It is simple @Banno: do you or do you not believe that a zygote has a right to life? Do they have that right?

At best, if I grant what you said here then, you are saying that the blastocyst has no right to life; which is the most basic right a human has :sad: ; or, worse, you are saying that rights have degrees.

CC: @RogueAI:

I have been trying, from the start, to get @Banno to answer similar questions; but, unfortunately, they refuse to engage. The whole argument, as far as I can gather thus far, is that it seems immoral to force a woman to continue going through with pregnancy because of any value placed on the unborn human and, therefore, abortion is permissible. This is just utter garbage: it is entirely circular.

I will say that, with respect to my view, I have been using my terms too loosely sometimes; and this is something I will avoid doing in the future. To be painfully clear to everyone, here’s what I am arguing:

I am evaluating whether not Mrs. Smith has the right to, or should, kill the human being developing in her womb in virtue of what is actually good and how I think that relates to behavior. Viz., what is actually good is what is intrinsically valuable, what is most intrinsically valuable is what is the chief good, the chief good is eudaimonia, being a eudaimon requires one to be just, being just requires one to respect other beings relative to their (teleological) natures, a person has a nature such that they havewill develop into having a rational will, and to respect a rational will is to treat it as an end in itself and never as a mere means.

@Banno refuses to discuss whether or not a zygote, embryo, or/and fetus have basic human rights; and this thwarts the conversation to a stand-still.

I would love to see a non-emotional, on point, reasoned argument from observable facts state what a human being is and when such a thing first comes into being.

If I were iron-man a pro-choice position, then I would say that you are asking an irrelevant question because you are equivocating personhood with “human beingness”; and that you are absolutely right that a new human being is create upon conception, but that a person is not thereby created upon conception and personhood grounds rights. A person, under this view, is a being which currently has a mind which has a rational will, and not a mere natural potential for one, and this is indicated, for an organism, by having a brain which is functioning aptly enough to deploy such a subjective experience (as a mind with rational capacities). Therefore, up until the unborn human being acquires the proper brain it is morally permissible to abort.

This argument sucks for multiple reasons:

1. What grounds rights is the rational nature of a being and not its mere acquisition or possession of a mind—otherwise, all animals would have equal rights—and so it is clear that infanticide would be equally morally permissible in this view (for children, especially at really early ages, clearly do not have a rational will).

2. Many human beings which even a pro-choice person wants to count as a person would not count under this view and thusly would not have any rights. E.g., a person who we know is going to wake up from their coma in 2 days time but currently does not have enough brain function to deploy a mind with rational capacities has no rights for those 2 days.

3. Dead people have no rights, which leads to the logical conclusion that one can do whatever they want to a dead person’s body as long as it serves no injustice to anyone who may have known them. E.g., sex, desecration, etc.

This is why anyone and everyone should be going for a teleological analysis of this, even if they don’t believe that we are designed in that strong, theological sense of having an agent which endowed us with purpose. I am curious what @Leontiskos thinks about this.

I am waiting for @Banno to respond with “but it’s obvious we shouldn’t value the zygote over the woman!!!!”. :roll:

I apologize: I was not intending to sidestep any of your response. If there's something I missed, then please feel free to bring it up.

Likewise, I enjoyed our conversation; and until we meet again, Praxis!

I am not in any way setting out to prove that a cyst has less value than Mrs Smith. So I am not begging the question.

Here's why I said it is question begging: you are saying that is it morally permissible to abort because it is obvious that the woman should be able to abort. You are just masking it with other words now.

We might at again flip the question you keep asking of me, and ask you why you think that Mrs Smith has only the value of a zygote.

It's not that they, in total, have the same value: it's that they both have equal, basic human rights. I have consistently kept this conversation in terms of rights, not in total value. I do not disagree that in some circumstances, like when you have to choose between saving one person or the other in a manner that doesn't use one as a means towards saving the other, that we can, and should, value a newborn over an extremely old person.

I have never suggested that all humans are completely equal in value, but have consistently held that we have basic, inalienable rights.

So the question becomes: why don't you believe that all humans have equal, basic human rights? Do you not believe in rights?

You are back to just begging the question. This has been by far the most unproductive conversation I have had in a while.

It seems your version of Neo-Aristotelianism is somehow grounded in idealism rather than practical living and achieving eudaimonia (human flourishing).

Do you know the difference between normative and applied ethics? I think that's the issue here. My starts with normative ethics, as it should, and then dives into how to best pragmatically implement it into society.

There's nothing incoherent with saying people shouldn't be gluttons but that it should be legal; because giving people rights and liberties is better for allowing people to flourish, in practicality, than giving the government too much power to control people. That it should be legal, does not mean it should be morally permissible.

Whereas your whole argument is that X is immoral because it seems immoral to you? Or because you think your invisible friend claims it is immoral?

Definitely because my invisible friend said so, and nothing to do with my response.

It's worth noticing the slip in your spiel. A person has a rational will. A cysts does not. Consistency, where art though?

I knew you were going to that (:

You want to engage in an extended debate in order to hide the simple truth that a cysts does not have the same worth as Mrs Smith.

BRO….I don’t see how that is a simple truth, let alone true. That’s why I keep asking you for an elaboration on your ethical theory. I wouldn’t keep asking if it was clear to me :smile: .

You would use sophistry as a distraction from the immoral act of forcing someone to undergo an extended and unnecessary ordeal.
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Your pretence of depth is no more than surface posturing.

