just let my audience know who you are and where they can find you.
Trent Horn: Sure. So my name is Trent Horn. I am an apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, which is a media apostolate dedicated to explaining and defending the Catholic faith. My personal mission is to engage in productive dialogue with people who are not Catholic or Catholics who question the Catholic faith, and for us to reason together to get closer to the truth. I’ve written about nine books on various topics like atheism, the Bible, Protestantism, moral issues. I have a podcast called the Counsel of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L. If you have any Catholics in your audience hopefully they’ll catch the pun there. That’s a trenthornpodcast.com, it’s a Google, iTunes. And I just started a channel on YouTube a few weeks ago, it’s a baby channel on its way, Counsel of Trent on there where I’m posting more dialogues and short videos.
But my goal is to really … I believe in the Catholic faith, I believe it’s a true good and beautiful thing. But I know not everyone believes that or agrees with it. And I think that what we all can agree on though is the importance of having civil dialogue amongst one another who disagree and try to find ways to get more resolution on these important issues that divide us.
Shannon Q: Wonderful. Sounds like you and I will get along just great.
Trent Horn: Yes, I think so.
Shannon Q: Yes. So I’ve been looking forward to it. It’s been a little while in the making because both of us have a pretty ridiculous schedules. So I appreciate you making the time. And I thank you very much. And I believe that this is going to, or at least portions of it are going to be posted on your podcast at a later date. So if anybody is interested in checking it out, please go and do so. I’m going to ask Trent for his links so that I can put them in the description down below after this dialogue. So that [crosstalk 00:07:25]
Trent Horn: Yes, I think that would be great. And I’m very grateful that you agreed to speak with me. What’s funny is when I go on the internet, I find a lot of people, whether they’re Christians or atheists who have no problem posting videos criticizing other people, but it’s actually rare to find people who are willing to sit down and do dialogues like this. I’ve seen a lot of people, both Christian and atheist, yes, they’re willing to just put out their view but not not sit across the table. And so it’s refreshing to see someone willing to do that.
Shannon Q: Yes, right back at you. I think it’s incredibly important because we’re so busy I think spewing our ideas at each other nowadays that we don’t really take time to figure out where another person might be coming from and how they get to where they are and where we might have things in common. We do a lot of othering. We other people quite frequently based on very limited information that we have and polarize ourselves, and a lot of us have more in common than we have in conflict. So I appreciate you doing the same and I’m glad to hear that, that’s something that you’re open to and and enjoy doing. So, now let’s fight.
Trent Horn: It’s okay.
Shannon Q: Seriously though [crosstalk 00:08:42].
Trent Horn: Well it’s funny it’s this issue.
Shannon Q: It’s contentious, it’s an emotional issue.
Trent Horn: Abortion is a very emotional issue. I mean, I think the reason that it’s such an emotional issue is because the stakes are incredibly high and I think only one side can be right or at least have the majority of the truth on its side. And whichever side is correct, the consequences are very dire because it’s not like … I mean, you don’t see people get this emotional about the flat tax or something else that people have a gradient of views. For me, I feel like if I’m wrong about this, about the issue of abortion, I believe abortion ought to be illegal, I think the unborn are human beings and abortion is an act of violence against them, but if I’m wrong about that, then I would be causing a severe amount of harm to women, to those who obtain abortion, and I would be really setting the clock back and reducing their personhood almost, if I’m wrong.
But I feel like though, if I’m right, and if the other side is wrong, then a large amount of violence is being legally sanctioned every day. So, I think it’s contentious because the stakes are very high and both sides can’t be right.
Shannon Q: And ultimately, I think what it comes down to and why it is so existentially important to people is because the real argument is, what does it mean to be a person, and when do we become a person? And that’s something that matters to all of us because we matter to ourselves and we want to matter to others. So, the ultimate question is, when do we start to matter and why? What makes us matter? So, that makes it a very emotional issue for people.
Now, I’m guessing, and this is just a complete guess, that I potentially see a later emergence of what would constitute personhood then you likely would since you seemed any abortion, presumably you would think should be illegal and is violence, is killing a person. So, that would mean that immediately upon fertilization, that constitutes a person, that blastocyst to zygote stage of embryonic development, right at that point, that constitutes a person. Is that a fair assessment?
Trent Horn: Well, and I’d be interested to see your take on this question and how its framed.
Shannon Q: Yes.
Trent Horn: I believe that a person is an individual member of a rational kind. So personhood is a value judgment about certain beings that have particular rights and intrinsic value. And so I think that personhood does not reflect one’s abilities, it reflects one’s identity. Personhood it’s a property that is categorical, you have it or you don’t, I don’t believe it comes in degrees. I think all people are equally valuable, are equally precious, and have an equal right to life. And so you’re correct, it’s very important to figure out who a person is.
Shannon Q: Sure.
Trent Horn: My view is not just that all human beings matter because it’s possible there are persons that are not humans. I mean, as a Catholic I believe angels exist and they’re persons but they’re not human. It could be possible in our universe there could be extraterrestrial life that is rational that is a person, but it’s not not a human. And I figured out, well are they people? To give an example, I think if Yoda, from Empire Strikes Back, was here, a person would be a person. But I also think that, that’s true for baby Yoda. He’s not technically baby Yoda but now called that in the Mandalorian, that’s on on Disney Plus [crosstalk 00:12:49].
Shannon Q: I finished all of it. It’s done. Yes, I finished it. I don’t know if you know this, but my boyfriend he used to work for Lucas Film.
Trent Horn: Wow.
Shannon Q: And I’m team Trek so it’s rough in our household.
Trent Horn: You mean Dark Star Trek.
Shannon Q: Yes.
Trent Horn: I never enjoyed the comparison between Star Trek and Star Wars because the only thing they really had in common is star.
Shannon Q: Yes.
Trent Horn: One is an anthology series that thoughtfully takes philosophy and puts it in space fictional stories, and the other is swashbuckling, Flash Gordon space opera. But that’s a different debate.
Shannon Q: That is a very different debate.
Trent Horn: My point here is that even baby Yoda, from the Mandalorian may not have the rational abilities that adult Yoda has from Empire Strikes Back, but they’re the same being that to me, I would say as a rational kind or a person. So, yes, my position would be that all persons are valuable and have a right to life, we ought not directly kill them. And so I’m curious is your position that if a human embryo or human fetus were a person, you would be opposed to abortion?
Shannon Q: Yes, actually. I have a perspective that in order to find out essentially whether or not … because I would agree with most of what you said when it comes to personhood on a surface level. If anything, anyone, any person who is cognizant of their own existence and is capable and aware of their existence should be considered a person. Any sentient life, I guess, would be a really broad way to do this. But the question is, what constitutes a person? Being able to correctly and accurately qualify and quantify, what constitutes personhood is an important thing to do. And I would attach that to cognition, and specifically thalamic development, it’s a structure in the brain that a lot of studies of the thalamus have shown is related to consciousness and to our emergence of self awareness and what we would consider to be consciousness.
