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utsfl:classroom:seminars:pba460h [2016/03/29 10:58] – outline for Dr. Kaczor's talk balleyneutsfl:classroom:seminars:pba460h [2020/03/27 15:00] (current) – balleyne
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-====== PBA460H: Moral Intuitions, Gradualism, and the Burning IVF Lab Thought Experiment ======+====== PBA460H: The Burning IVF Lab Thought Experiment ======
 Start with this thought experiment, then ground it in Dr. Kaczor's philosophical reflections on gradualism. Start with this thought experiment, then ground it in Dr. Kaczor's philosophical reflections on gradualism.
  
 FIXME should these two things go together? FIXME should these two things go together?
 +FIXME Dank PL Memes racist/sexist question Twitter post
  
-===== The Burning IVR Lab ===== +===== The Burning IVF Lab =====
-http://blog.secularprolife.org/2013/10/pro-choice-thought-experiment-burning.html+
  
-FIXME outline+<note> ** "You never know when some lunatic will come along with a sadistic choice..." **
  
-Plus, uncertainty about survival rate, conditions for survival, safe transportation, etc.+Spiderman faces an ethical dilemma as he battles the Green Goblin: either he can save his beloved Mary Jane, or he can save a trolley car full of young children. If he decides to save Mary-Jane and not the kids, then the only conclusion is that it should be legal to kill elementary school children because they’re not really humans. That’s a good argument, right? 
 +{{youtube>3S2PqhtCO1E?medium}} 
 +</note>
  
-===== Gradualism ===== +  * http://blog.secularprolife.org/2013/10/pro-choice-thought-experiment-burning.html 
-[[https://vimeo.com/20627662|Dr. Chris Kaczor against Gradualism]]+  * http://www.lifenews.com/2017/11/06/heres-the-pro-life-response-to-that-pro-abortion-gotcha-question-about-a-burning-fertility-clinic/
  
-==== The Challenge ==== +“Wait,” you may be thinking, “That argument doesn’t make sense at all!” Perhaps not, but the scenario is pretty close to the “Burning IVF Lab” analogy which is popular among some abortion supporters.  
-> Pro-lifers ought not in principle make any distinctions between early and later abortions, yet it is plain that they, like other people, often do. There seems to be some confirmation to the gradualist or developmentalist view. The further along the path towards birth, the more protection we think the human fetus should have, or the more serious the reason must be for abortion. ((Mary Warnock, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Ethics))+  * See http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/10/20332/  
 +  * And Tomlinson's version - https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/920085535984668672
  
-  * Not challenge this common intuition that Warnock talks about +**The Analogy:**
-  * But going to challenge the gradualist or developmental view, that human beings gain moral value throughout pregnancy as they develop +
-    * Gradualism: the value or worth of a human being increases over time with gestation +
-  * Going to challenge the view that pro-lifers ought not in principle make any distinctions throughout pregnancy +
-    * Namely, distinctions between early (first trimester) and later (second or third trimester) abortions((Andrew J. Peach, "Late- vs. Early-Term Abortion: A Thomistic Analysis" in //The Thomist//, January 2007)) +
-  * Briefly +
-    * Affirm the idea that human beings through all stages of development have equal basic moral status +
-    * Affirm that the intentional taking of human life at any stage of development is intrinsically evil +
-    * Deny that all abortions, both early and late, are ethically identical in every way+
  
