In this episode Trent shares a recent debate he took part in where he defending the pro-choice position and explains why he would take part in such a debate.
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. Recently, I was invited onto a podcast called When Belief Dies to do a devil’s advocate debate. So a devil’s advocate debate is where you defend a position that you don’t normally hold. Usually it’s opposite to a position that you currently hold. I’ve seen a few of these over the years between Christians and atheists, where an atheist will make it case for Christianity and the Christian will make a case for atheism. And I was asked to come on to When Belief Dies and do a devil’s advocate debate. And so I suggested to them, I said, “Well, I don’t know, at least at this time, if I want to do a devil’s advocate debate on atheism,” but I said, “I’d be happy to do one on the issue of abortion.”
Trent Horn:
Now I had a little bit of hesitancy about doing this because I understand the concerns that people would have. And I had concerns. I still have some about doing devil’s advocate debates, but I think it has their place because my ultimate goal is to lead people to the truth, right? And so it would seem weird for me to go out and publicly defend a lie because what if that leads people away from the truth? I don’t want to do that. So I don’t think I would do devil’s advocate debates as a norm, but in this particular case, I was okay doing it, but I will tell you this though. At parts of it, defending abortion I felt icky. I felt icky and I didn’t like it. Though the only thing I liked about it was when I was in theater in high school, I really enjoyed playing the villain. I loved, in drama, playing the villain. The villain gets to, he’s the best in any play or TV show or film. Villains get to chew the scenery. You get to have, it’s great. You cannot have a good hero in a story without a really good villain. And I enjoy playing the villain. You get to have a lot of fun with the role.
Trent Horn:
And so I felt like that here, where I’m defending legal abortion, but why was I okay doing this particular debate? Well, one reason as you’ll see, I chose a position that I thought was strong. It is a strong pro-choice position, but I still believe it’s morally repugnant. And many people, even people who identify as pro-choice, will see the strongest argument I could muster for defending legal abortion ends up sounding very repugnant and many people would reject it. So I was okay with that and seeing that this could be an opportunity for me in defending a pro-choice position, to be able to show why the vast majority of acceptable pro-choice arguments, the kinds of arguments that people are okay making, the regular Joe on the street makes, in this debate I talk about why all those arguments fail. So I felt like it was a good opportunity to do that from a unique perspective.
Trent Horn:
I also planned on doing a debrief/rebuttal of the arguments in a separate episode so that people could see, I don’t believe in these arguments and here’s why. I trusted my interlocutor, Ben Watkins, who is from Real Atheology. Ben and I have debated atheism, one of the best debates I’ve ever had. Ben is a smart guy. He knows the arguments. That’s the other problem with devil’s advocate debates is that you’re not sure that the other person is going to do a good job. What if you do a good job defending the other view and your opponent, who’s supposed to defend your view, does a crummy job? Nobody wants that.
Trent Horn:
So I trusted that Ben would put forward a good case and he did. I did think he got a little philosophical, so as you listen, like when Ben says pro tonto, just ignore that part. It’s jargon that just basically means to an extent. He’s not making an absolute case. He’s saying that roughly to an extent, when you hear pro tonto, just take it out of the sentence and you won’t miss anything. That’s my only criticism of Ben in our debate that I felt like he over jargoned it a tad bit, what he was arguing, but he tried to make a very strong case. I think he did, one of the strongest cases for pro-life that I have seen a pro-choice person make. Most pro-choice people are abysmal when it comes to trying to say what pro-lifers believe or to make a strong pro-life case. So I was okay to doing this devil’s advocate debate.
Trent Horn:
I wouldn’t do any advocate debate unless I trusted that the other person could defend my side really well. And there’s only a handful of people that I trust to be able to do that, quite frankly. But I still, made me a little uncomfortable in parts, but I think it’s a good exercise for people to see, and for people to see also that we can stand up to the strongest arguments that are out there, because we understand the other side. You should always try to, and that’s what Aquinas does in the Summa, right? He takes an opposing view, builds it up, then says why it’s wrong. So this debate is me building that view up, and Ben refutes it somewhat. And in my debrief, right after this episode, you can watch that. You might be watching this and just really not like hearing me say these things and quit. I don’t think you should do that, but I can understand why you would do that.
Trent Horn:
If that’s the case, then don’t forget to watch my rebuttal the next episode where I talk about why I don’t believe these things. And once again, I think it’s helpful in that regard. So without further ado then, here is my devil’s advocate debate, Ben Watkins versus Trent Horn, is abortion moral or immoral? So where I defend the pro-choice view. Check it out.
Sam:
So essentially we’ve got our 10 minute openings to begin and all I’m going to be doing is just keeping track of time. And as needed, I’ll just jump in and just say, okay, it’s time to kind of start wrapping things up, et cetera. But to start with, Ben, I believe you’re going to be opening up for us for the first 10 minutes. So I’ll hit start as soon as you’re ready and we’ll go from there.
Ben Watkins:
All right. I will share my screen with you now.
Trent Horn:
Sweet.
Ben Watkins:
Okay. I want to start by sincerely thanking Sam and the When Belief Dies channel for inviting me to this devil’s advocate debate. And I want to thank Trent for agreeing. Trent and I have had fun engaging in substantive discussions in the past, and I doubt today will be any different. So let’s get started.
Ben Watkins:
Let me begin with a preliminary remark. I will assume David Hume’s famous distinction between is and ought, or roughly the distinction between science and morality. There is no controlled science experiment that will settle the question of abortion and no moral conclusion will follow from scientific facts. With that said, let’s look at my main argument. Premise A claims that prenatal humans are living humans. Premise B is the most controversial premise, and one nearly all pro-choicers reject. So two of my arguments will defend it. Premise B claims all humans have a right to life. Therefore conclusion C follows, prenatal humans have a right to life. Premise D is a moral assumption. We have a powerful pro tonto reason not to kill what has a right to life. So conclusion E follows from premise D, we have a powerful pro tonto moral reason not to kill a prenatal human. If premise B is more probable than its negation, given certain moral and metaphysical assumptions, then we at least have a pro tonto moral reason against elective abortion. My probable pro-life argument is a rebutting defeater for pro-choice.
Ben Watkins:
I will now focus on giving reasons for accepting premise B in a qualified form. Recall I’m arguing there is a powerful pro tonto reason not to kill you or me. So all else being equal you and I should not be killed, but what explains this fact? I think a likelihood inequality will help us see why pro-life better explains this fact than pro-choice. Pro-life confers a probability of exactly one on the observation we should not be killed. So it entails an observation all parties to the discussion concede. However, pro-choice does not entail this observation unless we make additional moral and metaphysical assumptions. I want to argue that what explains the truth of this likelihood inequality is that the prior probability, that is the probability giving other moral and metaphysical assumptions of pro-life is greater than that of pro-choice because it is simpler.
Ben Watkins:
When I claim that pro-life is simpler than pro-choice, I mean it’s both more modest and more coherent with the moral and metaphysical assumptions we accept before even asking the abortion question. By more modest, I mean pro-life is less arbitrary, for pro-life draws a principle distinction between humans that should not be killed and humans that may. I’ll soon explain this distinction. Pro-choice on the other hand arbitrarily excludes prenatal humans from the class of beings that should not be killed. This arbitrary distinction comes at the theoretical cost of modesty, because pro-choice will have to make additional moral and metaphysical assumptions to make probable the observation that you and I should not be killed. It might be objected pro-choice affords more coherence with our moral and metaphysical assumptions at the cost of being less modest.
Ben Watkins:
I will argue this is not so for at least three reasons. The first is Don Marquis’ is future like ours argument. The second is an argument from Alexander Pruss and the last is one from moral risk.
Ben Watkins:
The first argument I’ll give in favor of premise B comes from the philosopher, Don Marquis and claims that a future like ours or flo implies a right to life, and nearly all humans, including prenatal humans have a future like ours. Therefore, nearly all humans have a right to life. The future of a prenatal human includes a set of experiences, goals, and acts relevantly similar to those of postnatal humans like you and me. The loss of a prenatal humans’ future of value from an induced abortion is at least as great as the loss of the future value loss from the killing of a postnatal human. I argue this is a sufficient condition for our having a pro tonto reason not to kill any human. These claims are also in deep tension with pro-choice. These moral and metaphysical assumptions do not cohere well with pro-choice.
Ben Watkins:
My next argument comes from the philosopher Alexander Pruss and will probably be my most difficult, so I will break it down into three digestible stages. The first stage begins with a question about what makes something the same unified entity through time. It’s natural to suppose my mother was once pregnant with me, but this can actually be argued for. Firstly, the prenatal human, call it fe, that once lived in my mother’s womb never died. So fe must still exist in some form. Secondly, the parts and features of fe continuously grew into mine. If we ask where fe is now, the obvious answer is exactly where I am, but there can’t be multiple physical objects of the same size and shape in the exact same location. Thus fe and I are one in the same entity. So much for the first stage.
Ben Watkins:
The second stage draws our attention to the metaphysics of identity claims. If two things are one in the same, then they have all the same essential properties. I have the property of having a right to life essentially. I am also one in the same entity as fe, so it follows that fe also has the property of having a right to life essentially. This also makes sense of a common, moral intuition that the earlier I am killed, the greater the harm, because I am deprived of more life than if I were killed later. So much for the second stage.
Ben Watkins:
The third and final stage is the easiest. It draws our attention to the fact that there is no moral difference between me when I was a prenatal human and you when you were a prenatal human. If I had a right life when I was a prenatal human, and there is no moral difference between me, you and any other human with a future like ours, then it follows that all humans with a future like ours have a right to life, but nearly all humans have a flo. Again, we’ve arrived at my premise B.
Ben Watkins:
My final argument involves moral intuitions we have given uncertainty. Here’s how Cameron Bertuzzi has illustrated it. Suppose you are hired to demolish a building. As project manager, you hire a team of experts to get the job done. When the time arrives to press the trigger, you ask your safety officer if she is positive there is no one left in the building. She replies, “I did a walkthrough last night and didn’t see anyone, but I’m not a hundred percent sure.” It’s clear what ought to be done at this point, given the small, but reasonable chance someone is still in the building, you ought to postpone the demolition. Going forward at this point would be morally reckless and negligent. I think we can mirror this reasoning. If there is a non-negligible chance all humans with a future like ours have a right to life, then we have a powerful pro tonto reason not to kill them. So we morally ought to fail conservative. Given my argument so far, there is a non-negligible chance all humans with a future like ours have a right to life. Further, nearly all humans, including prenatal humans have a future like ours. Therefore, we morally ought to fail conservative.
Ben Watkins:
We’ve arrived now at a qualified version of premise B from my probable pro-life argument. In conclusion, I want to recap my case. I labeled my main contention premise B. It claims that all humans with a future like ours have a right to life. If this claim is conceded along with my preliminary remarks and moral assumptions, then it follows we have a powerful pro tonto, moral reason against nearly any elective abortion. This conclusion is also directly bolstered by my fail conservative argument. Based on the non-negligible chance that humans with a future like ours have a right to life, the proceeding reasoning might give us a definitive answer to the question of abortion.
Ben Watkins:
I’ve argued poor pro-life is a prior probability than pro-choice. That is a higher probability of being true, given other moral and metaphysical assumptions. I then defended this claim by arguing that pro-life is both more modest and more coherent than pro-choice. Pro-life is more modest because it makes no arbitrary exception to the moral principle that all humans have a right to life. I then gave at least three arguments for the claim pro-life is more coherent given certain moral and metaphysical assumptions. The first of these arguments was that all humans have a morally relevant future like ours or flo. My second argument claimed I am one in the same entity as a prenatal human, in the past, we called fe and there is no moral difference between me, fe and all other humans with a flo. Finally, I argued there is a non-negligible chance with a flo to have a right to life. So we have a powerful pro tonto, moral reason not to kill nearly any human, which is to say, we should fail conservative. I’m go ahead and end there.
Sam:
Thanks, Ben. Let me bring that out. Fantastic. Okay, Trent, over to you. As soon as you’re ready, I will hit go on my timer.