And in early stages of embryonic fetal development that’s not really there, not in any way that we would have an aptitude for self awareness or even anything higher than basal reflective responses to external stimuli. And if what’s constituting a person is being able to have basal reflexive responses to external or environmental stimuli, then we have to expand personhood an incredibly broad swaths to anything that’s alive really at that point in time. I mean, there’s little Little bit more nuance to my argument later but to get back to yours, what do you think constitutes a person?
Trent Horn: Sure. I believe that, for me, when we think about persons, it has something to do with their rational nature. I think you and I seem to both agree with that because it seems to me, do you believe that there are not any non human animals are persons in the same sense that humans are persons?
Shannon Q: I think you could make a pretty strong argument for most higher order primate groups, dolphins, so you could probably make a pretty strong argument towards too, and I think it’s because they display social interaction, proto-linguistic abilities, elephants potentially as well because they demonstrate empathy, but one of the things that they all have in common with us is larger cranial cavities, and prefrontal lobes, and higher thalabia development that would lead towards that cognitively from a neuroscience perspective.
Trent Horn: Yes. I think if dolphins are persons, they should be in prison, they’re the worst.
Shannon Q: They’re bad. But just because you’re self aware doesn’t mean that you’re adhering to the same moral structures that we’d like. That’s anthropomorphizing our moral structures onto the animal kingdom, right.
Trent Horn: You’d only pick higher order animals, it sounds like you wouldn’t give that to let’s say animals that are aware of stimuli and even have rudimentary planning skills like a rat, or a snake, or a pigeon.
Shannon Q: Potentially. That’s a broader argument. I feel like now we’re entering into an argument for whether or not veganism is a good way to go, right, because if you’re utilizing that metric to describe what personhood is, then potentially the morally right thing to do, if cognitive development, and moral interaction, and the ability to rationally assess the environment around you is what constitutes personhood, then we probably shouldn’t be eating animals because they can demonstrate those abilities. So what makes us special?
Trent Horn: Well, I mean, the argument would be, you shouldn’t eat people.
Shannon Q: No.
Trent Horn: I premise you and I would agree with this.
Shannon Q: Don’t eat people.
Trent Horn: But then if animals are people, you shouldn’t eat them.
Shannon Q: Right.
Trent Horn: But I don’t think most people would agree with that argument. I think even many vegans, I don’t know if they would say that the death of let’s say a rat is morally equivalent with the death of a newborn infant or a toddler, I don’t know if anyone would be willing to go that far to say that if you fumigate a barn to kill a family of rats, I think most people would say that, that is not morally equivalent to fumigating a house to get rid of a family of squatters.
Shannon Q: Right.
Trent Horn: But the key here is, for me, it sounds first we have some common ground because there is a lot of people who will say abortion is still fine even if the fetus is a person. But it sounds like we have some common ground that we both agree we shouldn’t kill innocent people, and so if a fetus or a human embryo was an innocent person, abortion would be seriously wrong. Now we have to figure out what a person is.
Shannon Q: Yes.
Trent Horn: And so I think we also both agree that personhood has something to do with our cognitive abilities, and I would say it’s rational abilities that exceed that of other animals, because I can think of three kinds of living creatures, a living creature that is not sentient like a plant, a living creature that is sentient but not a person, so a creature that is aware of pain, is aware of lightness and dark, and heat and cold, but is not a person, does not have that level of consciousness, and then of animals that are persons. I think properly speaking that only applies to humans as we know it. We’re willing to broaden it. But I got to figure out where we draw that line between sentient but not a person versus sentient and is a person, because I think sentience and consciousness are two different things.
Shannon Q: Well, actually, I think we’re a little bit … Yes. Well, no, actually. I think that they’re synonymous but discussed differently. But I think that we’re looking further down the line. So we’re both agreeing that once somebody is sentient, self aware, rational, and it’s capable of reason and self identification, and responds to stimuli, all of those things, it would be morally incorrect to end their life or harm them on purpose. Now, there’s more nuance when it comes to abortion, and like I said, I will get into that later. But first, I think one of the important things to establish is, we both agree that sentience and that establishment of personhood is tied to the ability to have cognition. The ability to have cognition is directly tied to the development of your neocortex, and your neocortex doesn’t develop until later stages in a pregnancy.
So, I guess my point would be that even if we both agree on what constitutes a person, what constitutes a person doesn’t apply to a blastocyst, to an early stage embryo. Most stages of pregnancy before 20 weeks, there’s not a lot of neurological firing aside from reflexive responses only your cerebellum really is developed, your prefrontal cortex, most of the other components of your cortex aren’t actually developed yet for you to even have the ability for that sort of awareness. So, why, without what we agreed upon, cognition, why pre-cognition would abortion be wrong?
Trent Horn: Because I would say that what makes a being valuable and what makes killing wrong, and there’s multiple ways that you could sort out why killing a person is wrong, I would say that persons are valuable in and of themselves. And so their value doesn’t come from their present ability to exercise a certain capacity, but just from the fact that they exist and they’re the being who has that capacity. So I think that there is … I’ll explain my position then I have a question for you to fold this through.
Shannon Q: Sure.
Trent Horn: There is a difference between having an immediate capacity and a capacity to have a capacity. For example, you and I have the capacity to speak English, that’s presently exhibited.
Shannon Q: Moderately well.
Trent Horn: And we both have the capacity to have the capacity to speak to (Golig [00:23:21]) or Cantonese, for example. And so we have the capacity to do that even though we’re not able to exercise the capacity at this time. It could develop later if we took Rosetta Stone or did things like that. So I would say a person is not someone who has the capacity for consciousness, but is the being that has the capacity to have the capacity for consciousness. That’s a variant virtue of the being they are. And I think that this view, because it’s tied to whether you are or aren’t, you either are this being or you aren’t, I think that it’s a very good view for several reasons. One was would be this, if having consciousness is what gives us value, if it gives us our value as beings, and if the property that gives us value comes in degrees, then it would seem to follow that some people would have more value than other people if the property that gave us value came in degrees such as consciousness or intelligence, some people are more aware or less aware than others.
But if it’s a property that you either have or you don’t have, being a member of the human species or not, well then all members of the human species regardless of their cognitive abilities, their functional levels, would be treated equally and they wouldn’t necessarily be susceptible to discrimination from things like ableism, for example. All human beings are equal in virtue of the being they are not their functional ability. And I guess my question for you would be, at what point in human develop does a human have consciousness that you’re talking about to make them a person? But you can respond to what I said. But that’s what I’m curious about your view.
Shannon Q: Yes, there is a lot of interesting things that you said there. So, your analogy fell apart for me a little bit when it came to capacity for language, because I’m currently demonstrating the ability to utilize a language. I’m forming morphemes and phonemes, right, I’m producing language. But just because I’m not producing a different language, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have the capacity for language. So your analogy was utilizing the ability to use one language over another as opposed to the ability for language at all.
