"Would you save one 5-year-old child from a burning building, or save 1,000 embryos?"
Discussed (at great length) at Salon.
Addendum: Reader Brad Williams notes that this question is also discussed (at great length) - from a different viewpoint - at The Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse.
It's a good question that has received good answers. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/10/20332/
ReplyDeleteIt is unreasonable to assume that since most people on Earth would save the five year old that they do not, therefore, believe that embryos are human beings. I find it to be a great philosophical question that every pro-life person should work through, but it certainly isn't unanswerable, nor does it betray a hypocrisy in their thinking.
DeleteThanks for that link, Brad. I've added it to the text of the post.
DeleteYou're welcome. And thank you for the interesting things you post that I wouldn't know about if you didn't blog intermittently. :)
DeleteI'm pro-choice, but the obvious rebuttal here is that prioritizing a five year old over embryos doesn't mean that embryos are not human or okay to destroy. I'm not fond of thought experiments like this - they do have value, but people use them as traps and bludgeons, and nobody likes being on the receiving end of that.
ReplyDeleteIt certainly does poke at the branch of 'pro-life' types that want to pull apart the social safety net for children, though. Reminds me of a cartoon of an older guy in a rainstorm extending his umbrella to cover a pregnant woman's belly, but not the woman herself or the young child standing next to her. That's pretty obviously about social control of women, not concern for life.
You might like this chart: https://www.liveaction.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Insane-Pro-Life-Motives-Chart.png
DeleteI agree with you about thought experiments, too; Daniel Dennett calls them "intuition pumps" and notes that they can be used as rhetorical devices to bias a reader's interpretation of the question.
Wow, another insightful and even handed response to an inherently problematic topic. That's why I love this blog. So many decent people who actually add something to the discussion. Well said, I couldn't agree more!
DeleteHow is the cartoon about "social control of women?" It's a cartoon about prioritizing unborn life--pure and sacred--over other human life. This position is held by men and women alike. I regard it as superstitious, but it's not a gender-specific position. As to the "Pro-Life Motives Chart": It's important to remember that men are also "punished" for their sexuality. Especially in circumstances where a pregnancy is taken to term without the father's consent. In most of the US, a woman has the right to choose. Men have no legal voice in this decision, but will be legally responsible for child support--over at least 18 years. Social control? Not where I live. Not in 2017.
DeleteThe javascript to reply to a comment thread does not seem to be working for me in Firefox or Safari. This is a reply to Brad Williams.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing the article -- I found it very thought provoking. I did find this sentence towards the end to be problematic: "Unless denied or deprived of a suitable environment, or killed by violence or disease, they will develop by an internally directed process from the embryonic stage into the fetal infant child ..." Many, many embryos do not develop into children, as they have genetic problems or other early developmental problems that prevent their continued development and they become miscarriages. I'm not sure they are 'diseased' however -- it's not an external agent, like a virus or bacterium, causing these problems -- it's inherent to the embryos. This is one reason I do not consider embryos to be human beings -- we have no way of knowing which ones can actually be carried to term.
You're welcome. I agree with your critique somewhat. I think they definitely could have made a caveat like "barring genetic abnormality or problems during development" and it would have been fine. I would say, however, that genetic abnormalities and developmental problems do not exclude someone from being human.
DeleteThe best analogy I have heard about abortion goes like this. There was an ER doctor who had to treat a man with an arrow wound through his abdomen. It turns out that another hunter had mistaken him for a deer and shot him on accident. The moral to that stay is: You don't shoot something rustling in the bushes unless you know for sure it's a deer.
With abortion, I believe it is impossible, scientifically, to put a date on when a fetus becomes a "baby". Is it at conception? All the genetic traits are there to develop. Is it at 9 weeks? When the heart begins to beat? We just don't know for certain. It's like shooting into a bush when you hear rustling. You might be killing a person. You don't know for certain.
If you flip the question and resulting conclusion, you can see why this question doesn't really show what the questioner supposes.
ReplyDelete"Would you save your 5-year-old child from a burning building, or save 100 elderly strangers in a nursing home?"
Instinct of 99% of us would be to save our own child. You can even go with a 5 year old stranger and 1+X elderly strangers, and most of us would favor the child until a certain point.
Faulty conclusion: therefore, nobody really believes the elderly are human and/or have value.
To Roy and others -
ReplyDeleteAs I understand the original thought experiment, it is not addressing an argument that something (embryo, elderly person, etc) has "NO value." It is addressing the argument that the two items have "EQUAL value" (an embryo is the same as a child).
In Roy's example, if you were to argue that an elderly stranger has the same value as your own child, then a group of elderly strangers would have more value and should be saved by choice.
I don't know how many people believe that a fertilized embryo is "the same thing" as a postnatal child and needs to be treated the same, but if they do, logic would say that they should be racing out of the burning building carrying the box of embryos.