Trent Horn:
All right. Well, I’d like to thank Sam for hosting this debate. It’s fun to be debating Ben again. We had a lot of fun last time, and I think we’ll have a lot of fun this time. The issue of abortion is very controversial. So I hope both of us today can generate more light than heat as we debate it. Even though I am pro-life, I’m going to be defending the pro-choice position, that abortion is not morally wrong and so it should remain legal. However, this does not mean that I think every argument for the pro-choice position is sound. Just as there are terrible arguments for the pro-life position, there are terrible arguments for the pro-choice position, and they often mimic one another.
Trent Horn:
For example, pro-lifers sometimes argue against abortion by pointing out allegedly negative effects that it has on women. Usually the arguments for this conclusion are based on the testimony of post-abortive women, which is not as reliable as medical studies, which have failed to demonstrate that women on average suffer worse after having an abortion than from carrying a pregnancy to term.
Trent Horn:
But even if we were to grant this assumption, it wouldn’t prove abortion is immoral or it ought to be illegal because we tolerate many things that are bad for you. Legal activities like smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, eating fast food, et cetera. Likewise, pro-choice advocates sometimes argue that abortion is moral or should be legal, simply because it has many positive effects for women. It allows them to better plan their families, avoid financial, physical, and emotional stresses associated with an unintended pregnancy. Moreover, keeping abortion legal has the positive effect of reducing the number of women who may be harmed by choosing illegal abortions. But like our bad pro-life argument, this argument fails because we outlaw many things that provide people with positive benefits, like bank robbery or insurance fraud. We do this even if outlawing these activities makes them riskier for those who engage in them.
Trent Horn:
As the pro-choice philosopher, Mary Anne Warren has said, the fact that restricting access to abortion has tragic side effects does not in itself show that restrictions are unjustified, since murder is wrong regardless of the consequences of prohibiting it.
Trent Horn:
The central issue, then, we must confront is whether the act of abortion is moral or immoral. And if it is immoral, is it so immoral that it ought to be illegal? In order to do that, we need to know what the act of abortion does. For this debate, I’ll define abortion as the direct removal of a human embryo or fetus from the uterus with the intent of killing said embryo or fetus. Now there are cases where this might happen indirectly through something that I think is just abortion by another name, but I’m going to focus my argument on the traditional methods that are used, not just to end a pregnancy, but to end a pregnancy with the intent of bringing about the demise of the human embryo or the human fetus.
Trent Horn:
Now let’s address a common pro-life argument. The human embryo or fetus is a human being. Abortion directly kills human beings. Therefore, abortion is immoral and it should be illegal, common, but flawed. This argument fails because what makes killing wrong cannot be that it simply ends the life of a human being. First, many pro-life advocates are fine killing some human beings, like people who are brain dead, for example. So it doesn’t seem true that the killing of all human beings is wrong.
Trent Horn:
And second, if we encountered a race of intelligent aliens like us who were not human, we’d probably agree it’s wrong to kill them, even though they aren’t human beings. Most people agreed it’s wrong when Lex Luthor tries to kill Superman, even though Superman is not a human being. In fact, the issue of aliens brings me to this thought experiment offered by Mary Anne Warren. Imagine you’re an astronaut who crash lands on an alien planet. You start to get hungry and wonder which creatures it is okay for you to eat. After all, there could be people on this planet who look nothing like the people you know from earth. So appearance or biology, won’t help you determine which beings on the planet are fair game for food and which are not. Instead, I bet you would look for certain criteria that would show one of these alien beings is a person and thus impermissible to kill. What criteria are those? What would you look for to determine if these things are persons or not?
Trent Horn:
Here’s a quote from Mary Anne Warren that I think summarizes it very well. She writes, “I suggest that the traits which are most central to the concept of personhood or humanity in the moral sense are very roughly the following five:
Trent Horn:
One, consciousness of objects, events, external, internal to the being, and in particular, the capacity to feel pain.
Trent Horn:
Two, reasoning, the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems.
Trent Horn:
Three self motivated activity, activity, which is relatively independent of by lot of genetic or direct external control.
Trent Horn:
Number four, the capacity to communicate by whatever means messages of an indefinite variety of types. That is not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, not like a monkey banging on a typewriter who eventually gets to Shakespeare, but on indefinitely many possible topics.
Trent Horn:
And number five, the presence of self-concepts and self-awareness, either individual, racial, or both.
Trent Horn:
So Warren goes on to write, “All we need to claim to demonstrate that a fetus is not a person at any being which satisfies none of capacities one through five, if you cannot satisfy any of conditions one through five, you are not a person.” She writes, “I consider this claim to be so obvious that I think anyone who denied it and claim that a being which satisfied none of conditions one through five was a person all the same would thereby demonstrate he had no notion at all of what a person is. Even animals like mice or snakes have rudimentary consciousness, but human embryos and fetuses prior to the 20th week of life lack even that. They are not aware of anything and never have been aware of anything. As a result, they cannot possibly be persons and they can’t be harmed by being killed since they’re not aware of anything. And so they have no desire to live that the act of killing would frustrate. We even recognize that mice and snakes who have some awareness can still be killed because their level of awareness is just so far below what constitutes a person and an embryo or fetus is even lower than that.
Trent Horn:
“And any reason to favor the mere biological life of a fetus over any other being merely because of its DNA, that would be discrimination. That would be speciesism. We don’t do that for DNA conferring racial characteristics, why should we do it for DNA conferring species membership?”
Trent Horn:
Let me also offer a thought experiment that shows deep down we understand the wrongness of killing has nothing to do with ending the life of a human organism, but everything to do with ending the existence of a person. Let me give you two thought experiments. Imagine a mad scientist has kidnapped you and threatened to either destroy your or mind and body, or only destroy your mind by wiping all of your memories. Which one would you choose? I suspect most people would find both options equally horrifying. At the very least, they would say in either case, you didn’t survive this ordeal. But if the pro-life view were correct, and we are identical to a physical organism, it would seem intuitively we would choose to have only our memories destroyed and think we had survived, even though we are now profoundly disabled.
Trent Horn:
And to change the thought experiment a little further is experiment number two, suppose the mad scientist says that we have the choice to either have our body destroyed and our mind uploaded to a computer, or we can have our mind destroyed through the memory wipe and keep our bodies. Most people would at least want their mind preserved. And many would say that if this happened, that they would’ve survived the ordeal, but all this shows the pro-life view is false. We are not identical to organisms, especially embryonic or fetal human organisms. We are persons who come into existence once we possess rational thought and have an enduring sense of self over time. And if that is true, abortion can’t be immoral because no human fetus has any of the features to make them persons that we can’t kill.
Trent Horn:
So finally, I think the pro-choice position I’ve articulated, I know Ben has talked about simplicity. I think my view is simpler. It explains why we would save a adult or even a small child in a fire rather than a tank of a hundred frozen embryos. That explains why pro-lifers don’t spend a lot of money trying to save embryos that are going to be miscarried. They don’t do that very much. It explains why pro-lifers resist legal punishments for women who choose abortion. It explains all these things that they’re simply not persons. And it does all this without positing strange metaphysical claims about the embryo or fetus, simply saying that persons have a right to life. So in that respect, I hope you’ll agree with me and recognize that all persons have a right to life and a right to control their own bodies. Thank you.
Sam:
Thank you, Trent. Fantastic. Right. Let me get five minutes up. Okay. So we’re going to be moving to our first rebuttals, five minute first rebuttals. And Ben, once again, we can be starting with you if that’s okay. Let me know when you are ready and I will hit go on my timer.
Ben Watkins:
I’m ready to go. Let me start off by thanking Trent Horn for his opening. Trent gave some examples that will hopefully illustrate the explanatory power and scope of Marquis’s future like ours argument. Using his examples of killing animals, supposing it’s permissible to kill animals. It’s not because they belong to another species with different DNA. Rather, they lack the potential for a sufficiently meaningful future like ours. Trent insisted only persons should not be killed. And because prenatal humans are not persons, prenatal humans may be killed. Let me try to respond.
Ben Watkins:
Suppose Trent is right and prenatal humans are not persons. The obvious response here is so what? I make no use of the moral concept of persons. Instead I insisted prenatal humans do have a future of value killing deprives them of. In other words, killing a prenatal human harms it. This is true even if a prenatal human is unaware. Similarly, killing a comatose adult who has a non-negligible chance of recovering harms her, even though she is unaware of it. Moreover, harming prenatal humans wrongs that human because the harm is bad in virtue of being bad for that human, not solely in virtue of being bad for others who receive fewer benefits from that human if it is harmed. This last point is a nod to the dissertations of both Elizabeth Harman and Russell DiSilvestro.
Ben Watkins:
But is Trent right that prenatal humans are not persons? I’m skeptical. All of the capacities Trent regards as distinctive of persons, like consciousness, desires, reasoning, self-motivation, communication, and self-awareness are present in prenatal humans, just in a latent state. These are capacities that the vast majority of prenatal humans are sure to develop by growing and learning if we let them live. They arguably are persons already, not just potentially. Adult humans who sustain severe brain damage and lose all the aforementioned capacities, or even all her memories, are still persons, provided she like a prenatal human can acquire those capacities later on. Whether she is the person she used to be is another matter, but that is irrelevant here.
Ben Watkins:
Trent also gave an embryonic rescue argument as a reductio of my premise B. He asks us to imagine a moral dilemma where we can only rescue either a hundred embryos or a single toddler from a burning building. When presented with this dilemma, most people’s overwhelming moral intuition is we ought to save the single toddler and not the hundred embryos. I agree and can try to account for this. The fact both toddlers and embryos have rights to life does not imply it would be better for one toddler to die than a hundred embryos. To have a right to life is for others to have an obligation to let one live when they can do so without flouting other obligations. Such an obligation says nothing about how bad it would be for the being to die. It may well be that the toddler’s death would be a hundred times as bad as any of the embryo’s deaths. After all, there are morally relevant differences between the toddler and the embryos. First, the toddler will die a painful and terrifying death, whereas the hundred embryos won’t. Second, there is a significant uncertainty as to whether the hundred embryos will survive this event, but it is nearly certain the toddler will. And third, there will be harm involved to those closely related to the toddler, whereas few are likely to care deeply about the embryos. I think this matters morally.
Ben Watkins:
Similarly, if it is less pressing to save an embryo from miscarriage than abortion, which involves intending to end the embryo’s life, but even if we were no less pressing, my view would not entail we ought to save embryos from miscarriages. Rights to life are not rights to being rescued, just rights to being allowed to live. A conscious human at risk of being burned to death probably has a right to being rescued by passers-by, but an embryo at risk of miscarriage or fiery destruction does not, even assuming a right to life.
Ben Watkins:
Trent points out pro-lifers resist legal punishment of women who have abortions, but perhaps we do not resist punishment of women specifically. I suspect we just resist severe punishment of any reasonable party, opting instead for moderate deterrence measures, for the responsible parties do not mean to wrong anyone or anything. They believe abortion is morally on par with chopping down trees. So they are far less culpable than murderers who intentionally kill other persons. Manslaughter is clearly worse because it’s perpetrators carelessly endanger the lives of those they know have rights to life, but abortion shares a wrong-making feature with murder, knowingly depriving it being of a future like ours. Perhaps responsible parties should face some sort of legal con consequences. They just shouldn’t be severe.
Ben Watkins:
How am I for time? I should probably go ahead and end there.
Sam:
Yeah, that was it. Perfect.
Ben Watkins:
Sweet.
Sam:
Amazing.
Ben Watkins:
That’s what a perfect world looks like. Throw back.
Sam:
Cool. Trent. Ready?
Trent Horn:
Not yet.
Sam:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Not yet. It has still not come to fruition. It is in a state of journeying. Well, all right, let me, and then we have five minutes, I think. Okay.
