I don't know. I know many people seem to function fine without brains, so maybe that is possible, too!
The glaring fallacy of the specious tautology above is that it IGNORES the fate of UNWANTED children and how little "value" their lives actually turn out to have in reality. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david...sequences-for-mother-and-child_b_6926988.html The erroneous assumption in the OP is that all lives have equal value when it is demonstrable that the lives of unwanted children do not have equal value to those of their wanted peers. Unless the OP is willing to adopt about one million children each and every year the fallacy of the OP exists in the baseless assumption that all lives have equal "value".
Answer this then, 1. A person's life only has value others place on it. 2. Life A (say my life, for example) is not valued by anyone. 3. Therefore, life A is worthless. 1. Life A is worthless. 2. I desire life A to end. 3. Therefore, it is not morally wrong to kill life A. Show me the error in logic.
Do you agree that depriving an adult their future of value is grounds for considering killing them immoral? Yes or no. Another question: Does the fetus exist? If it exists, what are it's characteristics? If it is developing, then cells are dividing. If cells are dividing, then it is alive.
There is no assumption in the argument about the value of particular lives. The moral category is not the lives of fetuses or adults but their futures.
There is no logic, just your opinion. Where did I say a life is worthless because no one values it? I didn't. I don't know anyone whose life isn't valued by anyone at all..... According to whose "morals" is it wrong to kill life A? I never mentioned morals, you brought that up. It might not be morally wrong for you to kill life A according to YOUR morals, but according to law murder is illegal. ..not because you consider it immoral but because without a law against it there would be chaos ...
Discussions about logical consequence are only useful when both parties have at least a rudimentary understanding of what it means for one statement to follow from another. Many people don't have that, which is why words like "fallacious" are so often thrown at initial premises and other non-deductive statements where they have no application.
Semantic quibbling on your part exposes the weakness of your position. The hard fact is that the value of all "future lives" are not equal because, as the scientific studies demonstrated the "future" lives of unwanted children is not on a par with those of their wanted peers.
Those who cannot deal with the exposure of their fallacious position often resort to semantic quibbling because they have nothing else of any merit to contribute to the debate.
If you compare the "futures" of children in third world countries vs. the "futures" of those in wealthier nations and see they are not on par with those in wealthier nations, does that mean they are less valuable? Derideo_Te, I can see why it looked like semantics to contrast "lives" with "futures". What I mean is that the category that is morally central in this argument is not the category of personhood. The category that is morally central is that of having a valuable future like ours. This is a completely different way to look at the question of the morality of abortion. That is the point of this argument. So it is not semantics at all and looks at the debate through a totally different lens. Here it is in more explanation from above,
You didn't say that directly, of course. That's the point! You need to think through the implications of what you say and follow an argument. You have said over and over that a person's life only has value others place on it and you wanted me to respond. So I did. I am showing you that, if that is true, then in a situation where nobody places value on a particular persons life, then that life has no value (i.e. is "worthless"). Value and worth are synonyms. No value = no worth (i.e worthless). Just because you do not know someone doesn't mean it isn't the case somewhere. This is part of thinking through the implications of your statements. I gave an example above of a little girl that no body knows about who isn't valued by her parents and is killed by them. According to you, her life would have no value (i.e. "worthless"). Surely a person's life has objective value whether or not anyone subjectively values it. In fact, I find the statement, a person's life only has value others place on it to be completely repulsive and even dangerous. I am gathering from what you write that you do not believe in any kind of objective morality. Correct? Yes or no.
Boy is this true. Just like some people are tone deaf in music, others cannot see how conclusions can be deduced from premises. It's probably not their fault.
I notice that you don't believe women should live by their own morals, not yours.....in fact you seldom mention women at all and they are the ones who have abortions and they are BORN PERSONS who have rights
All you have to do to fix the validity of this is remove references to the degree to which the future of the fetus is valuable. None of us can judge value for another, so you don't want to proceed as if the value being referred to is that placed on a life by others. So you can't say that one life is equal in value to another. Once you make that change(oh, and qualify 2 as probabilistic since we can't be sure about the future of every fetus), 2 and 3 would look something like this: 2. Abortion ordinarily deprives the fetus of a future value. 3. Therefore, it is ordinarily wrong to kill a fetus. For the same reason that you can't say future value of the fetus is equal to that of an adult, a detractor can't say that the fetus has no future value. If we want to be realistic, we have to assume that the fetus will value its own life in the future and may, for all we know, value its own future now, which makes 2 more plausibly true than its negation. The argument is now logically valid(meaning the conclusion follows from the premises). The soundness(whether or not the conclusion is true, which depends on the truth of the premises as long as it is valid, which it is at this point) of the argument will depend on the truth of premise 1.
Yeah, and it's kind of hard to explain, too. The only thing that really seems to help is knowing that, if a scenario where the predicate is true and the conclusion false is logically possible, the inference is invalid, otherwise it is valid. But then you have to apply that, and it's not always easy to see.
Actually, it does. The zygote lowers the woman's immune system so that it can implant in the uterus without her body rejecting it as foreign. If I were to tie you down and hook you up to a machine that would inflate your abdomen to the size of a term pregnancy, would you be able to defend yourself or would you have to lie there and take it?