-==== The Differences ==== +An IVF lab is burning, and you have a choice between rescuing a 5-year-old girl or 10 frozen embryos. Who would you save?
-  * Distinction between //intrinsically// evil and //equally// evil +
-    * Two actions can be intrinsically evil, but not equal in every way((e.g. Aquinas: if someone steals a chalice, it's stealing, and sacrilege)) +
-      * Because of an additional deformity, e.g. Aquinas: stealing a chalice is stealing //and// sacrilege +
-      * Because of circumstances, e.g. To steal $10,000 is intrinscially evil, but it's worse to steal it from a widow on a fixed income than from the Queen of England or from J. K. Rowling +
-      * Culpability of the agent, e.g. murder, drunken husband comes home and finds wife in bed with another man versus cold-blooded assassin who plans for months +
-  - An action that's evil in itself can be made worse by an additional evil +
-    * e.g. all murder is wrong, but torture before killing would be an additional evil +
-    * all abortions are wrong, but there could be an additional evil, e.g. if the fetus would suffer pain +
-    * (could be exceptions, e.g. if fetus is anesthetized, but not common practice) +
-  - The more easily an obligation can be met, the worse it is not to meet that obligation +
-    * e.g. if I could save someone by walking two blocks and I refuse to do so, that's worse than if I fail to save someone by running 10 miles +
-    * The later in a pregnancy a woman gets, the less effort is needed to bring that pregnancy to birth. Early in pregnancy, a relatively greater effort is needed. +
-    * (could be exceptions, e.g. health problems discovered later in pregnancy, but still true in general) +
-  - The later in pregnancy a woman goes, the less likely it is that there is inculpable ignorance +
-    * Very early in pregnancy, it's more plausible to mistakenly believe that abortion is just the removal of a bunch of cells, but later in pregnancy, almost everyone is aware of the humanity of pre-born children (e.g. through ultrasound images, fetal movements, etc.) +
-    * (could be exceptions, e.g. a personal well-versed in fetal development may well know that a human being in earlier stages of developments may well know early on, or someone who is extremely ignorant or has a mental disability may not know later in pregnancy) +
-  - Fear diminishes culpability +
-    * The shock and fear of a crisis pregnancy lessens the culpability, so there is less culpability when abortion is chosen in the initial period of shock than later in pregnancy as the emotions of fear and shock lessen +
-    * (could be exceptions, e.g. health problems that arise later in pregnancy, or //pregnancies// discovered later, or self-denial earlier in pregnancy, etc.) +
-  - The longer a relationship endures, the more ethically problematic it is to end it +
-    * Worse to end a marriage after three decades than after three weeks; later miscarriage is often more traumatic than early miscarriage +
-  - People have an ethical obligation to avoid unnecessary risks to their health +
-    * Abortion later in pregnancy carries more health risks for the mother+
  
 +  * Abortion advocates want to say that since virtually everyone would save the little girl, that this indicates that the 5-year-old has a higher moral status than the embryos. If pro-lifers really believed that all human beings have equal status, then they'd save the larger number of people. 
  
-We can accept Warnock's intuition that later abortion is more problematic than earlier abortions, but not accept the grounds for this that the human fetus gains moral status throughout development, i.e. accepting the intuition without accepting the gradualist view.+Summarized another way: 
 +> You are in a burning IVF clinic. In one corner, a child. In the other, 1000 embryos. Which do you save? If you save the toddler, this shows that you know they’re not equal. And if you’d just admit this, you’d understand that abortion is ok.
  
-==== Other Grounds for Gradualism ==== +==== Relative Suffering ==== 
-  * The gradualist could recognize that any individual characteristic is insufficient to grant personhood +From the [[https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/four-practical-tips-responding-burning-fertility-clinic/|Equal Rights Institute blog]]
-    * e.g. sentience (the ability to experience pleasure and pain), there are human beings who are already born who do not experience any pain whatsoever, with chronic insensitivity to pain syndrome (FIXME well, this doesn't response to //preference// utilitarians, who would say that someone who's born may still have preferences even if they can't feel physical pain, or they may experience emotional pain, etc.), e.g. Abby Gingras +
-    * other characteristics: viability, conscious desires (FIXME this is the response to preference utilitarians), mobility, etc. -- they're either over-inclusive or under-inclusive, (FIXME Kaczor's book) +
-  - Instead, they say, "Okay, perhaps singularly, sentience or conscious desires or viability or whatever doesn't make you a person, but when you add up these characteristics over time, they make you more and more like a person until finally personhood kicks in; individually they don't account for much, but collectively they do" +
-    * like a rope: one thread is easily broken, but a rope is very strong -- by birth, you have a very strong rope +
-  - This analogy actually fails because a thread does have //some// strength, but an unsound argument doesn't have //any// strength at all +
-    * If sentience is irrelevant to moral worth, than adding sentience to other characteristics is also irrelevant +
-    * e.g. I'll show you that African are not full persons with moral worth +
-      * they have dark skin +
-      * they're polytheistic +
-      * they're poor +
-    * But those are horrible arguments! +
-      * skin colour has nothing to do with personhood or moral worth... and not all Africans have dark skin... +
-      * that has nothing to do with moral worth or rights... and not all Africans are polytheistic... +
-      * being poor has nothing to do with your moral worth... and not all Africans are poor... +
-    * "Okay... well, taking individually, each one of these things doesn't really work... but if you put them all together as threads in a rope, then collectively they work." +
-      * It obviously doesn't work. An unsound argument is a zero. You can add up as many zeroes as you want and it doesn't work. +
-  - Others defend a gradualist view by appealing to other sorts of rights, e.g. right to drive, or purchase alcohol, or serve as an elected representative, etc., so maybe the right to life is gradually gained +
-    * The right to life is radically different: in order to drive or vote or hold public office, we have corresponding //duties// to fulfill +
-    * there's no corresponding duty with a right to life +
-  - Casting gradualism as a golden mean between extremes +
-    * Pro-lifer extremists say all human life is equally valuable, and abortion advocates say abortion is okay all the way through pregnancy, but gradualism is a golden mean -- not extremely pro-life or pro-choice +
-    * It is a sort of mean, but is it the virtuous mean? +
-      * Take theft: the mathematical mean between stealing from 100 people and stealing from no people would be to steal from only 50 people, but clearly the mathematical mean is not the moral mean +
-  - Jeff McMahan: Almost everyone does distinguish between "full blown murder" of an adult, and abortion. People who are pro-lifer don't really think that the fetus has equal status to an adult +
-    * Pro-lifers can hold that all killing of an innocent human being is //wrong// without holding that all killing is //equal// +
-    * Killing an adult is, because of other factors, circumstantially worse than abortion +
-      * Killing an adult thwarts the plans and the dreams of the one who is killed, whereas a fetus doesn't yet have plans or fears +
-      * Killing an adult engenders fear and terror in other people that abortion doesn't normally entail +
-    * The culpability of the agent can also present serious differences +
-    * It's a little bit like the difference between killing an average person on the street and killing a President or a Prime Minister +
-      * They're equally bad in one respect: killing the innocent +
-      * But killing the POTUS could have unbelievable effects on millions of people, could cause wars, financial collapse, etc., versus killing a regular citizen+
  