Trent Horn: I could do something. I could change the analogy to say that you and I probably have the capacity to reproduce, but that was not true when we were toddlers. We had the capacity to have that capacity, it just had not developed yet. And yet we were still animals, if you define an animal as a creature that can reproduce, especially those reproducing a sexual reproduction, we fell into that kind even though we couldn’t exercise the capacity at that point in our development.
Shannon Q: Okay, so I see what you mean. But the reason I think that your initial analogy tried to work and that one may not for me personally, is because what we were doing was tying it to personhood and we can’t tie reproductive abilities to personhood because you can still be a person cognitively without the ability to reproduce, right. There is people that are sterile that can’t reproduce. But-
Trent Horn: Right, my point was just that I’m just saying that there are certain attributes we have or things that we can do that we can immediately exercise them, but also there is the case where the being who can develop the ability to exercise those things, and that makes us a being that is different than other being. So, for example, if you see a cat that can’t read, even though reading is a good thing, that cat is not malformed or having a developmental problem because cats by their natures don’t read. But a 10 year olds who can’t read, we would consider them suffering from illiteracy and an improper development. And so if we had a way to treat them, we would treat the 10 year old human as having a developmental problem but not the cat, because there’s something in virtue of his nature that he ought to be functioning in a certain way.
And so I think if we look at the human nature, it’s a valuable thing not to function in a certain way. But I think I want to get back to what a person is because I’m just trying to see, from your perspective-
Shannon Q: I think that’s we’re getting caught up because all of these things that you’re mentioning that we have capacity for and others don’t, I tie those all back to neural function, right. The-
Trent Horn: I agree, the brain is what allows us to do these things but-
Shannon Q: But it seems as though you’re saying before we have any sort of … just a mere potentiation that one day we may have Cortices means that even though we don’t yet the potential of the future development of those Cortices is worth seeing through even though … because we will one day.
Trent Horn: Right. Well, my point is that we’re the kind of being who would develop in that way, and persons have a right to naturally develop in virtue of what they are. And I think your view, because some people may criticize my view and say, well, you’re just saying that value comes in potentialities, but are you saying that when the Thalamus or the frontal lobe or the neocortex, whichever part of the brain it may be [crosstalk 00:29:06].
Shannon Q: A bunch of them all together.
Trent Horn: Reaches a point of development, consciousness emerges, what does consciousness mean to you? What is that particular trait or property? What does it entail?
Shannon Q: That is such a huge question. That’s a massive question. So to me consciousness, this is going to be incredibly simplistic and drilled down because that’s the question that philosophers and neuroscientists have been attempting to answer since we were aware that it was a question worth answering. So I’m not going to be able to answer it today realistically, and neither are you. If you can, please do. But I think-
Trent Horn: But you know that early embryos and fetuses don’t have consciousness.
Shannon Q: Yes, because I see it as an emergent property of our neo cortical structures. Without those neurons firing, without those electrical impulses traveling back and forth, without those neural chemicals bouncing around in our brain, we aren’t aware. We aren’t aware of what’s going on around us, we aren’t aware of ourselves, we aren’t able to react to our environment. I mean, you reference levels of consciousness, I don’t necessarily think that there really are levels of consciousness. I think that we, as people, like to quantify and classify things and put them into groups because we have these biases where we like to make schemas and build them around things, and classify people, and classify things. So a lot of people with psychiatric disorders, we classify them as having a deficit in consciousness perhaps, and that’s the wrong way to look at it. It just means that based on the arbitrary societal standards that we’ve set for a specific type of cognition, they aren’t meeting what the mean comparison is for a larger population of people. It’s just a deviation that makes them slightly different but it’s not a detriment unless you assign it the value of detrimental.
So, I can understand why you might say that because that’s the perceptual view that people have on these things, but I don’t see that as a level of consciousness, I see that as a value judgment based on how we form societies. So, that’s [crosstalk 00:31:27] maybe why they fell apart. But they all come from an emergent … Without our cortices, I don’t think that we’re able to be aware. If you remove my prefrontal cortex, I no longer exist, that’s just fact. If you lobotomize me, who I was pretty much isn’t there anymore, even though I can respond to stimuli. Once you start messing with my brain, fundamentally, who I am immediately changes. And if it’s gone, I’m not here. So, if I disappear when my brain is gone, am I really here before it’s there?
Trent Horn: That’s two separate questions then. So one is about a symmetry related to personal identity, and the other one goes back to what consciousness is. I would like to revisit the previous one because I didn’t quite get like just a few descriptive terms to be helpful for me to know what you mean by the word, consciousness. And I was just surprised when you said that you don’t see that in levels among human beings.
Shannon Q: No.
Trent Horn: I agree with you that the value term whether something is detrimental or harmful, these are normative judgments we make, but empirically it seems quite obvious that there are certain cognitive abilities that some humans can engage in and others can.
Shannon Q: Yes.
Trent Horn: That infants cannot recognize themselves in a mirror or toddlers cannot grasp abstract concepts in the same way [crosstalk 00:32:56].
Shannon Q: Do you see them as less conscious because of that?
Trent Horn: Well, I would say, they have less rational abilities. I would think infants do not have a similar consciousness to us, which would be a perception of, I, a subject over time. I don’t think a newborn infant has that. Let me ask you another question. Can you give me an example of an animal that is aware of its surroundings that it would not be murder to kill that animal? So if I kill this animal, it is not equivalent to killing a person.
Shannon Q: Fly.
Trent Horn: Okay. So a fly as a rudimentary understanding of the world around it. I don’t know if flies can feel pain though, I don’t know if they have a sophisticated [crosstalk 00:33:50]
Shannon Q: I don’t know, I’d have to look at that. I don’t know if they have sophisticated interfaces. [crosstalk 00:33:52] Some fish might or a lobster.
Trent Horn: Okay.
Shannon Q: Lobsters have nervous systems.
Trent Horn: Do you think the killing of a lobster is the moral equivalent of killing a human.
Shannon Q: Do I think that? No. And I think that, that’s because I’m making a value judgment because I personally, because I am human, place a higher degree of value on humanity than I do to literally any other species.
Trent Horn: That is a very interesting argument. What would you say to someone who said, I don’t think the killing of a black person is as harmful as the killing of a white person because I place more value on white people because I am white? It sounds like-
Shannon Q: I would say, you’re a horrible racist because I’m at the … unless the argument is that you’re saying that seeing a lobster as-
Trent Horn: I don’t hold that view, it’s a hypothetical.
Shannon Q: Certainly, I would hope not. Certainly hope not. I’m glad you clarified that. But I see what You might be doing here is showing that there’s like somebody could make an argument saying that I don’t value X group, whatever the group may be, that could be an inter-species group or an extra-species group. Somebody could say I value this group less than that group, and how do you differentiate why that one value judgment is better than the other?