Thank you for the clarification. Distilling the essence of your argument to be only the "future value" of the fetus then it comes down to who gets to make the determination as to what is that "future value" and on what basis is it reached. The argument that DM is making is fallacious because it places equal value on that of a nuturally born person and a fetus without any other factor being taken into consideration. You touched on this fallacy by bringing up the point of the differential between the lives of people in 3rd world nations versus those in the westernized nations and yes, there is a significant difference in the "value" of those lives when compared on an economic basis. Corporations would not be exploiting those "cheaper value" lives if they did not realize a significant profit that they cannot obtain by using labor in the westernized nations. So to return to DM's fallacy that the "future value" of a fetus is equal to that of an adult it is patently obvious that he is making a baseless assumption by treating them as being "equal" when it is obvious to everyone that they aren't. And why does DM get to make this determination? Who appointed him the Lord High Chancellor of the "Future Value" of Lives? Having established that DM does not have the authority and/or qualifications to make this determination of "future value" the next obvious question to ask is who does have that authority and/or qualifications? Should we hand over this power to the Federal government or the State governments instead? What criteria would New York choose to define the "Future Value" of a fetus versus say a state like Alabama? If they don't use the same criteria would that be discrimination and therefore it would require that it either be up to Congress or the SCOTUS to decide what should be applied nationwide. Does a one-size-fits-all "solution" work in a diverse nation where there is extreme wealth and abject poverty? Is that the route you want to take when it comes to legislating the "Future Value" of a fetus? Or would it make more sense to leave the decision up to those who are impacted by the actual outcome? For a two income upwardly mobile young married couple with a house the "Future Value" of having a child would obviously be very different than it would be for a single mother earning minimum wage having yet another mouth to feed. So the fallacy of DM equating the "Future Value" of all fetuses to those of self sustaining adults is patently obvious as soon as you take it out the academic ivory tower and put it into the context of the lives of real people. As a purely philosophical concept it makes as much sense as the absurd theorem that All Cats Have Nine Tales. DM's position ignores reality and is therefore nothing more than a mental exercise in futility.
And yet I am willing to bet that you don't see the danger of what you are advocating by pretending that the "future life" of a fetus is equal to that of an adult and how repulsive it would be to women to have someone else dictate to them what they must do with their own bodies and force them to become little more than "breeders" for a government that can arbitrarily decide the "future value" of their fetus. Where is the "morality" in dehumanizing women into nothing more than chattels for the seed of men?
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I'm glad another poster is engaging the argument in an intelligent way. I gave your post some thought but I still think the premises work. I'll explain... Let me start with your statement that "None of us can judge value for another". Don't good Samaritans value other's futures all the time at suicide hotlines? In a moment of despair when a suicidal teen calls the hotline because she sees no value in her future, the person on the other end of the line sees great value and seeks to prevent the suicide. In fact, it is almost universally held that it is our duty to step in during such cases. And stories abound of those on the brink of suicide who turned back and went on to futures of tremendous value. Beethoven was on the verge of suicide due to his deafness yet his desire to express himself in his music ultimately held him back and we know how valuable his life and compositions have been. So we can be wrong about our futures in moments of despair while others can often see their value. Regarding whether the future of a fetus is of equal value as an adult, I think we would be hard pressed to say that the futures of fetuses differ in any significant way from those of adults in total. So this is often expressed as fetus have a "future like ours". Regarding that we cannot be sure of the future of every fetus, the same could be said of adults; we can die at any time. Again, I would say that the fetuses have a "future like ours". Anyway, let me know what you think. Thanks again.
Yeah, those things are true, but... First, I should say that the argument was valid the way it was. I talked as if I was fixing it for validity, but what I must have been thinking shows up in the conclusion out of nowhere was actually introduced in the second premise. By "judging value for others", I mean making a call as to how, quantitatively, another person values another thing. Take the one working the hotline for example. Say she finds out that the girl calling in has a best friend and a boyfriend. The caller values those two relationships differently. If the hotline worker makes an assumption about which of those relationships ranks higher on the caller's scale of values, she could make matters worse for the caller instead of helping. Say the hotline girl starts going on about how badly the caller's best friend would miss her without knowing that what is bothering the caller most at the time is that her best friend seduced her boyfriend, she actually wants her boyfriend back, but wants nothing to do with her best friend at that point. The girl working the hotline could find out about the order in which the other girl ranks her values, but the person that information must come from is the girl herself. What if I say that the value Jim places on his own life is equal to the value Bob places on his own life, and then two seconds later, Bob shoots himself in the head? Bob's action proves that I was wrong about the degree to which he valued his life. It turned out he preferred death, something most of us don't want at all, to life at that moment. Since some people kill themselves, it's obviously possible for death to have a ranking on our scales of preferences. We each have an idea of where we rank it ourselves. For most of us, it's usually so far down the scale we don't even think about it. For any two people out there, though, we, as observers talking about what other people value in general, can't say with any degree of certainty where death ranks on their respective value scales. To say, for any two people, that the value they place on their own respective lives is equal, is to say that the position at which death ranks on their respective value scales is exactly the same. But how could we possibly know that? So this "Abortion ordinarily deprives the fetus of a future value." is more plausibly true than this "Abortion also deprives the fetus of a future that is equally as valuable as an adult's future." Another thing is, when someone tries to negate premise two(mine), they would be making the same mistake as someone trying to affirm the original premise 2 in that they are making a call as to where death ranks on the value scales of other people; they're saying it ranks at the top which is not plausibly true at all.
Sigh, you thought your statement was ironic. And you thought this after I demonstrated why your post didn't apply to mine. Dizzying indeed. Okay, so I can't help myself (to summarize, since I believe I may not have painted the most vivid picture): - my conclusion was not an opinion but a supported argument, which is why I posted this in response to your post (to show you that your post doesn't apply, i.e. that it's not ironic). - You fail to recognize how your statement isn't an example of irony and respond by saying "your inability to recognize irony is dizzying." Which incredibly, manages to misunderstand both posts (mine as well as yours) and also manages at the same time to meet both the literary and common usage of the term "irony." Seriously I couldn't have come up with this in a hundred years, you're like an ethics forum Shakespeare. - I can't put into words, how awesome your post is.