Trent Horn:
Ben, thank you. That was a really great rebuttal. I’m going to touch on some of the points Ben made in his rebuttal in my next address. Here, I just want to focus on some of the things that he said in his opening statement. So Ben is basically arguing from probability. Imagine a seesaw, right? You have a seesaw, it tips to pro-life or pro-choice. Where does the evidence stack? And he thinks its prior probability is to pro-life, it tips in that direction because the pro-life position is simpler. It’s just saying all human beings have a right to life. Now I agree, it’s simpler than many other complex pro-choice positions. There are other pro-choice positions that are arbitrary. They try to divide personhood through arbitrary biological categories like viability or birth. But notice in my opening statement, I never mentioned drawing lines at birth or viability or any kind of biological category like that. Instead, my position is just as if not simpler than his because I said personhood is what gives you a right to life. And I stuck with just that specific functional concept.
Trent Horn:
So I don’t think that his view is, it’s at least as simple as mine, if not mine is simpler than his. But let’s look at some of Ben’s arguments to say why the seesaw should tip towards the pro-life side. First, he mentioned Don Marquis’s future like ours argument. What makes killing human beings wrong? Well, it deprives them of a future like ours. You kill a frog, a frog doesn’t have a future like ours. That’s why it’s different. If Superman would have a future like ours, it be wrong to kill him. So I give him credit. This is not a species centric argument.
Trent Horn:
The biggest problem here though, is that in the uncontroversial cases like me or Ben or Superman, we have a psychological connection to our future. Okay. We desire our future. And that I think is the most grievous wrong and when we deprive someone of it. If the argument’s taken so far, I mean, do eggs and sperm have a future like ours? Is it murder to use contraception? What if I had a pill that I, and in let’s take a serum. I inject a cat with a serum and it will give that cat a right to life. Okay. Or sorry, it will give that cat rational ability.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]
Trent Horn:
A Right to life. Okay. So I will give that cat rational abilities, if I don’t inject the cat with the serum that gives the cat rational abilities. Have I deprived the cat of a future like ours? Have I committed murder? It doesn’t seem very intuitive to me.
Trent Horn:
Maybe Ben’s next argument will fare a little better. He tried to argue from continuity that we are organisms. I was once a fetus. I was conceived. I developed in the womb, but this argument really tries to… It seems to assume what it tries to prove when it says very much that I was conceived or I was in the womb. I was a fetus. I think that’s kind of folk language that we shouldn’t necessarily take literally. So I guess I could put it this way. I’ll grant Ben’s point. We’re biological organisms. We were in the womb in a sense. But I think what’s carrying his intuition here is that foundationally we are not organisms, we are persons.
Trent Horn:
To give you an analogy, you and I are like a piece of origami. When we say origami is a piece of paper, what we mean is the origami is a piece of paper folded a certain way. So when we say you and I are organisms, what we mean is we are persons whose biological components are folded in a certain way. So yeah, we are organisms, but only the kind of organisms that can engage in rational abilities beyond other non-human animals. We can engage in rational thought, deliberation. That is what makes persons unique from any other being. We are persons because you and I and everybody listening to this debate, our biological components are folded in that way to make us. So I’ll agree with him. Yeah, we’re organisms, but more foundationally, we are persons. So it’s more folk language to say that I was conceived or that I was a fetus.
Trent Horn:
The final argument is kind of a catchall he gave us. It’s like, “Well, even if we’re all balanced out, we shouldn’t take the risk. What if this is a human being?” I could just invert that argument. “What if we’re taking a risk that we’re infringing on a pregnant woman’s right to choose?” If there’s even a chance we’re depriving her of fundamental rights, we shouldn’t that. But I think that I’ve shown we’re beyond the mere agnostic position because I’ve shown that in matters pertaining to abortion, only the woman’s rights can be infringed because only she is a person. The fetus is not a person because persons have to be capable of rational behavior and thoughts and abilities beyond merely non-human animals. No fetus can do that. They’re not a person, therefore abortion is not immoral and it ought to be legal.
Sam:
Okay. That was bang on. Thank you as well. Fantastic. Okay. So we’re moving to our second rebuttals now, and we’re going to be starting with Ben once again. Ben, let me know when you’re ready and we will start the timer.
Ben Watkins:
Okay. I’m good to go. Okay. So I want to kind of just really quickly recap sort of the strategy that I laid out in my opening and then try to respond to some of the objections that Trent has raised. Thank you again for giving those objections, Trent.
Ben Watkins:
So I started with a preliminary remark about humes is ought distinction. One of the things that I wanted to show with that argument, or at least that preliminary mark, is that the question of abortion is not a scientific question. It’s not going to turn on some issue of science. I gave Don Marquis’s argument, a future like ours argument, because it’s a moral argument. It’s about what is the wrong making property of acts. We want to know what a sufficient condition is for some act to be morally wrong. And so there’re moral considerations.
Ben Watkins:
The second argument I gave was one from identity. And so it’s a metaphysical argument. It’s an argument where if we really dig into the metaphysics of identity, what answer we land on in the metaphysics of identity will largely dictate what we find more or less plausible about the question of abortion.
Ben Watkins:
Then the third was an epistemic one. It was about uncertainty given moral information. So it’s not scientific. We need moral considerations, we need metaphysical considerations, we need epistemic considerations, so I tried to wrap that up in this one simple concept of prior probability. Trent raised an objection that he thinks his view is simpler than mine. But recall that the way that I made this argument, I started with a supremely simple form of pro-life that all humans have a right to life and then the negation of that, which I called pro-choice, was only some humans have a right to life. But we all accepted the observation and moral assumption that you and I have a right to life.
Ben Watkins:
So this pro-life hypothesis entails that observation, whereas pro-choice does not. Pro-choice will have to make additional claims in order to actually entail that observation. So I want to say that this at least counts against the simplicity of the pro-choice position that’s being put on the table right now because keep in mind, there’s an entire moral category of personhood that’s being put on the table for the pro-choice position. Again, my view just doesn’t have to use these conceptual tools. I think that, that’s a theoretical virtue. That’s what I would want to say about the simplicity aspect of it.
Ben Watkins:
He also responded to the metaphysics of Bruce’s argument by saying that it almost seems like it assumes what is needed to be proved and I’ll concede in one sense, it might seem that way because that’s just kind of the nature of metaphysics.
Ben Watkins:
It’s kind of difficult to really grasp those abstract concepts. But I did try to argue for the assumption that a fee really did exist. A prenatal human in the past that not only existed, but it never died and its parts and features grew into mine. And so I’m not just assuming that I am one in the same entity as this prenatal human. I’m also arguing for that premise, because I want to then say that we have a future of value. These prenatal human has an essential property that they have. They have a future of value. And so we can come back to that moral consideration from Don Marquis again, the future like ours argument. And the moral uncertainty argument is really kind of icing on the cake here in the sense that it’s saying that, “Look, this is how we apply our moral intuitions, given money, moral uncertainty when it matters.”
Ben Watkins:
So it might be the case that abortion is seriously wrong, but we shouldn’t make it illegal. Something like abortion or not abortion, adultery or infidelity. We agree that it’s morally wrong, but we shouldn’t make it illegal. Maybe abortion is similar to that. The uncertainty argument is meant to kind of undercut that because, no it’s the consequences of adultery are not that someone with a right to life or a future of was lost. It should be it because if we don’t fail conservative in this way, many innocent human beings will be unjustifiably killed. I think I’m out of time. So I’ll go ahead and stop there.
Sam:
Amazing. Thank you very much. Okay. And we’re back to Trent for the second rebuttal. Whenever you’re ready, Trent. I’ll hit go.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Yeah. So I just have a few thoughts here on Ben’s position so far. I think, one thing that really stuck out to me was he said a statement I had to do a little bit of a double take was when I said that a fetus or an embryo is not a person. He said, “Well, yeah, it is a person that it has these latent capacities.” Like yeah, well maybe it can’t think rationally. Now, maybe it can’t do these kinds of distinct person abilities now, but it can do them later. But I just don’t think this works because we would say that the rights of a person or how we ought to treat a being are in virtue of the capacities it actually has not its potential. I know it’s a well worn truism, but it’s worth saying just as an egg is not a chicken and a sapling or an a… Sorry, an Acorn is not an Oak tree.
Trent Horn:
A potential person is not an actual person, even if they can do these feeds later, they’re just a potential person now. To give you another example, when someone wins the presidential election, their president elect they’re a potential president or let’s say a presidential candidate, like a presidential candidate is a potential president, more so than you or me, but it doesn’t mean we give him the nuclear launch codes. He has to become an actual president and even some actual presidents. Maybe we shouldn’t do that, but I’ll leave that for the rest of you to decide. So I would just say here, I just don’t understand why he’s grounding this more in the being that it has the future like ours. I brought up the question about psychological connectedness. I do think futures do matter, but they matter to people who want them. Acorns don’t want to be Oak trees, eggs don’t want to be chickens and embryos don’t want to be adults.
Trent Horn:
So I think that, that’s very problematic for his position. Finally, about the point I raised though about the… It’s not intuitive, if the unborn or not persons… And I apologize how much time do I have left? Hope, I’m not-
Sam:
About three minutes.
Trent Horn:
… Oh, well I got plenty of time. I had said a few notes here, actually. One more thing he said was about punishment, because I think that this is something that’s important that you have got pro-life or you’ve got people saying that, “Oh, well the woman who obtains an abortion is just as much a victim as anyone else.” And yet I don’t see saying that the same about any other born individuals who commit homicide against persons. It’s very rare for, I can’t think of any other cases where we say that. Other people who commit homicide are just as much a victim as anyone else. To me, I find that to be a belittling and a patronizing attitude towards women.
Trent Horn:
And maybe that’s just what pro-lifers do. I don’t know, maybe that undergirds their position. I don’t mean to make an ad hominem but I’m just trying to figure out what they’re thinking here. Because Ben said the example, “It’s not like cutting down, oh, cutting down trees.” He said, “Well, we do lighter punishments because of these women. A lot of them, they don’t understand what they’re doing. It’s like think thinking maybe they’re going to cut down a tree.”
Trent Horn:
And I’ll give you that, maybe some people who obtain abortions are not aware that they are destroying a biological human organism, but it seems like a lot of others use language like, “My baby died, I killed my baby.” So it would seem like they’re aware of that. Yet, pro-life advocates don’t seem to want to hold either the women or men. They don’t want to hold men responsible either for these actions. Which I think, under my view makes a lot of sense if the embryo or fetus is not a person actually. So, those are some of the problematic elements that I saw in what Ben was saying. And then maybe we can cut through a little bit here more when we more engage each other. But I think that’s what I have for now.
Sam:
Brilliant. Well, thank you both for that. That was brilliant. Let me just get my next timer already. Okay. So we’re going to be moving into essentially the sort of cross examination periods now. So this is going to be where you each take in turns to ask the other person questions. Feel free to cut them off whenever you want to. Essentially it is your 10 minutes to ask whatever you want. And if you want to move the conversation on. Feel absolutely free. So basically are going to be starting with Ben. And as soon as you’re ready, Ben. I’ll hit start and then yeah, we’re good to go for 10 minutes.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah, I’m ready to go. So how does your view of personhood deal with premature infants or those born at the lower bound of viability? So for example, what I have in mind is if a woman had an infant born at, let’s say 20 weeks, but then decided she no longer wanted to be a parent. Would she have the right on your view to have it euthanized or killed, induce an abortion?
Trent Horn:
How far along is the pregnancy an abortion like-
Ben Watkins:
We’ll say 20 weeks. Yeah. We’ll say 20 weeks at the lower bound of the viability range.
Trent Horn:
… Well my position, now I will say to you that killing a human organism, there may be other… I’ll give you, there may be other reasons it’s wrong to do that in spite of it not being a person, but my position would be a fetus at 20 weeks, 30 weeks, 40 weeks. And you mentioned infants. My position would also entail that shortly after birth for some time period, an infant would not be a person either. As I made clear in my rebuttal and what I was saying my is not arbitrary biological criteria. I think it’s very simple. So it would entail that fetuses and young infants are not persons and there may be conditions where it is permissible to kill them.