-==== Why We Should Reject Gradualism ==== +Tim: The first issue is that if I save the infant, the embryos aren’t going to die a painful, terrifying death, but if I save the embryos, the infant will suffer a painful, terrifying death. That really matters to me. Suppose I had the choice to save two people who were in deep comas or one person who was fully awake. If I save the person who is awake, does that show that I think they matter twice as much as the other two?
-  - Human physiological development continues well after birth +
-    * Gradualists should hold that it's worse to kill a 20 year old than a 10 year old, or worse to kill a 10 year old than a 2 year old +
-  - Some human beings before birth are more physiological developed than other human beings after birth +
-    * e.g. a pregnancy that continues two weeks past the due date, versus a baby born prematurely at 25 weeks +
-      * by any reasonable standard, the baby born at 25 weeks is less physiologically developed, but no one would hold that infanticide is okay for the pre-term baby, yet that would follow from the gradualist view+
  
 +Ann: I guess not. But if life is so important, shouldn’t you still save the two? It still feels like you ought to value the lives of ten embryos over one infant.
  
-FIXME I think Ainslie wanted to argue a gradualist view until some magical plateau is reached (or until there's enough of a rope) somewhere in the middle of pregnancy, and would side-step pre-term delivery by saying perhaps there isn't proportionate reason to kill the child once born because the issue of a mother's bodily autonomy is off the table (rather than weighed against a gradually developing right to life)+Tim: Perhaps, but let me point out the second major issue with the thought-experiment. The frozen embryos might not survive anyway.  
 + 
 +==== Triage ==== 
 + 
 +  * The embryos were conceived via IVF, so we have no idea what's going to happen to them. 
 +    * They may be implanted, and there's no guarantee that all or even any of them would successfully implant. 
 +    * Could the frozen embryos even survive outside the conditions of the lab? For how long? 
 +    * Consider it like a case of triage. "Two people are in mortal danger and a doctor can only save one. The doctor will save the person with the greatest chance of survival. Does that mean the other person is less valuable than the person she saves? Of course not. But if she tried to save the person with the most extensive injuries, she may end up losing both." 
 +    * The fate of the embryos is extremely uncertain; the 5-year-old has a 100% chance of survival if you rescue her. 
 +      * (This is not like the car sinking into a lake, where in that situation you have a duty first towards the more dependent person and the more capable person might have a better chance to fend for themselves, because both the baby and the mother have a 100% chance of survival if you rescue them in that scenario) 
 +==== Relationships and Attachment ==== 
 + 
 +  * What if you knew 100% of the human embryos would survive, and be implanted, and our technology had a 100% success rate for implantation? 
 +    * Say you’re in a burning building. In one room is your mother, and in another room is a complete stranger. You only have time to save one. I would almost guarantee you would save your mother. But does that mean the one you didn’t save wasn’t human? What if you were faced with the choice of rescuing your spouse or child or a room full of people? If you save your spouse or child over the roomful of people, that does not mean the people in the other room were not human. 
 +      * As Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen point out, there could even be circumstances in which people agree that it would be reasonable for a //particular// person to save the embryos, even if other people, including people with no personal attachment to either the embryos or the girl, might be drawn to rescue the girl. For example, say a doctor in the clinic is a father or grandfather to the embryos. Most people would not consider it immoral for that doctor to rescue the embryos over the little girl. 
 +      * FIXME Random pro-lifer on FB: "The question is one of intrinsic vs extrinsic value. Every human being has the same intrinsic value, but we also add extrinsic value based on their relation to us, their resemblance to us, their age, etc. So it's little surprise I would save, say, my daughter over some random stranger. These choices don't reflect on the intrinsic value of these people, but rather the extrinsic value I place on various characteristics." 