Now, I respect what you’re doing. Well, I don’t know if respect is the right word because I don’t like that analogy, but I see what you’re doing. And I would say, based on my [crosstalk 00:35:38]. One moment, just let me finish and then absolutely, sorry, because I want to get this out. But what I would say is that how I would respond to that person is, how do you differentiate the value of somebody who’s another race within your species from yourself? And they wouldn’t really be able to have a good answer to that question because there is no good answer to that question because whatever you see is intrinsically valuable as humanity, you would be able to apply to another person who’s a member of humanity.
Now, once we go all the way down to the level of lobster, it becomes far easier to differentiate, which is clearly why I chose lobster or fly. Once you get up as high as other primates, it becomes significantly more difficult to differentiate those things because we have linguistic abilities, can communicate thoughts, and are aware of each other’s feelings, those are what makes it more difficult, I think, and all of it ties back to cognition. Even in both of these examples, there is prefrontal cortices. There could be good arguments made for why you shouldn’t even kill lobsters, that’s why vegans exist, right. But all of these are existing animals that are in the world, that are in the environment, that already exist, that were born and have reached the full instantiation of what they are in the world.
Trent Horn: Well I don’t see how the location of an organism determines its value. If it turned out that a fetus did have consciousness, and I think that even under the standards you’re operating with, we could say that third trimester fetuses are late. I mean, do you think that a newborn infant has consciousness and thus would be a person that would be wrong to kill?
Shannon Q: I would [crosstalk 00:37:27] even argue, third trimester abortions, I wouldn’t be for at all.
Trent Horn: Right, okay. And so these arguments from personhood, the problems that I have with them is I think that, if they tie it to consciousness as a property, then you lead to one of two conclusions I don’t think most people are willing to accept and I think that would show a flaw in the thinking.
Shannon Q: Oh, please.
Trent Horn: One would be the idea that personhood is tied to a rational ability beyond most animals. That sounded like what you were arguing earlier when you picked primates, dolphins, that these are just a few select species and the vast majority of non human animal species wouldn’t be persons. As people with superior linguistic abilities, cognition, possibly empathy, but the problem with that bar is it sets it so high, I don’t think a newborn infant could pass. And under that view, no newborn infant would be a person. But the other view that is just that most people wouldn’t accept either that I think is counterintuitive, is that if the bar is set low enough to include newborn infants as persons because they have a particular level of consciousness, then you would have to say that any other animal that has consciousness that is similar to a newborn infant or higher, that the killing of those animals would be the moral equivalent of killing a newborn infant.
I think a lobster’s awareness of the world might be on par with an infant’s. I think a cat, or a dog, or a pig, or a pigeon, or a rat, they have equal if not more awareness of the world than a newborn. Yet most people would say that it’s more severe to kill a newborn infant than to kill those other animals. So I don’t think the possession of consciousness or things like that, it doesn’t make the explanation there because it doesn’t show why we would value the newborn infant more than many of these other lower order animals like a pigeon or a rat.
Shannon Q: Because the newborn infant is one of us, I think that, that’s a pretty clear differentiation. And I think that there are a lot of people, in moral philosophy, who would make the argument that any other living things, take a pacifist approach to harm, [inaudible 00:39:44]. Yes, and they make … Yes, exactly. And they make relatively compelling arguments that are fairly sound. I mean, I still like bacon, so I’ll eat bacon. You know what I mean?
Trent Horn: [crosstalk 00:39:55].
Shannon Q: It is. It’s absolutely fascinating to me because we do already draw those lines, we draw them extra species, but when we’re pressed on it, like you and I are pressing each other right now, it’s very difficult to say, yes, what is that line. But when we look at something like a pregnancy, that has the potential, the abstract and objective potential to be a human like us, to be one of our children, to be one of our grandchildren [crosstalk 00:40:32].
Trent Horn: To be a person.
Shannon Q: To be a person like us, the way that we identify personhood for ourselves.
Trent Horn: Just like a newborn has the potential to talk and do things like you or I can.
Shannon Q: Right, exactly. But that draws me back again, and there’s another thing I wanted to get on too, and this is fascinating, but that draws me back to the cortical development, that’s where I really feel once you have the ability to be aware of your own existence, and you really can’t say that a baby isn’t aware of their own existence because one of the bars that we use when we’re doing psychometric testings is the ability to self report, and babies can’t self report. But when we look at their brain activity, we can see that they’re having specific types of stimuli and emotional responses to things in similar fashions that adults do based on their environment. So we know we know that they have that internal life that we identify as human, as us, we can recognize that taking place. Those emotional responses, we can see those in those cortices but it all goes back to the cortices. Before that brain exists, there’s not even that capacity for that. If you halt-
Trent Horn: Well, what I would say here is, so you’ve picked a particular biological organ as being the source of our value because it is able to produce mental states that you consider to be valuable?
Shannon Q: I consider them to be us.
Trent Horn: Well I have a question, they considered to be us, if you were in an accident and you suffered a brain injury that reduced you to the cognitive level of a newborn infant, would you still exist?
Shannon Q: Would I, as I exist now, still exist? The version of Shannon that is me? No.
Trent Horn: Not the version, the person, you as a person.
Shannon Q: Would something like me still exist in this physical instantiation? Yes.
Trent Horn: [crosstalk 00:42:36] Yes, but if you were cognitively reduced to the level of a newborn infant, would we still consider you to be a person? You have a very different personality, but I wonder, would you still be a person?
Shannon Q: Yes, I think so.
Trent Horn: Okay, well that’s because some people would say, if all of my memories and everything were gone, I would be gone.
Shannon Q: I would be gone, but that doesn’t make me any less a person just because I’m no longer me. You’re still a person and you’re not me.
Trent Horn: That’s deep. Right. But I think the way we could look at it is our personalities grow and develop over time and they change, but the underlying person is still … our personhood is something that’s much more a stable foundation for our personality be attached to. But I need to go back to see your argument that it’s us, these particular kinds of mental … a being that has conscious mental states is a person.
Shannon Q: Or could be a person depending on where you draw that line. And the trick is figuring out where’s that line that you switch from just cognitively aware of your surroundings may be responding to environmental stimuli, to self awareness, capacity for thought, and why do we assign more value to one group than another? If we’re going to do that, we need to figure out what attributes one group of value and not another group.
Trent Horn: [crosstalk 00:44:14] Well, I’m willing to switch gears here to offer an argument that maybe if we’re stuck on value because, well, the next route that I would go is because, to me, everything you’re arguing for is to why a newborn infant would be a person and we could call it murder to kill a newborn infant.
Shannon Q: Yes, we sure would.
Trent Horn: A rat that can navigate a maze surely has the same level of consciousness or cognition as a newborn infant. I mean, it can navigate a maze but most people will not say a rat is a person.
Shannon Q: But why is that the valuable metric for assigning personhood. So I’ve referenced earlier, and I didn’t get a chance to expand upon it as much as I probably should have, I didn’t articulate it very well is when you put a newborn in an MRI machine, the emotional centers of the brain start to activate.