Ben Watkins:
Okay. What do I have is for other questions? Okay. Let’s suppose a human sustains a brain damage that temporarily takes away her consciousness, her desires, her self-awareness, her self motivation, all those things. And she can only regain these abilities after nine months of rehabilitation and treatment. How do you explain why it is wrong to kill her now? So yeah, go ahead.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think these kinds of cases are difficult because we’re not as familiar with them. When we put forward cases, we should try to use things that are as familiar to us. So you’re saying this woman… Are you saying that she’s… In nine months, will she retain her previous memories or get brand new ones?
Ben Watkins:
It does not specify, so that’s the scenario just says that she had that she gets an injury that causes brain damage. And whether this a new person or some other person wakes up, is another question.
Trent Horn:
Well, I would say-
Ben Watkins:
I’ll grant that’s a difficult question of [crosstalk 00:48:51].
Trent Horn:
… I would say that if the same person awakens nine months later. It’s not that much different from sleep. And I would say that the person still had interests moving forward. And I think that should be respected. But if the person loses their memories, I mean, I guess it doesn’t have to have a coma. They just lose all of their memories and they’re wiped back to the state of being an infant. My position would be that they wouldn’t be a person anymore, because I believe persons have to have abilities beyond what other animals can do. And among humans that doesn’t seem to happen until some point after birth, which we aren’t entirely sure.
Ben Watkins:
Okay, so I’m sorry, but I think I missed it. So, but how this person is in the… We know that in nine months with rehabilitation and treatment, she’ll be able to get better in some sense. Would it be wrong to kill her when she has the brain damage where she doesn’t meet those necessary conditions of personhood that she would say.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, it would be wrong to kill her if she is still a person. But unless I think about the case more, I just don’t know if-
Ben Watkins:
That’s fair.
Trent Horn:
… the injury she has sustained means she not a person anymore. So I guess it depends because I said earlier that the potential for personhood, the potential to act like a person isn’t what makes you a person. So it would seem like in that case, because she does, even if she has a potential to act like a person who she doesn’t have that active ability, it doesn’t seem she’s a person anymore, regardless of what happens later. So I would just say just in general, people should try not to be accident prone. I guess because we have limited healthcare resources anyways, we should marshal them for people who have the most promising avenues.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. So the reason that I asked this question is because I think that the pro-life view can give a simple explanation of the wrongness of killing this person in terms of the future of value that awaits her once she recovers. So again, it’s trying reinforce that this pro-life view might be able to explain easier instances where we all agree that it would be wrong to kill this person, but it seems like the pro-choice view might struggle with that particular example.
Trent Horn:
Well, I think in any case we’re going to have difficulties in explaining different views. It seems like your view doesn’t cover all humans, because if we had someone who is severe, who is very mentally handicapped, I wouldn’t say they have a future like ours, so I guess your argument only applies to a majority of human of lot-
Ben Watkins:
Nearly all. Yeah, nearly all.
Trent Horn:
… Yeah. Okay. Sure.
Ben Watkins:
So we’ll move on to another question. I think we kind of got our heads around that one a good bit. So let’s use another scenario, so you mentioned that even if a human has a right to life, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the right to someone else’s body, that the woman has rights to bodily autonomy.
Trent Horn:
Well, the argument I did make was I said, people have a right to control their bodies. I said, persons do. And when you-
Ben Watkins:
Oh, I got you. You’re right. I am sorry.
Trent Horn:
… Yeah, and when you deal with abortion, there is only one person involved and that is the woman.
Ben Watkins:
Gotcha. So I wanted to imagine a scenario where a woman happens to find a baby in an abandoned cabin in the woods, and she has no way to feed the baby, except by using her breast milk. And additionally, it’s certain the baby will die unless it is fed the woman’s breast milk. Is she obligated to do so, even if she does not consent as a person to the babies using her body for nourishment?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, so you’ll notice in the position that I gave in the debate to defend the pro-choice position. I’m not making a strict bodily autonomy argument, because I believe if you grant personhood to the fetus, you will end up granting many other things beyond just a right to life. That’ll also include a right to care for another individual. That what makes persons unique is that persons have duties to one another. Though, as I said earlier, if this is a very young infant, then I guess we could compare it to what if a woman found a Golden Retriever or a Calico cat. Does she have an obligation to care for it? I think, I would say that because humans value infants more, maybe she would have some kind of an obligation to do that.
Trent Horn:
But yeah I would say that any obligation she would have towards the infant would not be because it’s a person, probably it could be societal expectations. It could be like, I’ve struggled with this. My view entails the wrongness of infanticide, but maybe killing infant is wrong for the same reason. It’s wrong to destroy a Picasso that you own. It’s lots of people want it and it’s very unique. But I don’t think it would, if it is wrong, it’s not due to person to be due to some other prudential or secondary factors.
Ben Watkins:
So to be clear, would you say that this baby that’s been and found does have a right to use this woman’s body for breast milk?
Trent Horn:
You know What? I’m going to say that, that will depend on an overarching moral framework that I’m not fully decided on yet. For example, if you’re a utilitarian, right? If you’re a consequentialist who thinks that, “Well, we have to maximize utility, that’s our goal.” Then I would say everyone has an obligation to maximize utility. I would say, “Yeah, the woman has an obligation to do that.” I would say, “You have to be plugged into the violinist because those harms are outweighed by all of the utility of the other person’s life.” But if you believe in bodily rights and those are more important than consequentialism, you have more of a, maybe a Kantian view, deontological view. Then I might say, “No, she doesn’t have an obligation.” I think you could say she’s a morally reprehensible person. You could dislike her strongly. But I think I might say that she doesn’t have to care for that infant, because that infant is not a person.
Ben Watkins:
How am I doing for time? Do I have time for one more?
Sam:
You have 10 seconds, so probably not, I’m afraid.
Ben Watkins:
Oh, nope. Okay. Fair enough.
Trent Horn:
10 seconds started, right? Oh, now they’re over. They started nine seconds ago.
Sam:
Amazing. Okay, Trent, it’s over to you. As soon as you’re ready again, I’ll hit start the timer and you’ll tend to ask some questions.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Okay. Well, let me go through some of your things. Let’s talk about the future like ours argument, because I raised what’s a common objection to the argument. I’m curious to hear your reply. Does it entail that, like let’s take sperm and egg for example, that they would have a future like ours. And so contraception would… Even people who are against contraception, usually wouldn’t say it’s as wrong as murder. So would you say that your the future like ours argument means like do sperm and egg have it? And if they don’t have a future like ours, why would an embryo or fetus have one? Help me understand that.
Ben Watkins:
So I don’t think so because I… But the reason that I don’t think so has to deal with kind of the some deep metaphysics of the nature of objects. And so this idea that there was a sperm from my father and an egg from my mother’s ovum. Then came together to create a new individual, a new individual that was neither a part of my mom, nor a part of my dad. It is its own unique individual. And so until that moment happened, so it would take a while to kind of lay out the framework for the metaphysics of this view, but it would basically say that “No, look at the moment of conception, a new individual came into existence and this individual is existence is separate from both my mother and my father.
Ben Watkins:
Whereas, the egg could be considered part of my mother and the sperm can be considered part of my father.” And so that a new individual, a new object came into existence at the moment of conception. And that I am identical to that. Again, we can call that fee and that I am identical to that fee. And that’s when my right to life began.
Trent Horn:
Well, I guess then my question is, are you identical to fee. The previously existing embryo or fetus or do?
Ben Watkins:
So we don’t want to say numerically identical, because that’s much too strong of a claim.
Trent Horn:
Well, sure you have, because you have properties that fee never had. You’re doing it.
Ben Watkins:
Exactly. Yeah. So we wouldn’t be numerically identical, but we would be one in the same entity just at different stages of life.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So it’s like how you are same person who started this debate, even though you have slightly a few more properties.
Ben Watkins:
Yes. So this assumes without trying to get too deep into philosophical jargon is the non reductionist view of identity. So that what makes the same thing, same entity through time is a further fact about this thing’s continuity. And this would be contrast to a reductionist view of identity, but I am trying not to get too deep in that.
Trent Horn:
Well, I get it. And I might have opened that can of worms with some of my thought experiments, because I think the crux of our disagreement help me see if I’m wrong, is I think that what we are is we are a collection of mental states and you seem to be saying, what we are is an organism. Is that the difference between us?
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. So we would be a human organism. We would be a living human organism or we could say we are a living human individual. And so that we are in that, we are separate entity, so I am not the same organism as my father. I am not the same organism as my mother. Just, I’m not the same individual as my father. I’m not the same individual, nor am I a part of them. I might be made of parts of them, but if I’m a distinct individual organism.
Trent Horn:
But if we are organisms, if that’s what we are. What do you do with my thought experiment where I could either destroy your body and your mind, or just destroy your mind. It seems like under my view, a lot of people would treat that… I mean, what would you, I see those as being pretty equivalent in the harm that is caused and the person is gone. Maybe you don’t agree.
Ben Watkins:
No. But so what’s wrong with the reply here, the obvious reply here in that in just both cases, we use the future like ours criteria and both of them like whether you destroy my mind or my body is irrelevant given the future like ours criteria, because in both cases I’m deprived of a valuable future.
Trent Horn:
I see. So you’re saying there could be acts besides killing that deprives someone of a future like ours.
Ben Watkins:
Yes. So I’m not saying that a future of value is a necessary condition for a killing to be wrongful. It’s only a sufficient condition for the wrongness of an act. So there, other acts might be wrong for other reasons. I think it would be much too strong acclaim. I don’t even think Don Marquis would make that strong of a claim that he was giving necessary conditions for the wrongness of killing.
Trent Horn:
So you would, especially my second example, so do you would just reject the view of, I would rather have my mind uploaded to a computer than to have my body and mind destroyed or do you think that’s not possible or?
Ben Watkins:
No. So, well, yeah if that’s the question, now you have opened the bucket of worms as far as the metaphysics of identity, because we would ask, is it the same as surviving death? Is that the same as ordinary survival or does someone does uploading you to a mind, uploading your mind to a computer? Is that just another way of dying? It’s not like a regular way of dying, but is it really a way of dying and someone who wakes up on the other side of that computer wakes up as a different person. And I don’t know. I think that’s a super interesting… Well, I do in a different context about questions of personal identity, however, I’m in a devil’s advocate debate and I can’t use those resources.
Trent Horn:
But your position. So, but it seemed like you’re a position, it’s hard. I’m trying, you’re like saying, “Well, it’s not rooted in metaphysics and personal identity.” Then it starts to kind of be because, well it’s a particular kind of object.
Ben Watkins:
Well, no. I’m just saying that I don’t want to get into it, because of time constrains.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, no, I understand.
Ben Watkins:
I don’t want to unpack. I definitely think that the metaphysics of identity is super important to the question of abortion. I’m trying to present it in a way the that’s accessible and digestible.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, because maybe we’re going at it in two different ways. You’re looking at it as what makes killing wrong. And I’m trying to answer the question. I think what makes killing wrong is the kind of thing killed, I guess we’re both saying that you’re focusing in on this property of a future like ours. Well, what do you think though, of like that there’s a difference between, I desire my future and like my fetal self that had no sense of a connection. Do you think there’s a relevant difference between psychologically being connected to the future like ours or not?
Ben Watkins:
So, yes. I think that regardless of my view, on the question of abortion, I would have to admit as much, especially even the value of something like desire, fulfillment. I think you would have to say that something that has a desire, depriving something of something that desired something and desire depriving something of something that didn’t desire it. I’m thinking of, if I desired water and you gave me water and when a plant desired water, or plants don’t really desire water, but they need, but you deprived a plant of water. You’ve not done something wrong in the same way that you’ve done something wrong to me by depriving me of water because I wanted water or water’s crucial for life, but an alcoholic beverage, something that I don’t need, but you, because you’ve thwarted my desire fulfillment in there. You’ve wronged me in a way that a plant can’t be wronged.
