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exactly

If an embryo is morally equivalent to you and I, then should I be picturing a toddler dying when I think of a fertilized egg not implanting in the uterus and passing out of the body? Also, you said this - “ Clearly society should prioritize preventing assaults over preventing injury-causing accidents.” I do t think this is necessarily obvious. If roughly one out of every five people were dying of some sort of accident I think that would be a huge priority that would require the restructuring of society on a significant scale - in fact, we saw this just happen with COVID. We can absolutely argue about whether the lockdowns were necessary with how contagious COVID was eventually discovered to be,, but I think we’d all agree that if there were a pandemic going around that we knew killed (say) 25% of the people it infected and had a 2-week incubation period where it was super contagious we would probably prioritize getting a handle on the pandemic over stopping assaults, and we’d probably be right to do so.

W.r.t. point 2, the scenario can be further revised to the following: Imagine that no fires have been started yet. But you have been given the foreknowledge that a lightning strike will cause a fire in the left building with a child, and at the same time, the biological mother of the embryos will start an arson fire in the right building with 100 embryos. You have been given a button to stop one of the two fires from occuring, but you are unable to stop both fires. Given this scenario, which fire would you choose to stop. Also, given that you reject the "normal intuition" response for BCR, consider this additional revision. The left building has 100 children, while the right building has 99 embryos. Does this change your choice - i.e. does BCR outweigh preventing unjust killing from occuring here; are there any other ratios that might change your decision?

​@@ecta9604I don't think you should necessarily picture toddlers dying anymore than you should picture middle-aged men dying. It's better to accurately picture what is actually happening. But yes, a human zygote, blastocyst or embryo dying due to natural causes is a tragedy and I hope medical advances will solve this problem, similar to how infant mortality has been reduced. I don't think we disagree about whether one instance of assault injuring one person is more serious than one accident inflicting similar injuries on another person. I certainly agree that if people are dying at a massive scale from accidents or a disease, then, assuming we can do something about it, dealing with non-lethal assaults is a much lower priority. But the fact that you invoke the specter of mass death indicates that you think that unjust violence is normally more serious than accidents.

​@@shadowc5Good question! I think the answer depends on if all I can do is prevent deaths or if stopping the arsonist mother also involves bringing her to justice for her (attempted) crimes. If it's the former, I think saving 100 born children is somewhat better than saving 99 embryos. If it's the latter, then I think that the tragic loss of one extra life could be outweighed by bringing a homicidal arsonist to justice. That said, I think saving lives is very important, so my answer would probably change if the ratio was 100/90. I hope that clarifies things.

@@Paradoxarn.​​⁠well, I’m asking about the toddler because I want to know if the death of a fertilized egg is morally equivalent to the death of something like you or I, and I’m invoking mass death because we are absolutely going through a mass death event if prenatal humans - especially very young ones - are as morally valuable as you and I. If I believed that a fertilized egg was morally equivalent to a toddler I wouldn’t be focusing on abortion in the same way that I wouldn’t be focusing on assaults during a deadly plague. Instead I would be trying to structure society in a completely different way because about a third to a fifth of all the people who ever exist are dying before even getting born. Often those deaths are fully preventable either by the woman avoiding things that are likely to cause a miscarriage such as working at night (there was a Danish study that confirmed that a solid fifth or so of miscarriages seem to be preventable in simple ways like avoiding night work or exercise), or by not getting pregnant in the first place when conditions that are likely to cause a miscarriage are present (such as obesity). If I believed that the fertilized egg was morally equivalent to you and I, doing those sorts of things would at the very least be morally equivalent to drunk driving, and would probably be closer to manslaughter or reckless endangerment resulting in the death of a child. Plus, if there’s a moral equivalence between that fertilized egg and you and I, I think it’s completely unavoidable to advocate for things like miscarriages to be at the very least investigated at a cursory level, just as we’d investigate the death of anyone else for obvious foul play. I’m not talking about crazy criminal-level investigations every time - just a quick glance to ensure that the egg which has been passed doesn’t have the equivalent of a knife sticking out of its back. Even in places where people are expected to die, like in old folks homes, we check to make sure that obvious foul play isn’t involved. We also check and keep records of deaths to establish a pattern - even in an old folks home, if the death rate increases sharply then that’s a sign that there is probably something wrong that we should try to fix, despite the fact that nobody is actively killing those people. The only way to observe that sort of pattern is to keep track of the deaths in the first place. If that fertilized egg is morally equivalent to a toddler, in the same way that an abortion or taking Plan B is apparently morally equivalent to killing a toddler, it would be abhorrent to not treat those deaths in roughly the same way. And from a moral standpoint it is bizarre that we’re focusing on abortion in the middle of the worst mass death that humanity has ever experienced.