Trent Horn: Do rats have emotional centers of their … Do they have similar elements in their brain that they have stress features when they get stressed?
Shannon Q: They have stress features but there could be an argument made that, that’s more of a stimuli response reaction. All organisms, even plants have stimuli response, right. They’re centered in different areas. Once you become mobile, you essentially need a mobile command unit, and that’s what a brain ends up being. And reptilian structures are more like our subcortical areas like where our limbic system is located, that’s why we call the cerebellum our reptilian brain, and then there’s mid brain structures built on top of it, and each has a specific function. A lot of them are reflective, and movement, and just operating our junk, right.
So rats mostly have the reflexive, and movement, and operating junk with some problem solving areas in order to navigate their environment. They could have emotional centers, I would have to look deeper at rat brains. So I don’t have the good answer to that. Maybe they do.
Trent Horn: How about … Yes, but here’s the thing, so in order to determine person, I’m trying to figure out, what is the property that makes someone a person that is I guess a necessary and sufficient condition that if you have this property, you are a person? And if it is consciousness, then to me, if a nonhuman animal has that property, we should treat them as persons. And since we do not in things like pigeons, rats, even we go up another level to dogs or cats, I think dogs and cats seem to have emotional lives, but most people are understanding of euthanizing unwanted dogs, but most people aren’t going to euthanize unwanted newborns. So I still believe once again that the [crosstalk 00:47:08]
Shannon Q: Unwanted dogs.
Trent Horn: Dogs that no one will adopt.
Shannon Q: I don’t like euthanizing unwant- … that’s awful.
Trent Horn: Right, but do you think your local … which would you find more distressing in your city that it euthanized 1,000 dogs or euthanized 1,000 newborns last year?
Shannon Q: Well, obviously 1000 newborns because I assign higher value to newborns because they’re humans like me. And I assigned higher values to things that are like me. If you asked a bunch of dogs the same question and we’re giving them the same emotional life, they would have a different answer. They would say, the dogs.
Trent Horn: Sure, but don’t fetus’ and embryos, they’re also biological humans as well. So aren’t they part of that which we should value?
Shannon Q: No, because once a newborn is born, no, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have … I have an eight year old, right, so I have a baby. And I’ve had miscarriage. I’ve never had an abortion, but I’ve been pregnant twice.
Trent Horn: I’m sorry to hear that.
Shannon Q: It wasn’t meant to elicit that I’m just letting you know that I’ve been through pregnancies and won pregnancies, right. And if I got pregnant now, it would be very hard for you to convince me to have an abortion. I wouldn’t because I’d want the kid, right. But there are circumstances where I wouldn’t want to make that choice for somebody else. I’m going to quickly answer this question and then we’re at 45 minutes and so I want to move on to the second [crosstalk 00:48:31] thing that-
Trent Horn: No. It moved so fast.
Shannon Q: I know, [crosstalk 00:48:34] where this is really, really-
Trent Horn: Then we’re going to go to Q&A or?
Shannon Q: Well, I do want to cover one other thing and then we’ll take questions.
Trent Horn: Yes.
Shannon Q: But yes, I’ll move on to the other thing even though I don’t feel like I fully answered your question but-
Trent Horn: We’ll figure it out. [crosstalk 00:48:48] Time went fast.
Shannon Q: It did go fast, right. This is a fascinating topic. There’s a lot of moral philosophy I think that goes into this too and like how we assess value to living things in general. But the second part that I wanted to talk about, and I was hoping that we would get to, is the idea of autonomy because we’ve been talking a lot about the baby and not very much about the person who carries the child.
Trent Horn: Sure.
Shannon Q: Now, one of the other perspectives that I have and I’m interested to hear your opinion on this is that, it’s nobody else’s right, whether they’re a potential human or a currently existing human, to utilize my bodily resources to sustain themselves. If somebody else, I’m sure you’ve heard the violinist analogy, if you required a consistent blood transfusion from me for even three months and I had to walk around with you transfusing my blood for three months, I don’t have a moral obligation to provide that for you. However, I do have a moral level, even if you are my child who I did give birth to, I don’t have that moral obligation. That moral obligation ends at birth for mothers. If my son needed a blood transfusion, I would give it to him tomorrow-
Trent Horn: Sure. You’re not obligated to do that.
Shannon Q: But I’m not obligated to do that. We no longer hold people to that obligation once that baby is outside of the mother, however, we hold the mother to that obligation when the baby is inside the mother, in whatever phase of development that fetus is in. So, what’s your position on that?
Trent Horn: I believe that people do not have the right to obtain bodily tissue or organs from others in some extraordinary way like the donation, if I were to donate tissue or blood to another person, that would be extra ordinary and it would be heroic because I’m not obligated to do that. However, I do believe that if someone is a person, they have a right to life. Now normally for persons like you are me, our right to life is more of a negative right. It’s a sense of, we have a right to not have other people kill us, don’t shoot me, don’t stab me, don’t poison me. I have a right to life and so if people leave me alone, they will basically respect my right to life. But the problem is, as human beings get younger and younger, that’s not necessarily true.
For a newborn infant, if you leave a newborn infant alone, you actually would violate his right to life, he would die from exposure. So the newborn infant’s right to life also includes the right to care from other human beings. And I guess we’d ask, well, what human beings does that newborn have a right to? And logically it would make sense the human beings who brought that newborn into existence. The and father are the ones who have the corresponding duty to the newborn to care for that child whether they want to or not, whether they intended to. So just as a man if he causes a woman to become pregnant, even if he didn’t want to have a baby, I would say he is obliged to provide child support because he is the father of that child and he owes that child care whether or not he wants to continue having that obligation.
And I would say that mothers have obligations to provide for their children before and after birth. Not extraordinary ones but-
Shannon Q: Why are they different though? Why does the father only have an obligation to money but the mother has an obligation to continue to take care of the child? That’s interesting to me because I feel like that should be equal, right?
Trent Horn: Right. Well what I would say is if let’s say you had a starving child, you have a mother and father, and you have their newborn baby, and the newborn baby is crying, and they don’t have any food. Let’s say lactation was the only way to keep that newborn baby alive. If the father could lactate, I would say he has an obligation to sustain the life of that infant. I’ve heard it’s possible maybe, all I know would be from Meet the Parents, I think Robert De Niro said any mammal can lactate, that scene with Ben Stiller. But odds are in that situation, it would only be the mother who would be able to provide-
Shannon Q: There’s more to childcare than feeding though.
Trent Horn: Right, there’s more to it [crosstalk 00:53:08] but it’s an essential-
Shannon Q: And it’s very rare that, that’s the only option.