Trent Horn:
Right. But I guess that’s like my view, I treat the fetus like a plant basically that it’s like, “Well, it can’t desire these things like I can.” And I think that is really the crux of what makes it wrong because person’s-
Ben Watkins:
I think this is a super great point because this ties us back into this idea of personal identity and the non reductionist view and the reduction is view. So the reduction is view is going see the difference between a fetus and an adult is the difference between an Acorn and an Oak tree. Whereas if you accept my pro’s argument and you see this non reductive fact that there’s this, it’s an all or nothing. I’m alive or dead or I have a writer I don’t have to write. You’re going to lean more into the… You’re going to think that abortion is morally wrong. Where if you have the Acorn, Oak tree view, the reductionist view of personality, you’re going to lean more to the pro-choice side, because you’re going to say, “Look, these don’t sacrifice something morally relevant.” And so I think that this is a great point. That questions in the metaphysics of identity can help, aside the question of abortion.
Trent Horn:
Well, I guess another question I have is, so if you’re saying, “Well, I’m identical, essentially not numerically, but I was a fetus. I was an embryo. And so I have a right to life now and I had a right to life then.”
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [01:06:04]
Trent Horn:
Embryo. And so I have a right to life now and I had a right to life then. It seems to me, are there two kinds of rights? I have a right to vote now, but I didn’t have a right to vote then [crosstalk 01:06:12]
Ben Watkins:
Well, sure. There’re legal rights and there’re moral rights. So I have a moral right for my wife to be faithful to me in our marriage. However, I don’t have that as a legal right. I can’t have the state punish my wife if she is unfaithful. So that would be the distinction between a moral right and a legal right.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So you think though that our moral rights go back?
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. Most of my arguments really focused on the moral aspect of the morality of abortion and really kind of assuming that the question of abortion turns on the morality of it.
Trent Horn:
Sam, how are we on time?
Sam:
That’s time, I’m afraid. So fantastic. Okay. So we can be moving into our sort of quick fire, 10 question round, where each of you gets a minute to respond. So I’ll be trying to time it, but basically obviously you have a minute. Try and do your best within the minute, essentially. So just to remind everybody, I’ve got Daniel in the call with me, he’s going to be putting through your questions onto the screen. I’ve also got Roger who’s in the chat. He’s been curating the questions. We had quite a few beforehand as well. So depending on and how the chat’s been going and the questions you might see a few from Roger, but that’s because they’ve all been kind of curated from other areas as well. So okay. To start with Daniel, if you’re happy to share the first question, okay. Can either debater claim any authority on this issue as people who presumably identify as male. So we’re going to start with Ben and then we’re going to go to Roger. So Ben, you’ve got a minute.
Ben Watkins:
I am going to be modest, I’m not going to claim to be an authority in any way on this question, regardless of what side I fall on it. At the end of the day, I’m a philosopher specifically a moral philosopher. So the best I can really hope to do is maybe clarify some concepts, claims, or arguments on either side of the debate to help people come to a better understanding of the question and to hopefully be able to use tools better in their searches for truth. So I would take a very distant approach as a philosopher to this question. And I would think that it would be disrespectful or inappropriate for me to be some sort of figurehead or authority figure on this sort of question because this question only affects me indirectly and what matters to me is the philosophy. So I would focus on that.
Sam:
Got you. Okay. Fantastic. Trent, over to you.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And what I would say is that, I’m not an authority, there’s only a handful of authorities on anything in the world, but I think I am competent to speak on this issue because it is morally important. I would say that I’m competent to speak on the morality of harms related to race. Even though I might not be a victim of racism, you can speak to issues because you have a rational mind because you are a person. And in fact, the position I’m defending here, it’s only indirectly related to abortion because it would also entail things like, well, could we destroy embryos that we create in a laboratory and grow in an artificial room. You could have a group of men who make an embryo in a laboratory. It’s a human embryo that’s developing in an artificial womb. That would be the exact same, almost the exact same central moral issues related to abortion we have been discussing would rise there as well. And we could continue the argument without making references to gender or sex or things like that. So the question of abortion, I believe is subordinate to the question of personhood. And that is something that any person should certainly have an interest in discussing.
Sam:
Thank you, Daniel. Yeah. Brilliant. Okay. And a related question, to what extent can this debate be characterized as a debate about who gets to control the female body? So this time we’re going to start with Trent.
Trent Horn:
Well, I would say that once again, this is a debate about who is a person and what can we do with those persons? And the fact the matter is yes, human embryos and fetuses, the vast majority of them do reside in the bodies of women. Some of them do not. Some are in IVF facilities, for example, some are in neonatal care units in hospitals, they’re fetus who have been born, but they’re very premature and require medical care to sustain them. So anytime we talk about a debate about what is a person and how do you treat that person? That’s indirectly going to say, if X is a person, then other persons cannot harm X. So when we talk about something, being a person and it being wrong to harm that person, well then naturally, as persons are not allowed to harm other persons without just cause, you can’t kill innocent people. So I think these are very loaded questions to talk about control over female bodies. I do think that’s important. I think sometimes people overlook it and we do need to confront it. But at the same time the central issue is whether a fetus is a person like you or I are, and if they are, then we have to confront that accordingly.
Sam:
Brilliant. Ben over to you.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. So I would insist that this is a loaded question. And so that it assumes that we have come here with an assumption or some way of intending to characterize the control of women’s bodies. And so I won’t put that to rest. Neither of us have assumed that I’m pro-choice arguing a pro-life case, Trent is pro-life arguing pro-choice neither us in either of those positions are assuming that someone is in control of women’s bodies. We both assume that morality is autonomous, that this is something that’s self-governed and that this is an aspect of moral philosophy. And that we can ask these questions and do and moral philosophy. And it’s not about who gets to control whose bodies. I think that’s asking a loaded question, that frames the question in a way that we don’t want to frame it.
Sam:
Right. That’s helpful. Thank you. Okay. Question three from Chris, what books do you recommend that best represent and defend each position? So, Ben, we’re going to start with you again, please.
Ben Watkins:
So if I’m talking about the pro-choice position, I think that David Boonin’s A Defensive Abortion is very good, as well as Nathan Nobis’ Thinking Critically About Abortion. I wish that I had more books to recommend for the pro-life side, because I will admit that most of my pro-life literature comes from articles and papers more so than actual books as that’s kind of a shortcoming on my part, but I would certainly recommend papers by the Don Marquis’ future value paper is obviously a must read for this debate. I would recommend Alexander Pruss’ I Was Once A Fetus and I would also recommend De Silvestro’s article on higher order capacities. I had to cut that argument because of time constraints for this debate, but I think that’s another really great article. And those are the ones that as I’ve read through what literature I have, I was most struck by. I found them to be the most. These are really challenging arguments, really worth looking at taking seriously.
Sam:
That’s helpful. And Trent, you’ve had time to talk to your bookshelf, over to you.
Trent Horn:
Yes, I was looking around. I have a few nearby here. I agree with Ben actually. So on the pro-choice position, this book, A Defensive Abortion by David Boonin, almost 20 years old, actually professor Boonin has written a follow up book called beyond Roe. So he has two arguments in here. One that argues the fetus is not a person. The other abortion is still moral, even if the fetus is a person. His latest book beyond Roe takes part two of this book and expands it and defends abortion, even if the fetus is a person. A few other books that might be related to that. And I agree with Ben there’s other good articles. People who have skillfully defended the pro-choice view, Jeff McMahon, Nathan Nobis, Ronald Dworkins book Life’s dominion is good on the pro-life position. The references Ben gave are great.
Trent Horn:
I have a few books here. Frank Beckwith’s book Defending life is a very good one. Pat Lee’s Unborn Human Life. And then two more, Embryo by Robert George and Christopher Tollefson good book, especially focusing on the question of personhood of embryos. Probably one of the best though I would recommend would be by Dr. Christopher Kaczor philosopher is called The Ethics of Abortion Women’s Rights, Human Life and the Question of Justice, Chris Kaczor. And it’s actually endorsed on the back by Boonin saying, this is one of the best book length defenses of the claim. Abortion is morally impermissible. Philosophy blurbs are always so flourishing. This is a good book on that this is impermissible. See Ethics of Abortion by Kaczor.
Sam:
Amazing. Thank you both for that. Okay. Question four. Does the whole debate boil down to whether there really is a difference between fertilized and unfertilized embryos? Trent, we’re going to be starting with you this time, please.
Trent Horn:
I think it boils down to that for Ben’s position. I think that if we’re talking about, because that was one of my objections to the future, like ours argument, that it becomes counterintuitive. If we say that a sperm or egg has a future like ours and others do not. So for that, it would also come down for a lot of pro-life positions that argue that like Ben’s position human organisms are persons. If you don’t believe there’s a moral difference or even a biological difference between, essentially the term unfertilized embryo, I don’t even know what means, right. An embryo is what comes into existence when sperm and egg come together. It’s not like you can have an embryo that floats out there that is not fertilized. You have an ovum, you can have an egg that will then be fertilized by a sperm. So the question is there a difference between ova and an embryo? And I would say biologically, absolutely there is. But then you’re right. The moral difference that will hinge and we have to figure out what factors make it right or wrong.
Sam:
Okay. Ben, over to you.
Ben Watkins:
Well, Trent already kind of stole my comment cause I was going to say that there is no such thing as an unfertilized embryo, that’s just a contradiction in terms. So what I think he means to say is that does the abortion question, turn on the metaphysical identity claims about the moment of conception. And I don’t think it does. However, I do think that these are considerations that can help us understand it better. Depending on what our views are about, the metaphysics of identity will move us one way or the other on the abortion question. I think that I’ve argued this elsewhere, that the question of abortion turns on the moral status of the fetus. That if it is morally wrong to kill a fetus or not morally wrong to kill a fetus, that’s what’s going into decisively answer the question of abortion. That’s the feature. So I think it’s essentially a moral issue in applied ethics.
Sam:
Okay. That’s helpful, right. The fifth question. So from filing Q for Ben, unless it comes up, doesn’t the possibility of parthenogenesis forgive me if I got that wrong. I.e unfertilized egg development contradict your flow and identity arguments. So we can be starting with Ben, but then obviously we’re going to get Trent with you on this as well. So Ben for you to start.
Ben Watkins:
I’ll just be honest and say that, I don’t know, because I don’t actually know what it would contradict because even if we’re talking about an unfertilized egg development first off, does that have a future like ours, a future of value? And then there’s a question of, am I identical? Am I one and the same entity with this unfertilized egg? Or is someone one and the same entity as this unfertilized egg development? And I don’t have enough information from the question to make that determination. So I don’t know if there’s enough there to drive some sort of contradiction. I’m not entirely clear what the objection might be here. Trent, perhaps you might [crosstalk 01:19:59]
Trent Horn:
I guess idea here is if there is an egg that could develop into a fully grown human being, would it have a ball by itself or with electricity? I’m not familiar.
Ben Watkins:
Spontaneously, I don’t know. Yeah. [crosstalk 01:20:12] There’s not enough in the thought experiment, it isn’t filled in enough for me.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I guess my thought on this is, it might just bring up though. What will be difficult on your view is like identifying what beings have a future like ours and what don’t. I think my view about what beings are persons is a lot easier. We just ask them and they say they’re persons. And so that’s a lot simpler. It gets harder when you have a
Ben Watkins:
It’s cheating.
Trent Horn:
Well no.
Ben Watkins:
I’m just kidding.
Trent Horn:
It gets a little harder with incapacitated persons, but you brought that up, but in general you can just ask them.
Sam:
Brilliant. Okay. Let me stop that there. Okay, great. Over to question six. So your style of argument seems to different seems different in the style of argument related to the conclusion you draw on this issue, do certain methodological approaches inevitably lead to different conclusions. I’m going to be starting with Trent for this one, please.
