A slightly different common argument is that while fetuses will eventually be people, they’re not people yet...Yet it seems that EAs are almost uniquely unsuited to this response. EAs do tend to care explicitly about future generations.
This is a fairly bad case of conflation, made worse by the fact that run-of-the-mill abortion activists make the same error. Caring about the future in the abstract, wanting a future filled with happy people—does not mean that the interests of any specific people who might have been created should be appeased. Else we’d say abstinence is fairly reprehensible, since it also prevents the creation of new people. So you’re basically in a circular argument—you have to start of believing fetuses are en-souled (by which I mean, they now count in utilitarian calculus as future people with the same interests as present ones) from the get go.
Others have pointed out this fatal flaw. However, I think it should be pointed out that a lot of it still checks out. You still do have to be very, very confident that fetuses aren’t ensouled and don’t count morally before you support abortion., just as the chart says. The chart correctly says you may abort fetuses if you are extremely confident they aren’t people and aborting them is not murder.
It is easy to dismiss the whole article because of the glaring flaw, but ultimately the math does check out given the assumptions. The problem is that we’re assuming that fetuses either are or aren’t full persons in a binary sense, and assign a probability. In actual fact, I am fairly certain that fetuses are neither persons nor non-persons, but entities that gradually gain moral status as they get closer and closer to a certain age, beginning at 0 weight at conception and gradually approaching 1-person-weight sometime after birth (infanticide is a moral horror, but I feel killing a toddler is worse). Can we factor that in?
Else we’d say abstinence is fairly reprehensible, since it also prevents the creation of new people.
Yeah, I realise they’re quite related positions. I often feel guilty for not having had children yet.
Can we factor that in?
My guess is that because everything is linear, treating a fetus as being like 0.3-person-weight will give you the same answer as treating them as having 1-person-weight with probability 30%
This is a fairly bad case of conflation, made worse by the fact that run-of-the-mill abortion activists make the same error. Caring about the future in the abstract, wanting a future filled with happy people—does not mean that the interests of any specific people who might have been created should be appeased. Else we’d say abstinence is fairly reprehensible, since it also prevents the creation of new people. So you’re basically in a circular argument—you have to start of believing fetuses are en-souled (by which I mean, they now count in utilitarian calculus as future people with the same interests as present ones) from the get go.
Others have pointed out this fatal flaw. However, I think it should be pointed out that a lot of it still checks out. You still do have to be very, very confident that fetuses aren’t ensouled and don’t count morally before you support abortion., just as the chart says. The chart correctly says you may abort fetuses if you are extremely confident they aren’t people and aborting them is not murder.
It is easy to dismiss the whole article because of the glaring flaw, but ultimately the math does check out given the assumptions. The problem is that we’re assuming that fetuses either are or aren’t full persons in a binary sense, and assign a probability. In actual fact, I am fairly certain that fetuses are neither persons nor non-persons, but entities that gradually gain moral status as they get closer and closer to a certain age, beginning at 0 weight at conception and gradually approaching 1-person-weight sometime after birth (infanticide is a moral horror, but I feel killing a toddler is worse). Can we factor that in?
Yeah, I realise they’re quite related positions. I often feel guilty for not having had children yet.
My guess is that because everything is linear, treating a fetus as being like 0.3-person-weight will give you the same answer as treating them as having 1-person-weight with probability 30%