Trent Horn: Right. But what I’m trying to make an analogy is that when the mother and father are in a position where they’re the only ones who can keep the child alive through the natural use of their bodies, they’re obliged to do that because this is their child who has a natural acclaim upon them. And the same will be true for the child before he or she is born. If we say the fetus is a person and it has a right to life, then I would say, what does that mean for the fetus to have a right to life if it does not have the right to the one thing that can keep him or her alive? So I’d say the rights to these bodily autonomy arguments, the violinist, the one you’re proposing I think is the more sophisticated one, but I also think it’s dis-analogous. But in autonomy in general, I’m very wary about these kinds of appeals and they disturbed me a bit.
Shannon Q: Interesting, why is that?
Trent Horn: Well, because they’ve been used in the past to justify the powerful oppressing the powerless. In the 19th century, there was a court case in North Carolina, North Carolina versus Jesse Black. And the question was, does Mr. Black have the right to beat his wife? And what the court said was-
Shannon Q: No.
Trent Horn: Well, that’s not what the court said. I mean, that’s not what the court says now but in the 19th century, what they said was, yes, as long as he doesn’t leave a mark. And they said the reason was because it’s his home and the state which should not intrude upon the domestic curtain, and he is the husband and father has the right over his home to exercise it as he sees fit. But we now see that it’s barbaric to say that just because he has power over his wife and his children, doesn’t give him the right to harm them, they’re still persons. And I would make a similar analogy to an unborn child who’s within the womb just because the mother has great power over this child and has a great blessing to allow this child to grow and nourish this child, does not give her the right to treat this child however she may deem appropriate.
Shannon Q: But however deem appropriate though is essentially like if you want to go back to the analogy of the court case, if he removed her from the home, you know what I mean? You’re essentially saying … I need to process if it’s true, because I want to make sure that I’m getting there was a lot there. So, you see that once a child is born, they still essentially have a right to the body of the woman because of lactation, even though there are other alternatives to keep the child live.
Trent Horn: They have a right to care. I’m not saying an exclusive right to lactation, I’m saying a child has a right to nutrition, shelter, the things a child needs to grow and properly develop, and parents are obliged to provide that. And there’s a different multitude of ways they can provide it after birth, but there’s really only one way they can provide it before birth.
Shannon Q: Okay. So before birth, the child, because the arguments about utilization of the woman’s body which can be detrimental, there are instances, and I want to get this out, and it doesn’t always pertain to this argument, this isn’t every instance, I want to get it out and then I’m going to get to my other point. But there are instances where a pregnancy is or could be life threatening. For example, I wouldn’t have an abortion, again, I’m going to go back to myself, but I have multiple sclerosis. I had to be induced in my last pregnancy and it’s the reason I had a miscarriage with my first one. It was because I have MS and my body didn’t deal with it. I’ve generalized auto immune disorders too so my body attacks pregnancies and attacks itself, I was borderline to the point that I may have lost the use of my legs and may have had … If I get pregnant again, it could be dangerous for me like.
I would still see it through personally, but I don’t feel like I have the right to make that choice for another person, especially if it’s a pregnancy where I was raped, or it was incest, or there’s a confluence of circumstances where a woman’s body could be seriously damaged, permanently damaged, it could result in death or it could result with them being incapacitated to the point that they can’t even take care of the child anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to take care of my son had I’ve been paralyzed. Luckily, I wasn’t. But if I get pregnant again, that’s a potential reality, that could happen. I have to weigh that, right.
So, does a child have a right to my body if it’s going to cause that sort of detriment before they even are the equivalent of what I would constitute a person based on their cortical structures? Because a zygote and a blastocyst are very, very small bundles of cells and once we get to the embryonic stage, even before they’re a fetus they could be doing a serious amount of damage to me, do you have the right to do that damage to me if it’s going to be the only way to keep you alive? No, you don’t. But people make the argument when it’s a pregnancy, that yes, you put yourself in this situation, you have an obligation to see this through no matter what it does to you emotionally, mentally, physiologically, life choice wise.
I mean, you even referenced the dude he has to pay and the woman has to lactate. There’s a disproportionate obligation society and from a physiological perspective even after birth that falls upon a woman. So, that’s a choice that you’ll never have to make yourself, thank goodness, and I hope I never do either. But is it fair for either you or I to say that we should be able to make it for someone else like? Is that early stage pregnancy so much more important than a fully instantiated woman like me? How do you weigh off those values?
Trent Horn: Okay. Well, let me address the different points that you’ve brought up. First, I would say that even if a moral issue is not going to directly affect us, we have the duty to form moral opinions, and even to pass laws that could affect the choices of other people. I mean, you or I may never … For example, suppose I wasn’t married and I didn’t have children. Let’s say I may never … Even if I were single, and I didn’t have children of my own, I would still have a moral duty to promote laws that prevent child abuse, for example.
Shannon Q: Right, I agree to that.
Trent Horn: Even if it doesn’t affect me, I can still … or let’s say climate change, where you could say, we have a moral duty to prevent catastrophic climate change even if it doesn’t happen for another hundred years. Even if it doesn’t affect us now, it could affect persons that don’t even exist yet.
Shannon Q: But these are things that could potentially have an effect on you.
Trent Horn: But let’s say people abused children, and I’m an adult, and I don’t have children, it won’t affect me, but I can see that it’s wrong and I ought to do something, and I think abortion falls under that. Some of the other points that you brought up, some of these hard cases and they’re very hard, traumatic cases about rape, or if someone’s life is in danger, or they have a health problem in a pregnancy.
Shannon Q: And they’re worth considering when you’re talking about laws, which is the reason I brought it up because you referenced, it should be illegal.
Trent Horn: Sure. What I would say here is that we have to answer the prior question, is the unborn child a person? If the unborn child is not a person, it doesn’t matter what reason you give for the child.
Shannon Q: And we couldn’t answer that question.
Trent Horn: Well, I didn’t expect that you or I would be able to answer it [crosstalk 01:01:13].
Shannon Q: Well then how can we make laws around it like? You’re advocating that there should be a law made because we’re constituting it as a person, but you and I could decide and no one can decide whether or not it is.
Trent Horn: But that’s like saying 150 years ago, people couldn’t decide if slaves or persons are not, then since [crosstalk 01:01:32].
Shannon Q: No, it’s not like that at all.
Trent Horn: What?
Shannon Q: I don’t think it’s like that at all.
Trent Horn: But wasn’t there a debate about the morality of slavery 150 years ago?
Shannon Q: Yes, just because people debated whether or not somebody had value in the past doesn’t mean that us having a conversation … I can see how you can make the analogy, but us having a conversation about a bundle of cells that don’t have a brain to me isn’t the same, that are completely reliant in a, I don’t want to say parasitic, but at the very least borderline parasitic relationship or at least symbiotic relationship inside another human’s body. [crosstalk 01:02:13] I don’t see that as analogous to a fully instantiated human who we assigned a differentiating value to because we were ignorant at that point in time.