Trent Horn:
I don’t think so. I think that one could take deductive arguments or going from premises to a conclusion or abductive, which would say we have all this data set and what best explains the data set? I would say in general, I’ve seen most pro-life people tend to make deductive arguments. Ben’s making an abductive one and I think they reach the same conclusion. It may be the case that certain people who make certain arguments have preferences for certain things based on what kind of philosophy they studied, what philosophers they’ve read or studied under. So I don’t know if there’s a direct connection between the kinds of arguments you prefer and the conclusions, I would say that these are tools, it’d be like saying, does someone who use manual tools are more likely to make certain kinds of objects than people with power tools. A lot of times they make the same things, but you’ll notice fine differences between them. I don’t know if that analogy helps.
Ben Watkins:
I think that analogy is super useful. So again, I’m not entirely clear. So the first sentence seems like a statement, but it’s got a question mark. So when it says your style of argument seems different in the style of argument related to the conclusions you draw on this issue, I’m not entirely sure what that means. So I’ll give you what I think it means. The style in philosophy is largely drawn between the analytic and the continental tradition. Now will these traditions inevitably give rise of different conclusions? No, I think they will often agree. And I think that’s a good thing when different methodologies converge on the same answer, the methodology or the tradition I was working in for this is one in analytic philosophy. So I was trying to be as clear in the concepts and claims that I made as well as rigorous in the arguments that I gave.
Sam:
That’s helpful. Thank you. Okay. Next question. Given the reality that most folks don’t read philosophy books, what is a way to sway the culture at large to one position or the other? We can be starting with you again, Ben, please.
Ben Watkins:
Democracy. So I think that out of the end of the day, it’s not that these arguments aren’t important, it’s not that discussing them and studying them is not important to the end of the day that what’s really going to change society is going out and voting to informing yourself on these issues and showing up really that’s the way that it’s going to swing. Now philosophy influences culture in other ways too. But for me, what I want to encourage people to do is to get as good of an understanding as they can of this very big question, come to their own conclusions and to show up to vote.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. What I would say is talking about the issue, what we’re doing here, having dialogue, having debate. In this debate, I’m taking on the pro-choice persona. So I will continue it to say that I would be very frustrated with other pro-choice individuals who refuse to do debates, refuse to do dialogues. There are many pro-choice individuals who will say that this issue’s just not up for debate. That’s not how you handle a moral issue that divides large numbers of people. You should be able to bring your arguments to the table and address it with one another. And that’s more of what we need to do. So even though we read philosophy books, we can talk with each other and see what we think about the issues.
Sam:
Amazing. Okay. Can you have an abortion? Sorry. Can you have an anti-abortion law that doesn’t control women’s bodies. So Trent we’re going to be starting with you for this one.
Trent Horn:
Once again, this is the loaded term here. Like I think some people would argue for abortion based on a brute literally a brute fact or right by power. That just doesn’t matter if this is a person, women can do what they want with their bodies. That makes absolutely no sense to me. If I invite a person into my home, let’s say a toddler, I couldn’t then just kill him or throw him out in a snowstorm because I don’t want to care for him anymore. Persons have obligations to one another. This idea and the fact that some persons live in the bodies of other persons, doesn’t change that. So could you have an anti-abortion law that? Here’s the thing that’d be like saying, can you have a law that doesn’t control bodies only if it’s a law that has only something to do with a thought crime. Like don’t think this, which of course you can’t enforce. So all laws control our bodies. They say we can’t type fraudulent things. My fist can’t go into somebody’s face. If you’re going to have a law against violence, committed bodily violence, the laws are going to control people’s bodies that in and of itself is not a bad thing. The question is, is the control justified? And my position is it wouldn’t be if the fetus is not a person.
Sam:
Real. Ben over to you.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. So I would again say that this kind of has some loaded language in it. So if there is an anti-abortion law, that law is not controlling women’s bodies any more than seatbelt laws are controlling women’s bodies. What’s going on there is that the state through legislation, which is justified through something like a just social contract restricts the choices that people can make. Again, it’s not an objection to seatbelt laws to say, well who’s controlling my body who has the right here to control my body. That’s not the case at all. What’s been happening is that we have the freedom to make choices. But if we make certain choices, the state is going to respond in certain ways to deter people from making those choices, your freedom is being restricted. Your body’s not being controlled. You still have autonomy and you still have freedom. And so I think framing questions in this way is just unhelpful. It’s got so much ambiguity and well abortion’s just murdering innocent babies. That’s not helpful because it’s not clear. Murder is a thick concept, babies is an ambiguous term, intentionality, innocent implies some sort of blame worthiness. The concepts are too ambiguous for them to be useful in such a heated discussion.
Sam:
Okay. That’s really helpful. Okay. So we’re going to do one more question. I think. So how is language related to the debate on abortion, emotive pro-life versus objective pro-choice language. Ben, we’re going to start with you please.
Ben Watkins:
So I reject the characterization that pro-life is emotive and pro-choice uses objective language. So the case that I gave tonight would be an objective case. It would say that you have a pro tanto moral reason not to kill someone with a right to life. That’s not an emotive statement. That is a statement that is meant to be objectively true in the sense that the wrong making property of some acts is that you kill an individual with a future like ours. So you can cast a pro-life term in objective terms or emotive terms, just like you can cast a pro-choice position in emotive or objective terms. I don’t think one necessarily implies that pro-life doesn’t imply motivism pro-choice doesn’t apply objectivism. You can cast either case in either terms.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I would say that both of those terms are just the nicest terms you can use. And I think everybody should get to use the terms they want to use. So either they’re both emotive or they’re both objective, it’s not one or the other, both of them are sufficiently vague enough. I would be fine with pro-legal abortion and anti-legal abortion, or pro-abortion and anti-abortion. I’ll also say that I think some pro-choice advocates are inconsistent here that they’ll say pro-life advocates rely on emotions. They’ll describe abortion, they’ll show graphic abortion images, and that they’re the objective ones, but then they turn around and they’ll say, well, abortion is justified in the case of a 12 year old girl who has been raped by her father and is going to die in pregnancy. And so I feel like these same individuals will derive pro-lifers for emotive things, but then they will craft these hypothetical cases to defend abortion that are just as if not more emotional. So I would it’s like Dragnet, just the facts man. Let’s look at the empirical facts, the moral facts and reach a solid conclusion.
Sam:
Bro, thank you for that Trent. Okay, so that’s the end of our kind of quick question of fire around. So essentially just for the viewers live at the moment and for the listeners later on, essentially we’ve got closing statements about to come up and then we’re going to have a 10 minute debrief where both Trent and Ben kind of switch back to their sort of standard usual everyday positions. And then we’re going to have a final sort of question and answer round where we’re going to spend a little bit more time from each of them on the questions. We’ve got five more questions ready to line up. So I just kind of want to make sure our live viewers know that and have a real think about a good question. You could ask both Trent and Ben to get the best from them. Cause this is a really rare opportunity to ask these two incredible people, their views on stuff. So have a think and put the best question you can into the chat for us. Okay. So we’re going to move to closing statements, Ben we’re going to start with you if that’s okay. So let me know when you’re ready. You’ve got five minutes. We’ll go from there.
Ben Watkins:
I’m ready to go. Let me start my closing by again, thanking Sam and the When Belief Dies team for putting together this debate. And thank you Trent for again, agreeing to have another great discussion with me, I’ll be brief and quickly recap my case. First I argued pro-life or what I also called Premise B has a higher prior probability than its negation or what I call pro-choice because it is simpler. Second I argued pro-life is simpler because it is both more modest and more coherent. Pro-life is more modest than pro-choice because it entails certain moral assumptions that pro-choice does not without making additional claims, such a claim is that there’s a pro tanto reason not to kill either you or me. I also claim that pro-life is more coherent than pro-choice given certain moral and metaphysical assumptions. I argued for at least three such moral and metaphysical assumptions.
Ben Watkins:
The first was Don Marquis’s first future like ours argument, which claimed we have a pro tanto reason against killing anyone with a future like ours. The second argument I gave was from Alexander Pruss. I argued, I am one and the same entity as a prenatal human we call fee. So fee has all of the same essential properties that I do. I have a right to life essential. So it follows, I also had a right to life when I was a prenatal human. Since there is no morally relevant differences between me or any other human, it follows. We have a pro tanto reason not to kill any human. My final argument, I called fail conservative. I argued a plausible epistemic principle given moral uncertainty. If there is a non-negligible chance, all humans have a future like ours, then we should fail, conservative and assume we have a pro tanto reason not to kill nearly any human, even a prenatal human. To do otherwise would be morally reckless in similar way it would be morally reckless to demolish a building without being certain it was clear to personnel. I called this cumulative case, probable pro-life and I believe it might be a rebutting defeater for pro-choice. I want to use my final closing comments to draw our attention to some features of my pro-life case and how it differs from pro-life cases you might find in the wild. First, my entire case is secular. At no point, do I refer to a religious tradition, theological claim, or divine authority. Additionally, none of my claims are intention with feminist principles, naturalistic worldviews, or humanist ethics, such considerations are insufficient to satisfactorily resolve the question of abortion on either side. The lesson I want people to walk away with is that the question of abortion is a difficult question of applied ethics, and it will require nothing less than for us to do moral philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology if we want to really understand this question and be justified in our beliefs about it. The next thing I want to note is that my case is formulated within the tradition of analytic philosophy. So I lean heavily on the rigor of argument and the clarity of concepts as tools for discovering deeper truths. I did not flash gruesome photos of abortion procedures nor did my rhetoric ever characterize abortion in graphic detail, nor did I use morally ambiguous concepts, such as murdering innocent babies. I want to close with a remark about the nature of arguments and humility. It’s important to remember that arguments are tools and not weapons. They are not meant to defeat political opponents nor to boost our own egos, because of the abstract nature of argument, they can be divorced from the very real phenomenology that women experience surrounding the question of abortion. Women are a marginalized in group and I’m not a woman.
Ben Watkins:
The best I can hope to do is help one or two people get more clear about the moral philosophy surrounding this question. It would be inappropriate for me to be a spokesman or figurehead for either side because the decision to induce an abortion only indirectly affects me an UN-marginalized member of an out group while it directly affects women, a marginalized member of an in group. With Roe V Wade staring down the possibility of being overturned and along with it, federal protection for a woman’s right to induce an abortion tense discussions are likely to ensue in the coming weeks. I want to take this opportunity to invite thoughtful people on both sides, to commit themselves, to understanding the arguments on both sides and recognizing our own limits so we can communicate better with each other, respectively, substantively, and with humility. Thank you for your attention and cheers.
Sam:
Amazing. Thank you very much, Ben. Trent, over to you soon as you’re ready. Let me know, I’ll hit start.
Ben Watkins:
Sure. Go right ahead. Well, I definitely want to thank Ben for taking part of this debate and I think one thing you might find interesting, the two things you find interesting. Number one, we’re even talking about this at all in precise, thoughtful terms, many people don’t do that. So I would echo Ben’s call to say, more people need to do that. This issue has not gone away. It will not go away. It is very important because based on my position, if the fetus is a person, then abortion is a tremendous evil that one ought to oppose, and it is not misogynistic. It is not bigoted to do that. It is the thing, any sane, rational person ought to do. And as I said throughout our exchanges merely the right to control one’s body or anything like that does not entail we can mistreat other persons, especially persons who 99% of the time in pregnancy, they are there through the voluntary actions of other persons.
Ben Watkins:
Being a person means you not only have rights. You also have duties. You have duties to non persons like not to be cruel to animals and duties to other persons as well. So that means the question really hinges on what are human embryos and human fetuses, are they persons or not? Because that will really change the kind of duties that we have towards them. And in my case, and I think it’s interesting for you to see that Ben had made a case very different from other pro-lifers because he wants to put forward the strongest argument. And I’ve made a case that I think is very different from other pro-choicers because I don’t care about the rhetoric here.