 +    * Or Dr. Chris Kaczor: "If forced to choose between saving the President of the United States and four other national Presidents and Prime Ministers, rather than ten unknown patients, most people would choose the Presidents and the Prime Ministers. To choose to save Presidents and Prime Ministers rather than plain persons is not a denial of the equal basic rights of those not saved, but rather a recognition that deaths of world leaders adversely affects many more people than the deaths of regular patients." 
 +==== Killing vs. Not Saving ==== 
 + 
 +    * There's also a //significant// difference between choosing who to rescue, and intentionally killing one person to save the other 
 +      * What if the choice were three comatose patients or a five-year-old girl? Many people would agree that the comatose patients are humans deserving of full moral respect. Yet no doubt many of these same people would opt to save the girl over the comatose patients. Does this mean, in a different situation, these same people would consider it justifiable to kill comatose patients to harvest organs for a five-year-old girl in need? 
 +      * Or, to return to our starting example: if Spiderman had only saved Mary Jane, would it somehow follow that it would be OK to kill elementary school children? 
 +    * **The question "Who do you save?" tells us nothing about "Who can we kill?" or "Who has human rights?"** 
 +    * (But, as Klusendorf notes, moral intuitions are important, but not infallible) 
 +        * FIXME quote Klusendorf uses about old attitudes towards slavery, "no people were killed" -- from Huckleberry Finn? Or Tom Sawyer? 
 +      * **Even if we were inconsistent by rescuing the adults over the embryos, this would do nothing to negate our arguments against abortion.** So as we see, allowing these embryos to die in the fire to rescue another human does nothing to show that we don’t believe embryos are full human persons, and it certainly doesn’t justify us taking their lives through abortion. 
 + 
 +<note> **An amusing dialogue example** 
 + 
 +//The scene: Union Station, rapid fire exchange amidst a crowd// 
 + 
 +Angry guy: Can I ask you a question? 
 + 
 +Blaise: Sure 
 + 
 +Guy: Okay, so, let's say there's a clinic. Oh, I mean, a fertility clinic. And it's on fire. And, uh, the fertility clinic-- 
 + 
 +B: It's fire and who do I save, the two-year-old or the 1000 embryos? 
 + 
 +Guy: Yeah 
 + 
 +B: Well, the problem with that question is-- 
 + 
 +Guy: No, just answer 
 + 
 +B: Okay, the question "who do you save"-- 
 + 
 +Guy: No, just answer it, who would you save? 
 + 
 +B: The two-year-old. 
 + 
 +Guy //(smug)//: There you go. //(starts walking a way)// 
 + 
 +B: Can I ask you a question? 
 + 
 +//(guy turns slightly)// 
 + 
 +B, //stun move//: You're the Flash, building is on fire and Batman and Wonder Woman are trapped, but you only have time to save one. Who do you save? 
 + 
 +Guy, //stops and turns//: That's ridiculous, that's not even real 
 + 
 +B: Okay, building's on fire, two-year-old and five-year-old are trapped, who do you save? 
 + 
 +Guy: Uhh.... 
 + 
 +Me: The question "Who do you save?" tells us nothing about "Who can we kill?" or "Who has human rights?" 
 +</note> 
 + 
 +"Consider the real-life example of Noah Benton Markham, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans in August of 2005. He was an embryo contained in a canister of liquid nitrogen, frozen along with fourteen hundred embryos, which police officers rescued from a hospital. He was later implanted into his mother, Rebekah, and born on January 16, 2007 in Covington, Louisiana, some seventeen months later. When Noah becomes an adult and looks back over his life, he can say with all certainty that he was rescued from the flood in 2005. If he had not been rescued, he would not be with us today." 
 + 
 +FIXME Maria: alternate version of this dilemma, the version I have heard //way// more often during activism so I think it's helpful for members to be aware of it: {{:utsfl:classroom:seminars:embryo_vs_baby.jpg?linkonly|embryo vs. baby, have to throw one off a cliff}}
  
-==== Conclusion ==== 
-  * People who hold the same basic moral status of all human beings //can// draw ethical distinctions between early and late term abortions 
-  * **This is important common ground.** Pro-lifers and many pro-choicers with different views on abortion can work together to curtail late term abortions, without in any way compromising the view that all human beings ought to be respected by law and have the same moral status 
-  * Consider history: many times, we've drawn distinctions between two classes of human beings -- those with rights, and those that don't count or have full, equal, moral status. **Every single time we've made this distinction between human person and human non-persons, we've made a catastrophic moral mistake.** The only reasonable position is that all human beings should be granted basic moral rights, basic moral status -- to reject the gradualist view against the weight of history.