Trent Horn: But I would just say we’re ignorant now when it comes to the value of the unborn that a human embryo is not a potential person, it is a person with great potential. To give you an analogy that sometimes people have a hard time seeing it, if you and I went to Loch Ness, and I took out my Fujifilm Polaroid camera and took a Polaroid picture of the Loch Ness Monster rearing its head, I’d be like, awesome, I’ve got the photo, I’m going to get the million bucks. And you look at the Polaroid, the second it came out of the camera, it would only look like a brown smudge. And if you threw it in the lake, I’d be like, what did you do? You’d say, well that’s not a picture of the Loch Ness Monster, it’s just a brown smudge.
Shannon Q: [crosstalk 01:03:04] And it never will be if I throw it in the lake.
Trent Horn: But that’s because you didn’t allow it to develop. What that picture was fully present there.
Shannon Q: But it was never a picture.
Trent Horn: Well, if it came out of the camera and you ripped it up, you rip up an actual picture of the monster, right.
Shannon Q: Once it’s fully developed, it’s a picture. Before it’s fully develop, it’s just a potential picture. I just ruined your hope that you might have a picture is what I ruined.
Trent Horn: So you’re saying I couldn’t have a reasonable hope that, that Polaroid I’m holding in my hand was a picture of that monster?
Shannon Q: You can have a reasonable hope that it will be a picture, but until it is a picture, it’s not a picture. All I did was ruin your hope that you were going to have the picture that you expected to have because you orchestrated the circumstances to produce a picture, that a picture was never produced because I interceded before the picture was able to happen.
Trent Horn: But that’s like … Yes, I just don’t think most people would agree with that analogy when it could … That’s the closest I can find to the idea of something is present even if we don’t recognize it, it just needs to continue to develop but it’s still there. I would say that, that Polaroid, that picture, that piece of paper that came out of the camera was qualitatively different than all the other pieces of paper in it, even though they may look the same. But to go back [crosstalk 01:04:26]
Shannon Q: Sure. Just like a blastocyst is different than an egg and a sperm if they’re sitting next to each other.
Trent Horn: Absolutely. One is an organism and the others aren’t. But to go back to the hard cases and things like that, I would agree with you if the unborn is not a person, who cares? You could give abortion for any reason.
Shannon Q: Yes.
Trent Horn: I would say then if the fetus is a person, then when these hard cases arise, we should just try to do our best moral reasoning to see how we would apply it to cases involving born people. If a mother and child were in a car accident and there may be a way where we can only save the mother and unfortunately, we can’t save the child, then we just save the mother. But we might say, well, is it okay to saw through the child to get to the mother and save her? I think most people would say, well, even if the child’s going to die anyways, I think many rescue workers would say, no, I’m not going to kill this child in the wreckage to get to the other victim. I can’t kill one-
Shannon Q: But what if you use the same analogy with just two people. I think when people put child in that scenario, they do it because child elicits to a very visceral emotional response because we all have this visceral to protect child [crosstalk 01:05:33], but when you put person next to person.
Trent Horn: Sure, you and I sitting in a boat that’s sinking, I would not be justified in pushing you out of the boat and causing you to drown in order to save my own life.
Shannon Q: You don’t think so? So you don’t think that there’s ever any instance where self preservation takes priority you should always sacrifice yourself.
Trent Horn: I believe, the Greek philosopher Socrates once said, “It is better to suffer evil than to inflict it upon others.”
Shannon Q: That’s very noble philosophy.
Trent Horn: And Jesus said some other important things too but I [crosstalk 01:06:08].
Shannon Q: Who is that guy?
Trent Horn: [inaudible 01:06:09] with someone that I think a lot of people … Well Jesus said that, “No greater love than he who lays down his life for his friends or even then for a stranger”, really, so for me to model after. But my point being that with that, if persons are valuable, then we understand that we ought not kill people even if it may yield positive benefits for us. If we start down the path of saying, it’s okay to kill people because of this positive about to directly kill them, to intend their death and directly kill them to have a positive outcome, that leads to scary results to me, I think should really concern people. I think rather, we ought to cherish all human lives and we should protect all human lives and consider all human beings as having equal value regardless of different traits about them, regardless of different biological traits be it race, age, physical development, mental development, and then all people are equal because we just pick one thing, which is being a member of the human community that matters.
And so I think that an unborn child, I think an abortion provider has the same intrinsic dignity and worth as an unborn child, so I reject abortion related violence of all kinds. But that’d be essentially the position that I would put forward and I think it’s a sensible one for people who care about equality and goodwill towards others.
Shannon Q: I see your perspective and I thank you for having a comment. I’m going to start taking questions in a minute. I have maybe one more thing to say because you know me, chitty chitty, chat chat. I did see one Super Chat come through. Any super chats will be read first if you have questions for either Trent or myself or both of us, or you want to tell us you’re awesome, anything that’s mean will not be read. Thanks for the donation, don’t say mean things. So my audience is an absolute delight, and I love them. And it’s not a thing that’s ever happened. Actually, I always feel the obligation to say it, but it’s just really not happened, they’re always wonderful.
But I’m also going to have a look after I’m done in the side chat, which I do have open now so that I can see if anybody wants to add me at Shannon Q. Make sure that I see it up, but I am going to prioritize the people that were kind enough to donate. So last thing I want to say is, one, thank you, I appreciate this. I hope you feel that you were respected and heard.
Trent Horn: Yes.
Shannon Q: So I appreciate you coming. It’s a contentious issue that a lot of people can just turn on a fight about because especially it’s very emotionally charged as well and imbued. So I appreciate you having a positive dialogue with me in regards to our positions.
Trent Horn: You too.
Shannon Q: It’s valuable to me and I think it’s valuable to other people as well. And I really do feel like the crux of our disagreement, even ignoring all of the other nuance, because there’s a ton of nuance in a discussion like this, you could talk about it for days, we’ve already talked for just a little over an hour. So thank you for your patience as well, it flew by, is where we assign personhood. I just feel like, for me, it’s higher up on the scale of development than it is for you. For you, it’s just seems like it’s moment of conception. And for me, it’s moment of fully functional cortical development, which there’s some debate about where that happens, but that’s where it happens for me. Which is where it becomes morally difficult and ambiguous for me. And prior to that, I just don’t have as much more difficulty and I think it just really boils down to where you and I ascribe personhood and having different ideas of where that happens.
Trent Horn: Yes. And the last thing I would say as you [inaudible 01:09:55] earlier about, well, if I stop being a person when my mind goes away, isn’t my mind when I become a person? And I think ultimately my position would be, we are people who have minds, but we’re not identical to our minds, especially given that the cortical development, the brain, trillions of new synaptic connections happen in the nine months after birth to develop self awareness. I would say that my position would be that a person comes into existence when they as an organism come into existence. And then when they die, the reason they go out of existence is not necessarily because their mind is gone, even if you were reduced to the state of an infant through a brain injury, you’re still a person, the person is lost when the organism is lost and you become a decomposing corpse. So my symmetry is personhood begins when the organism begins after a successful conception, and personhood is lost after the organism loses organic unity, and death occurs, and decomposition occurs.