Ben Watkins:
I want to have an argument that I believe at the end of the day is at the very least consistent. That when we look at persons, if we just simply say fetuses are persons when they’re viable or at 12 weeks or at five weeks or at birth, when they’ve changed the location, this is just arbitrary. It’s not philosophically defensible. Instead, my position at time and time again has said, what is a person? We see persons all around us and we can then make a judgment call. Understanding persons, have particular abilities, rational abilities. Beings that do not have those abilities, different beings, even beings we’re emotionally attached to. If they don’t have those abilities, they are not persons. And so the way we treat them will be dramatically different and that can justify the position of abortion. That doesn’t mean, of course, it’s not a hard decision for people who are.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:39:04]
Trent Horn:
…Position of abortion. That doesn’t mean it’s not a hard decision for people who are involved in it, but it does change it once we answer that question. That would be my encouragement for those who are watching this debate. Read a book, or at least go on the internet and read something. I mean, the best books, you saw them right here: David Boonin, “In Defense of Abortion”; Chris Kaczor, “The Ethics of Abortion”… Lots of great articles online that you can read; Alex Press’, “I Was A Fetus”, that Ben mentioned is a great one to start there… Jeff McMahan on the pro-choice side.
Trent Horn:
I would just encourage our listeners that the issue of abortion is not about “Does it benefit this person, does it not benefit that person?” It’s not about these secondary issues. We have to answer the question, “What is an embryo, what is a fetus, is it a person?” I would encourage all of our listeners to go out and at least have a definition of a person that you can jibe with and see if it naturally entails, or does not include, embryos or fetuses, and just be consistent and be thoughtful on these issues.
Sam:
Amazing. Thank you, Trenton. That was fantastic. Okay, so we have 10 minutes now where essentially… And I’m happy to do it either way. I can give you both five minutes and you can come out of character and begin to talk about why you’re arguing the way you did, what you learned in this conversation… Or I’m very happy for there that should be an open conversation…
Trent Horn:
I think it can be low key and open.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. Let’s do open. I’m so glad we’re on the same page with that, Trenton. Let’s not do timed.
Trent Horn:
Let’s take my hat off. Now. It’s fun.
Sam:
All right, gents. Well, go for it. 10 minutes, essentially, for you guys to have a back and forth and talk about why you’re arguing the way you did and what you learned from this conversation.
Ben Watkins:
I’ll go ahead. I’ll kick us off. I was admittedly a little surprised that you did not use arguments from Judith Jarvis Thompson… The bodily… Even if we can see that a fetus has a right to life, that it doesn’t necessarily have the right to use someone else’s body. Was that a strategic choice, because I know fitting in a lot of arguments in 10 minutes is tough.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I wanted to have a focus case, and it is hard because I know… It’s interesting, you had multiple reinforcing arguments. And I picked more of what I thought was a single shot to build up into, and there’s different merits to it. And it’s hard. It’s like, “What do we think are the strongest positions on the other side?” I wanted to be fair in this. I’m not going to come here with just an easy, dopey-dopey pro-choice position, that wouldn’t be fun. I picked a position that I think is very difficult to refute because of it’s consistency. And I would call that “The Singer-Tully-Warren Thesis”, which focuses on personhood. And so I wanted to go with that argument and I thought it would also be interesting, going with that argument, to take their criticisms of “The Thompson Violinist Argument.”
Trent Horn:
Because Tully actually, in his book … it’s around here somewhere… He basically says, “Well, yeah you don’t have rights to others, but if I…” Tully basically says, “If I’m responsible”… He uses an example, “If I’m responsible for destroying someone’s food supply, then I could owe them compensation.” I think “The Thompson Argument” is strongest in the least number of cases, like in non-voluntary pregnancies, but when you include the fact that you engage in an act that creates a person, I do think it’s weakened a lot.
Ben Watkins:
Got you. In your opinion, is the strongest argument on the pro-choice side in the interest of being fair because I think that the Don Marquis’ “The Future Like Ours”, “The Flow Argument”, is the strongest on the pro. What do you think is the… Because there’s multiple arguments on the pro-choice side.
Trent Horn:
The pro choice… I still would say that I think the strongest…
Ben Watkins:
Let’s do pro-life, too.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I’ll do both. As I said before I think the strongest ones on the pro-choice side are the ones that have the fewest inconsistencies. Many of them, they begin to fall apart because they’re ad-hoc or arbitrary. I think that “The Tully-Singer-Warren Argument” of personhood has the fewest inconsistencies. It’s much harder to pin down. On the pro-life side, I do see… I believe “The Future Like Ours” argument is good at reinforcing the general wrongness of many killings in abortion. I see this as supplementary, but not a main argument, because there’s many other cases it wouldn’t fall under, but I think, as our discussion showed, I do think what would be called, “Essential Property views” or “Identity arguments”… Beckwith calls it “The Substance View” of the human person.
Trent Horn:
I think those are the strongest, because when we start talking about “future Like Ours”, you end up getting to metaphysical questions of identity… I think Marquis tries to do “Future Like Ours” to get around… Let’s not talk about persons, let’s not talk about metaphysical identity, but you end up getting there anyways when you try to figure out what beings have a future like ours and stuff like that. I do think that like I call “The Kaczor-Beckwith-Lee Thesis” is probably the strongest that I would think, though Marquis is very strong in it’s own right.
Ben Watkins:
I would say, for the pro-choice side, I would agree that “The Tully-Singer Warren Thesis” of challenging the idea of a fetus being a person, and really the metaphysics of what is a person, and the notion of personal identity that I emphasized a lot. So I think that the moral status of the fetus is super important. And I think that the metaphysics of identity is super important. So I think those strongest arguments on the pro-choice side come from somehow denying that a fetus is a person or denying that I was once a fetus.
Trent Horn:
You don’t think the “Bodily Autonomy argument” is as strong?
Ben Watkins:
I do. Don’t get me wrong. But so I think that the questions surrounding personhood are ones that I’m more familiar with, so that might be why I lean to them, but I also find them very powerful. I also… Don’t get me wrong, I find Judith Jarvis Thompson’s arguments persuasive as well, but in a different kind… So for me, once we’re in Judith Jarvis Thompson’s arguments, we’ve conceded that a fetus is a person with a right to life. It’s the next step in the conversation. Even if you concede this…
Trent Horn:
Right.
Ben Watkins:
These other things seem to fall… But then I think you just get into a war of competing intuitions. A lot of the questions I asked you were thought experiments that mirror Judith Jarvis Thompson, but from the pro-life camp, and so then it becomes a war of moral intuitions. That becomes pretty tough [crosstalk 01:46:19].
Trent Horn:
Well, what gets hard with these, which I found interesting in my study is about personhood. We’ll try to come up with these thought experiments about personhood and Tully’s on, a cat with the serum. And I think it could become very difficult. My favorite by far is there’s a 2008 paper Impermissibility of Abortion, 2008 by Nicole Houston or Rick Kriegel I think, let me see if I can find it here, but because they talk about, oh, passive and active potentiality. Oh I know Kaiser quotes it in here and Hauston and Kriegel 2008. So they give this thought experiment. I don’t know, suppose many years from now a space elevator is installed between earth and Mars and an oyster finds its way to the elevator. At this point, the normal course of events should lead to the oyster, becoming conscious in the absence of intervention.
Trent Horn:
The oyster on the elevator is potentially conscious in the sense fetuses and neonates or infants are. And it’s so to speak in route to consciousness yet it still seems intuitively permissible to kill the oyster, to which Kaiser… I love Kaiser’s reply. It is difficult to take such a preposterous example seriously, rather than laugh and say, come on, do you really think that killing a newborn baby is like killing an oyster that could become conscious by taking a space elevator to Mars. So you’re right. We are competing intuitions. We always have to be careful to pick examples, once it gets too bizarre, it’s like they’re not even workable anymore.
Ben Watkins:
The dissimilarities in the analogy becomes so extreme and exaggerated that it becomes difficult to isolate really the moral intuitions and be clear. Everything seems to be jumbled up. And it’s this web of intuitions that you didn’t have to go and parse out.
Trent Horn:
Well I guess, I didn’t know, Sam, if you had any other questions for us to learn or people had questions to learn more what…
Ben Watkins:
I think there was something like five questions to be rapidly thrown at us or something.
Trent Horn:
That was for when we were in character. I think.
Ben Watkins:
You’re right.
Sam:
So we can start that now if you want, that’s actually fine.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah.
Ben Watkins:
Let’s do that.
Sam:
Okay. Sweet. All right, let’s go for it. So the first question is, and we’re going to be starting with Ben, just to see your weapon, so is the definition of person or human, an arbitrary definition that can just be changed to justify your position?
Ben Watkins:
I don’t think so. So first off, I think person is a moral descriptor and I think human is a biological descriptor. So there are terms that come from two different domains, but they can both be relevant to this discussion. And so one of my aims for this discussion was to avoid the concept or category of person, to use my entire argument so that nothing turns on the question. We can assume it is a person or you can assume it’s not a person. And so you can call it an individual. You can call it an organism. You can call it a human, you can call it a person. It should not matter at that point. So if we’re to say, well, what if we just have an arbitrary definition. Arbitrary definitions, don’t really get us anywhere. I’m saying that whatever that individual is had a right to life. And so there shouldn’t be any shenanigans where I have defined a right to life into existence. I want to avoid that move as much as possible.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I thought that was really neat in Ben’s case. Because a lot of pro-lifers will just use these terms and they’ll go into metaphysics and persons though, I think, and I find this a lot when I argue the position, especially when I’m engaging regular people, I sometimes just make an inference, the best explanation case to say, well, I’ll just say, look, you and I, we know you and I are persons. We know that infants are persons. We know that rats are not persons. And then I’ll just say, let’s just start with these facts. We both all seem to agree on what view is best going to explain all of these facts. So sometimes that might be a best at explanatory powers explanation to go at this. So that’s why I think that if you look at it in that way, it become… And I think that’s why it’s so powerful.
Trent Horn:
You heard people like Peter Singer who say… Singer says, look, there’s really no morally relevant difference between a fetus shortly before birth and an infant shortly after. And he says pro-lifers are right about one thing. There’s no difference between a fetus… Paraphrasing singer. No difference between a fetus before and after birth, where pro-lifers are wrong singer roughly says is they believe we ought to treat the fetus like an infant.
Trent Horn:
Whereas I say, we ought to treat the infant like a fetus. So yeah, you can make arbitrary definitions. And I think it is arbitrary if you make a dividing line like birth or viability, but you can also start at the ground floor and just say, well, a person is just someone with the immediate capacity for personal actions, though and I might explain this more in a follow up to this debate. I don’t believe that is a sufficient definition. I think Ben actually made a good little rejoinder in there when he said fetus and embryos, are persons because being a person is having the capacity to act in personal ways, even if it’s not immediate, but that gets us further down the line.
Sam:
I appreciate that. Okay. [inaudible 01:51:58] let’s go to the question number two. So super chat. Thank you [inaudible 01:52:03] appreciate it. Trent, can you go into more detail about giving a serum to a cat to give it rational abilities? How would you as a pro-lifer respond to it?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well I would say here that these objections about what is and isn’t a person, sometimes Tully and others will bring these examples up, to try to say that species membership is not morally relevant or I should say, sorry, membership of a kind is not morally relevant. And I think it is, things like species membership for us to make moral determinations. I think both Ben and I would agree. We have to focus on what will allow an individual or an entity to flourish. And in order to judge whether an entity is flourishing or not, we have to know what its capacities are. So for example, if I have a drug that can allow a cat to read, but I don’t give the cat that drug, the cat is still flourishing, like every other cat. But if I have a child and I have a child who’s illiterate and I could give it a serum to help it to read, I would say that I’m actually harming that child because the nature of a human being it’s ordered towards that certain rational end.
Trent Horn:
And so it would be wrong to withhold in that case, based on its particular end, that’s justified versus a cat, for example. So I would say in those different cases, there is a total difference between saying, oh, well, if I don’t give the cat, the serum, no rational being exists. And if I abort the fetus, no rational being exists. One is preventing a substantial change from occurring. And I would say in general, that’s not wrong. That’s fine. The other is actively interrupting the development of a person who does exist now, and that will be morally wrong and they’re not on par the best I could sift that up.
Sam:
That’s great. Ben, any thoughts reflections on this?