You look inwards and question why you spent your life being a sophist

that wouldn't help with the body count argument for single-issue abortion voting, though, given how few abortions occur so late in pregnancy

@moxie.6832 But a pro-lifer would value the embryos as much as a pro-choicer values the artificial womb babies, so it would still apply. The reason I gave the new hypothetical was to show why saving the embryos makes sense from a pro-life perspective.

@@gatuarhin at most this argument establishes that there is some point in development at which we should save 100 fetuses over a child (as discussed in the video). if there’s a reason why we should treat 100 embryos the same, it’s not clear how the argument gives one

This is sort of like the trolley problem, but instead of running one person over with a trolley to save more lives, you are extracting a cure in a violent way to save more lives. The only difference is that you feel more involved in the action with the cure example.

@iwersonsch5131 Fuck it, let's take the pro-choice route and work to develop immaculate birth control to avoid pregnancy to begin with, then celebrate that we simultaneously ended animal ag by giving animals rights like they deserve. On a serious note, that's definitely an interesting angle to throw at them. An embryo is by far less human than any animal in a farm in the areas that matter. All the areas that helped us decide humans should have rights, apply more to animals than they do to embryos is another way of saying that to help with clarity.

...Why is this a good objection? The one fertilized egg would be the only person in this scenario; if you're a religious person who believes life begins at conception, there isn't a dilemma here.

@@josephtnied I agree that if you believe a soul magically attaches to the egg when the sperm enters it and this is what gives it human rights, then this thought experiment isn't a dilemma, you just choose A. But many religious people think they can argue against abortion without appealing to that belief. However, the secular arguments they make for why a fertilized egg is valuable tend to also apply to the soon-to-be-fertilized egg, which commits them to choosing B.

@@warptens5652 Not really. They argue that, on scientific grounds, the fertilized egg is an individual human person because it has unique human DNA. The unfertilized eggs and the sperms don't have a unique human DNA so they wouldn't count as a unique person.

@@josephtnied ah yes, this is the one and only argument pro-lifers make, they never say anything else

@@josephtnied I couldn't have said it better!

you can just add to the hypothetical that every fertilized egg will be implanted

"and for those of us who also object to IVF itself, they could never morally be implanted"

​@@ldov6373 it's implanted by magic boom the idea that the morality of ivf has anything to do with the argument is silly

@@warptens5652 That would still be immoral by Catholic moral theology. The point is that there is no moral way to ever have those embryos fully grow to adulthood. The most moral thing would be to remove the artificial life support and baptize them before death. As a result there is no moral equivalence between a frozen embryo and an embryo in a mother’s womb. If you phrase the question as about embryos in mother’s wombs, most pro lifers will not concede anymore that they are less valuable than born children. It is like how an adult that needs artificial life support and has no hope of recovery would be of lower priority to save from a fire than a healthy adult.

@@thebyzantinescotist7081 The fire supplies a sauna with 100 women in the first trimester. If the sauna is allowed to continue, all 100 of those women will miscarry. They are indifferent to that (and will remain indifferent about it in retrospect too). Save the child or turn off the sauna?

Do you think that the holocaust was good because God didn’t stop it?

Fine but the issue might be whether or not to forgo your responsibility towards the unborn or the born. The pro life candidate might be for activily ending the lives of thousands of innocent born children and pregnant mothers. The pro choice candidate might be for activily protecting the lives of thousands of innocent born children and pregnant mothers from certain demise. It doesn't make much difference to a fetus if it dies from an abortion or dies from the malnutrition of the mother because a nation doesn't want her to get aid. And yeah, I am heavily eluding to the current mass extermination of innocent lives. Heck, you can even consider climate change and poverty. Climate change has contributed to increased miscarriages by hurting people's access to clean water and exposing expecting mothers to extreme heat. Not to mention all the born lives lost to climate change. Impoverished people don't necessarily have shelter from the heat, have the ability to move to a place with cleaner drinking water, or eat healthily. You might have a responsibility for the unborn at risk of abortion but don't you have more of a responsibility to everyone else's lives, the born and unborn.

​ What the hell are you talking about. USA has no starvation problem and climate change doesn't cause miscarriages.

@@jaskitstepkit7153 I was talking about the world generally and not specifically the US. The US has a malnutrition problem too though. Climate change causes extreme weather including extreme heat which does cause miscarriages. Climate change causes sea level rise and therefore ocean water contamination of underground fresh water. High sodium levels cause miscarriages. This just scratches the surface of the issue.

The video is examining the coherency of a set of beliefs, not trying to posit a personable take on abortion for the common man. If you're not interested in work of this kind, you're in the wrong place.