Shannon Q: Okay. I think we may differ a little bit there, but if I start to get into it, we’ll be at it for another hour. So there’s only the one Super Chat, it’s from Converse contender and their team you, they said, Trent did well.
Trent Horn: [crosstalk 01:11:09] I think we both did well [inaudible 01:11:13].
Shannon Q: I appreciate your perspective and that’s what’s most important I think.
Trent Horn: Sure.
Shannon Q: Everybody’s air quotes team is going to root for them. So what’s important is to be able to have a nuanced dialogue that people can pull something from. So Brent Keller says, “Does a fetus have to be a person or is it enough that it have a future of value?”
Trent Horn: I wanted to bring this up in our conversation but-
Shannon Q: Go ahead. There’s your opportunity.
Trent Horn: This is very helpful. There is another argument one could put forward, it’s a more limited one, but there is an agnostic philosopher named Don Marquis at the University of Kansas, and this is his argument. He says, “Abortion is wrong because it’s wrong to kill a being that has a future like ours.” And his argument is that the reason it’s wrong to kill newborns and adults is because they have a future like ours. But it’s not wrong to kill dogs, or cats, or rats, or lobsters because even if they have similar cognitive abilities, they don’t have a future like ours where they would ever have these rational functions like you or me.
And so Marquis’ was his position would entail the wrongness of not just killing newborns or adults, but also most human fetuses and embryos, except for maybe those that have an encephalitis and will not develop past the fetal stage. But otherwise it would entail the wrongness of killing fetuses or embryos, and listeners who want to learn more about that, he’s not even religious, he’s an agnostic, they can look up Don Marquis M-A-R-Q-U-I-S, and it’s called, The Future Like Ours [inaudible 01:12:58].
Shannon Q: That would be interesting to look. See, I’m not sure how you assign, that would go right back to how you assign value and differentiate personhood to me and we could just rehash all that, but let’s not.
Trent Horn: No, Marquis is very clear it’s not about personhood, it’s about figuring out what beings [crosstalk 01:13:14].
Shannon Q: But you’re attributing more value to a human contribution to existence or you’re attributing more value to just being a human and existing because, why? Right. That’s what it comes to.
Trent Horn: Yes, it’s a future like ours, it’s having experiences like you and I have.
Shannon Q: Okay. So it doesn’t necessarily has to be human, it just has to be congruent with the human type of existence, with the type of experiences that we have as we go through it.
Trent Horn: You see the wrongness of killing is that it’s deprivation, it deprives someone of something valuable and that future that doesn’t deprive it of animals for example, most nearly all animals wouldn’t have that property but the humans do and Marquis is open to other animals maybe having it, but he doesn’t line it with personhood, he lines it with that future oriented value.
Shannon Q: So it’s an argument of deprivation of human possibility?
Trent Horn: Of possibility to a rational future because then it would also explain why it’s wrong to kill Superman or wrong to kill non-human alien.
Shannon Q: But then is it wrong to kill Hitler? You know what I mean though. How do you attribute a positive value to [crosstalk 01:14:27] that future existence?
Trent Horn: Sure. And what you would say-
Shannon Q: But you have to have a very idealistic version of like, all of us are going to do good stuff.
Trent Horn: He wouldn’t say it’s absolute, he’d say all things being equal. If someone’s innocent and will have a future like ours, but one could be justified in killing someone in self defense or in war, but then again it’s like, what about baby Hitler? There’s a pan [crosstalk 01:14:53].
Shannon Q: What would you do, right? Yes, exactly. It’s an interesting question. I love to look into that argument more because it’s not something that I’ve delved into with nuance and the idea of potentiation, do we automatically assign value to potential? Interesting. I have another Super Chat. Thanks Joseph Kirby. Hi Joseph Kirby. We need more abortion convos like this, I loved it. That’s a sentence I never thought I would get to read in my life. We need more abortion.
Trent Horn: There you go.
Shannon Q: Well, that’s good though, that’s positive. It’s great but it’s also sad because it means that most people can’t have-
Trent Horn: Jesus said something similar to this. He looked upon the crowds and he said they were helpless and hopeless like sheep without a shepherd. He said the harvest is plenty but the laborers are few, pray that the master will send laborers out. So the harvest, we’re having good conversations out there, it’s plentiful, but the laborers who can engage with them are few, and we do need more.
Shannon Q: I couldn’t agree with that more. I think more people should foster these types of dialogues and certainly not deter them. So, thank you. Brent is on fire over there in the chat. It’s like, is he a branch? You got branches? Shannon Q, if we ask-
Trent Horn: That’s just me and I changed my [crosstalk 01:16:15] name I can come up with? How about Brent?
Shannon Q: Clever. I lost him for a second. All right. So, if we ask why is it wrong to kill Shannon Q? The answer would be, her future house value, or wouldn’t it be that I signed myself current value? I feel like that’s, yes, but I also think that I assigned myself current value and other people assign themselves current value and then we can recognize that since we assign ourselves current value, we wouldn’t want to harm somebody else because we wouldn’t want them to take what we value away from us, right.
Trent Horn: It’s a little bit like a golden rule argument. [crosstalk 01:17:03] I wouldn’t want someone to abort me. But I think the argument there where I would take that is the problem is there appear to be many human beings that we agree is wrong to kill that are incapable of assigning their own value, or saying I am valuable, I want to live to other that proposition, and that would include newborn infants as well as people with very severe mental handicaps, and people who are comatose would be a … someone in a reversible coma so we don’t go down the euthanasia rabbit hole.
Shannon Q: Oh my gosh, we could do this for hours. All right, so I don’t know if I see any other questions in the chat right now and I’ve already held you for over an hour and 15 minutes. So-
Trent Horn: I’m at the office and they closed an hour and 15 minutes ago, so we’ll see if I got locked in.
Shannon Q: Oh no!
Trent Horn: I told them I would be here late, so I think I’ll be okay.
Shannon Q: Oh gosh, well, I hope you can escape. It’s valuable to me that you escape the office. I wouldn’t want to be trapped at an office. All right, well, just in case anybody tuned in late, just please let them know who you are and where they can find you.
Trent Horn: Sure. So I’m Trent horn. I’m an apologist and speaker. You can find my books on Amazon. My podcast is trenthornpodcast.com, it’s the Counsel of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L, Counsel of Trent. Shows up on iTunes or Google Play. It mostly caters towards helping Catholics talk to non Catholics. But every Friday I do free for all Friday, and that’s something even atheists might like, I just talk about whatever I find interesting. So, I’ve talked before about how to hack Disneyland and not wait in the lines, what to do if you get arrested, the cheesiest movie lines in history. So even if you’re not religious, you could always try a Friday episode, there might be something there in the podcast you find interesting.
Shannon Q: Thank you for being here with me. And I am Shannon Q and I am an evil, atheist, infidel and I appreciate you talking to me. And as always everybody help elevate the discourse. Bye.
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patron page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit trenthornpodcast.com.