Ben Watkins:
So my inner contien would want to say that if we were able to develop a serum that gave a cat rational abilities, then that cat would be more… It would be morally relevant in a way that it wasn’t before. It might very well be a moral agent instead of just merely a moral patient. And I would think that there could be wrong acts that involved this cat, that wouldn’t be wrong if this cat hadn’t taken that serum. I don’t know if that’s a challenge to my pro-choice view or not, but that’s how I’d cash it out.
Trent Horn:
And I would say in general, this sounds a horrible idea. You want to make cats smarter? They already think they’re smarter than us.
Ben Watkins:
I have five cats, so I’m going to have to agree with Trent on this. I don’t think I would want to make them smarter.
Sam:
That’s the dedication to the [inaudible 01:55:10].
Ben Watkins:
Oh yeah.
Sam:
Okay, cool. Next question. Can persons have conflicting rights, Ben we’ll start with you for this one.
Ben Watkins:
Absolutely. So one of my conclusions for my pro-life case was that we had pro tanto reasons not to kill certain people. And so a Pro Tanto reason is a real reason. It’s a reason that we have, but it can be overridden by another reason that might be weightier. So we have what I would call Pro Tanto obligations. So there are obligations that we have to one another, but those obligations can come into conflict with each other.
Ben Watkins:
And that we should act on the weightier reason. So to give an example, I might make a promise to have lunch with my mother, but then I get a call from my wife who says I’ve been in a car wreck and I need you to come help me right now. I might break my promise to my mother to eat her lunch. I might have a duty to have lunch with my mother like I promised her, but I also have this duty to take care of my wife, especially if she’s injured especially in a severe way. My duty to my wife is going to be greater than the duty I had to my mother. Certainly these rights have come into conflict. And so you would do the one that you have the most pro Tanto reason to do. Pro Tanto being the Latin for to a certain extent.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And I would agree that people’s rights can come into conflict in for the same reasons. So a few examples, the right to life and the right to private property could come into conflict. In Catholic teaching, the right to private property is not absolute. So there’s a thing called the universal destination of goods. So in general, I couldn’t go to a store and steal something, just because I want it. I would violate the merchants right to private property. But if there was a hurricane or a disaster and I got people who need medical care immediately and the store is closed and I can’t access it. Even Aquinas says this, that the right to life in this case would override the right to private property. So some people might say, well, the right to control one’s body.
Trent Horn:
How does that relate then to the right to life? And so that’s why I would follow people like Maryanne Warren and others who would say, well, no, the right to life certainly would outweigh the right to control one’s body. Now what [inaudible 01:57:55] and others and Thompson would say is that the right to life does not entail a right to be kept alive. And that’s where the conflict is. But I truly believe that if we grant the fetus as a person, I think then… My follow up question is if the fetus is a person, what does it have a right to as a person? What does the fetus have a right to do now that it is a person? If it was not a person, what does that mean? And if you can’t say, well, it has a right to X.
Trent Horn:
If you can’t say now the fetus is a person. So it gets to do X. If it has a right to nothing, I think we’re calling it a person, a name only. That’s why I’m skeptical of these bodily autonomy arguments. I think that sometimes they grant the fetus is a person in name only, but then don’t recognize that this persons, Beckwith summarizes this well in his book, Defending Life. Saying that persons are not islands amongst each other, our obligations are not derived in volunteerism that we just get to decide who we’re obligated to. Persons have interconnected obligations to one another, even if they don’t want them. And so I think that that hampers, the bodily autonomy argument, the nature of personhood with these conflicts.
Sam:
Got you. Thank you for that. Okay. Daniel, we match a reason. Joe Schmidt, legends. Good have here buddy’s.
Trent Horn:
What’s up Joe.
Ben Watkins:
Cheers to Joe.
Sam:
Cheers to Joe. Amen.
Trent Horn:
He’s done one of these before, too. Actually people should go watch. He did one with Randall Rouser. A devil’s Advocate [crosstalk 01:59:33].
Sam:
Great channel. [crosstalk 01:59:36] final question. Final question. Okay, gents. So what is the relationship between the advocate and what is good for us? Sorry. What is the relationship between what we advocate and what is good for us? Surely being pro something choice or life is to suggest it enhances overall wellbeing. So we’re going to start with Trent and then finish with Ben, if that’s okay.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. What I would say is that depends on your particular philosophical view of good and bad of what constitutes particular good goods. So natural law theory is cashed out in different ways like classical natural law theory would say that basically the highest good as human beings is God and reason orders us towards that, new natural law theory would also recognize that, but it would also recognize other basic goods, things that are just good and to act again… It is always wrong to act against them, life friendship, for example, these things they are always good. And we ought not act against them. So we should advocate for that which is good. It’s an ancient maxim anyone could follow, do good and avoid evil the first lesson of morality
Sam:
Ben, over to you.
Ben Watkins:
Yeah. So what we advocate for is our motivations. It’s a subjective feature of us. What is good for us? I would argue is objective. And it’s normative. It can’t be cashed out in purely non-normative terms like our motivations can be. We’re going to have to make use of the concept of a reason and an appeal to things like principals. And so surely being pro something is to suggest that it enhances overall wellbeing. What I would want to say is that whatever the question to abortion ends up being, it’s going to have to be consistent with the idea that acting in these ways will make things go impartially best. So what does impartial best nest look like in each scenario? And so I would say that impartially best in the pro-life camp looks like preventing the unjustified killing of individuals with a right to life. Whereas the pro-choice position is going to see impartially best as not unjustly, limiting the freedoms of women to choose how to control, not only their bodies, but their futures. So that’s what it would broadly look like. I hope that answers that question.
Sam:
It’s good. I think we might actually have a final question. We’re meant to do five. We only had four. This is technically the fifth one, and it’s from the one and only [inaudible 02:02:42] theology. So there we go. Okay. Question. What is Trent’s opinion on David Ortberg’s famous paper, why abortion isn’t important where he argues there are bigger metaphysical issues than abortion is a symptom of ?
Trent Horn:
Yes. I was actually reading that paper not too long ago and I think it’s great. Well, I think it’s good. No, it’s interesting. I have seen other people Catholics or pro-life people who claim to be pro-life, who have claimed abortion is not important and I’ve really disliked their takes as you can imagine, Ortberg is a very good philosopher, he has a great book on the metaphysics of good and evil that I would highly recommend. And I think that this is right, this goes back to… And it’s something I want to research in the future. Ben and I were chatting about this in Houston before our debate. And I said to him, I said, Ben, what I find interesting. It’s like, it’s hard to get atheist to agree on anything. They can’t even agree on what atheism is. It’s atheism like hurting cats.
Ben Watkins:
You didn’t have to bring up that embarrassing point.
Trent Horn:
I think it becomes… That’s hard. But when I look at religious and nonreligious groups and their views on abortion, atheists are more United in their support of abortion than any other group. So even among Catholics and Christians and Protestants, 87%, evangelicals, you can find a significant number of people who believe abortion is not imoral. And that’s even with a magisterium and people teaching you and saying, here’s what you ought to believe. So it’s amazing to me that all these people who happen to not believe in God also don’t see anything… Have this very in a form moral position. Now that could be a coincidence. It could be tribalism. It could just be, we all happen to be politically liberal and we all stick together. It could be a crude or reason, or it could be that your fundamental metaphysical views about what reality consists of.
Trent Horn:
Is it merely material? Is there something be beyond the material? Are humans collections of mental states, are they organisms? It is what the body does fundamentally important. Those fundamental metaphysical questions. I do believe even people who don’t think about them have an implicit idea of them and that’s going to color because in ethics, we have meta ethics, what is good? What is evil? What is right? What is wrong? We have ethical theories like consequentialism virtue theory. And then we have applied ethics. What do you do about abortion? What do you do about euthanasia? I think a lot of people just start with applied ethics and they don’t think it through very well, good people should try to figure out ethical theories and the philosopher go right back to meta ethics, well, where do I start? And where you start is going to color where you end up. So I think that point of Ortberg’s paper is well taken.
Ben Watkins:
So I certainly remember the conversation that Trent and I had in Houston where he mentioned to me, it’s this observation that most atheists are pro-choice. And one of the things that it drew my attention to was how under-representative this secular pro-life community is in skeptic circles. So one of the aims that I wanted to try to, as far as raising the level of discourse in this conversation is to give more of a platform to the secular pro-life movement too. Because I suspect that the observation is caused by politic tribalism. I think that there’s a large pro-life movement and the reaction to that, the anti-religion, the anti-theist, Anti-God type reactionary react to that. And that’s why you see so much uniform, but then again, I’m just speculating. I don’t have any empirical data to back that up.
Trent Horn:
That’s why I said someone should do work on it. It’s a very interesting [crosstalk 02:06:47].
Ben Watkins:
It’s an interesting, yeah. It’s an interesting observation. I can only speculate about it, but it definitely drew my attention. I was secular pro-life needs a spot at the table because I think as my argument showed tonight, there is a hill for pro-choice defenders to climb here that there are plausible secular naturalistic feminist compatible principles that we can appeal to that seem to imply that it’s morally wrong.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. What’s weird Ben is… And you can understand this because you guys always try to be thoughtful, Real Atheology. And most people aren’t whether they’re atheist or not unfortunately. I mean it’s interesting an online discourse, it’s almost like atheists will say atheism is just a lack of belief. You can’t say anything else about us. And then if you are an atheist who claims to be pro-life or holding a traditionally religious moral opinion for secular reasons, you’re a crypto-theist. You’re almost like there’s these hidden dogmas of [crosstalk 02:07:49].
Ben Watkins:
I lack a belief in a right to continued existence. No.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I think it’d be good if you’re a free thinker, it’s like, Hey there… Because my favorite example of this actually is Christopher Hitchens was asked about this once. So atheist, Christopher Hitchens about abortion. And he said, roughly, there are things in religion that are patently silly that you can just dismiss the pro-life view, that it’s wrong to kill an unborn human is not one of them. That’s a serious view that people could hold. And I think for me, if atheist can at least say, huh, that’s a serious position. I would be happy that at least start there and go from there.
Ben Watkins:
I’m not confident. The majority of my atheist peers would concede that point. But I’m trying.
Trent Horn:
Well both of us have to evangelize my friend, so it goes on.
Ben Watkins:
There you go.
Sam:
Oh, I think we lost him. Yeah. I don’t know why.
Trent Horn:
So much for a right to continued virtual existence.
Sam:
Yeah. That’s gone.
Trent Horn:
Well, thank you for having both of us.
Sam:
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I was going to give both you a chance to just let people know where they can find you essentially. And I think we have him back.
Ben Watkins:
Not sure what happened. I was, oh, I guess I said something and they kicked me out.
Sam:
You were dumb. No, I don’t know what happened either. Sorry about that. So anyway, I was just trying to say, basically I want to give both you the chance just to let people know where they can find your work. They can go and get involved with more of the stuff you’re doing. So let’s start with Trent. Trent, where can people find you and learn more about what you’re doing?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I would just say they could go to my podcast, the council of Trent, C-O-U-N-S-E-L council of Trent on YouTube, Apple iTunes, Google play. So just search council of Trent, you can support us @trentonpodcast.com and you can find a lot of my work at catholic.com, which is the website of Catholic answers.
Sam:
Amazing, Ben where can people find you mate?
Ben Watkins:
So my name’s Ben Watkins and I am one of the hosts of Real Atheology of philosophy of religion podcast, where we explore questions in the philosophy of religion from non theistic perspectives and see what we can make the philosophy of religion look like after we rejected something like perfect being theism.
Sam:
Amazing. Yeah. Trent, Ben, it’s been so good having you on the podcast and on the youth channel today. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, I appreciate it.
Ben Watkins:
Thanks for having me.
Sam:
Thanks it’s been fun.
Trent Horn:
Hey guys, thank you so much for watching. Don’t forget to check out the next episode here on the channel, where I break down the arguments that I use in this debate and show you why I don’t think they actually work. And that way you can get the full debrief from that. Be sure to do that. And of course go check out when belief dies there are really great podcast, be sure to go check them out as well. And of course, to support us @trenthornpodcast.com. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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