@@goclbert I am aware of what the video is trying to do. The problem is, it doesn’t work. The reason it doesn’t go through is because the very topic involves the creation of laws in politics. Being realistic is literally part of the philosophical evaluation of this topic. You can’t avoid it, putting your head in the clouds, and saying “yeah but that’s the point”… it’s actually NOT the point on this specific case.

Importantly, though, that hypothetical was not proffered as an objection to single-issue pro-life voting in itself. That hypothetical was posed as a *defeater* for Tom's belief B that abortion *must* be stopped even if it takes significant costs to do so. Tom's belief B implies that, in such a situation, one should vote for the far-right candidate. Since that is false, Tom's belief B is false. Also, this may be more relevant to everyday politics than one might think. For starters, you misdescribe the thought experiment. Bobby isn't rounding up and killing *all* black people. He is only doing it to many tens of thousands of black people. This is important. Why? Because there's good reason to think that some realistic policy decisions can, indeed, be the difference between many tens of thousands of born people dying or not. The combination of different approaches to pandemics, different approaches to drugs, different approaches to healthcare, different approaches to gun regulation, and different approaches to environmental issues can easily amount to a difference of many tens of thousands of born lives saved or killed. If one's non-abortion-related political views lead one to judge that the pro-choice candidate would save many tens of thousands of born lives with their policies that would otherwise be killed with the pro-life candidate's policies -- as many millions of people's views are like in the United States -- then the case is actually reasonably relevant to our actual political situation. Of course, the analogy isn't _perfect_ , since (i) the pro-life candidate certainly wouldn't be able to realistically reduce abortions from 900,000 to 900, and (ii) the pro-life candidate won't realistically round up tens of thousands of blacks and kill them; instead. But the analogy wasn't meant to be perfect in this respect; it was only meant to test out intuitions about Tom's belief B.

"you proved i'm wrong but i don't care" ok

If you don't like hypotheticals, how about you answer the historical example presented later in the video? In 1989 The murderous communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu banned abortion. When he was overthrown Romania legalized abortion. Knowing this, do you support Ceaușescu's secret police in torturing and murdering civilians to prevent his overthrow?

This is a typical utilitarianism dilemma that doesn't count for any value judgements. The petri dish potential of life still doesnt hold as high of a value as the 5 year old that is currently living because of how unreliable that prediction is. The option with higher probability will hold more moral weight. What if the boy you killed was going to be the scientist who cures all cancer? The answer is we don't know so we face the issue at hand without conjecture.

If we change it to a tray of micro machines about to release sperm into ova, does this still hold? Five years from now, we have many five year old children. Should we save unfertilized ova that are about to be fertilized? If we make it unfertilized ova that will be fertilized the next day if we save them, should we save those ova over the child? I'm not sure this line of thought undercuts the intuition to save the child.

This all or nothing approach to abortion is merely a function of the laws, court rulings, and cultural happenstance in the United States. In most of the developed world, people do not hold this position. Abortion is very easy obtain early in pregnancy and the conditions needed to qualify for an abortion increase and/or eventually become impossible as the pregnancy progresses. This aligns much more with natural intuitions. Either way, within the US the vast majority of abortions occur during this early period so the argument still addresses the body count argument.

Doesn't this presuppose contingentarianism

I don't think a time travel hypothetical actually reveal the flaw in our moral intuition. Especially when you consider that it can give rise to some wild scenarios. Imagine if there was an innocent baby in front of you, and you have the option of either stabbing it to death, or not. Given a time travel 30 years later, you know that if you did not, there would be million and billions of additional human deaths - i.e. the baby would grow up to be a warmongering dictator! Would such a scenario reveal that our moral intuitions were flawed when we chose not to stab an innocent baby to death? Clearly not. The only thing time travel could reveal, might be that consequentialism isn't all morality is; and that time travel may reveal additional morally relevant information that isn't (and couldn't) be available at the time of decision making. Just like in the same way that one couldn't possibly know that some baby would become a warmongering dictator in the future, one also could not know that the 50 embyros would not all perish before they are born as they all fail to implant. Future knowledge is therefore additional morally significant information.

Then what is sperm? It's not dead or inanimate.

​@Decadent_Descent Spirm is a gamete, a body part, like a strand of hair, it is not a human organism, it is a part of the human organism, not a human organism itself.

I don't think anyone argues that life doesn't start there. Personhood and/or bodily autonomy are where the discussion around this subject take place. Someone who breaks into your home can be defended against, but they're undoubtedly alive too. So clearly being alive or a life isn't the end all point. Or considering we slaughter billions of animals every year, they're all lives as well, but I only see small groups advocate for them. You need to make a more comprehensive point.

@@Decadent_Descent so life begins at the time where both the egg and the sperm were created?

@@YuGiOhDuelChannelthe undertakings egg is also a gamete