I am hurt: do you really believe I am being ingenuine?!?

You still at heart want there to be an "is" from which you can derive moral truths to which all rational folk must agree.

I take the is-ought gap very seriously, unlike most Aristotelians, and my response is that the chief good is what is most intrinsically valuable; which, hence, does not fall prey to is-ought gap critiques. Eudaimonia is the most intrinsically valuable, that’s why it is the chief good.

But it can't, becasue in the end what counts as flourishing is chosen. You cannot escape the fundamental difference between what is the case and what we choose to make the case.

I thought you would have said, as a moral realist, “what is the case and what ought to be the case are different”; but instead, peculiarly, you said “what we choose” which is straightforwardly an implication towards moral anti-realism.

The flourishing of the cyst is a far less definite thing than that of Mrs Smith.

The blastocyst has a right to life, which you keep ignoring and sidestepping.

For a start, it is entirely dependent on the flourishing of the mother.

So in the violinist thought experiment, you think you are morally permitted to pull the plug? Is that the idea?

Further, the quality of life of Mrs Smith is something that we can ask Mrs Smith about, while that of the cysts is mere supposition.

You can’t ask a 10 month baby about what they think about their quality of life either...can you just randomly murder those too????

You would choose the flourishing of a cyst at the expense of the flourishing of Mrs Smith.

NO. I cannot violate the blastocyst’s right to life to help Mrs. Smith. For some weird reason, you keep refusing to engage in a discussion about rights….as if you don’t believe in them at all.

I appreciate the response, and I see that we need to address more the a priori vs. a posteriori distinction more in depth before we move on to that distinction as it relates to knowledge. So, for now, let’s forget about a priori vs. a posteriori knowledge, and focus on the generic distinction itself.

but you seemed to divide this experience between the empirical and non-empirical. This is where I'm confused.

Yes, this is the root of the confusion (I think). When I was saying, before, that a priori knowledge is knowledge gained independently of “experience”, I was using my terminology too loosely and that is my fault: what I should have said is “<…> independently of our experience of reality”, as that denotes the aspects of experience which are a posteriori—i.e., empirical.

By “experience”, I just generically mean the conscious awareness of which one is having; so why would I say there’s an a priori and a posteriori aspect to that experience? Because, simply put, there are things which my brain is adding into the mix (i.e., are synthetical) which are not actually of the sensations (of objects in reality) in order for it to represent them in the conscious experience which I will have of them.

The Kantian way of thinking about it, philosophically, is essentially:

1. An object “impacts” your senses.
2. Your sensations produce sensations.
3. You brain intuits objects from those sensations in space and time.
4. Your brain cognizes objects, according to logical rules and conceptions, in space and time.
5. You experience an object, or objects, in space and time.

If the sensations are intuited in space and time, then space and time are not contained themselves in the sensations; and it is even clearer when you realize that your brain cannot possibly learn how to represent things with extension nor succession to do it in the first place. Hence, the extension and succession which you experience things in and of, are not from the sensations and hence are not empirical (even if the brain learns how to represent the causal relations of things better with space and time as it develops).

So, e.g., space and time are forms in and of which your brain represents things and are not properties of the things-in-themselves (whatever they may be). This means that space and time are like the containers in which the content of experience is placed; and this is just a simplified way of saying that they are a priori and used to represent a posteriori content.

What you seem to be claiming, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that someone knows what space is before they've experienced it

No. I think that there’s a difference between the self-reflective reason—i.e., meta-cognition and self-consciousness—and non-self-reflective reason (i.e., cognition and consciousness). My brain has the “capacity”, as you put it, to represent in space and this extensional representation is not a reflection of any extension, per se, that an object itself actually has; but I must come to know, by experience, that I can extract out one of the forms of my experience as spatiality and that is is a priori.

This is why Kant famously said that all knowledge begins with experience, but not all knowledge arises out of experience. It was an catchy way of saying “not all knowledge is acquired and grounded in empirical data—a posteriori data”: there are certain ways we are pre-structured to perceive which necessarily are not reflections of anything in reality.

How is knowledge gained apriori?

Through experience, but not through empirical data. It is a transcendental investigation into how our cognition represents things, independently of what is being represented, in pre-structured ways.

I agree with this notion, but I'm not sure that's what Kant actually believes

I can’t speak for what Kant actually believes without being in his own mind; but I can say that the CPR seems pretty clear to me that what he means is that experience contains both an a priori and a posteriori aspect because there are necessary preconditions the possibility of that experience which are about how we are pre-structured to experience as opposed to the representation of the empirical, sensational content of that experience.

If you've never experienced space or its concepts, you don't know it.

I was entertaining your idea that someone could be thinking, self-reflectively, without ever having an inner or outer sense of space. If that is true, then they still would implicitly being using the concept of space, because reason fundamentally thinks in terms of space. E.g., if I am thinking about “bawwws” vs “glipglips”, even if they are utter nonsense, I am making separations and distinctions between them, which is inherent to reason, and this is conceptually spatial. You can’t have thoughts which don’t imply any conceptual separation between other concepts and ideas which you have—viz., you cannot think without space. You may not call it “space”; you may not know it is “space”; but when you are thinking you are thinking in terms of space. If you don’t believe, then just try to come up with a counter-example, and I will demonstrate that it is still using, implicitly, conceptual separation between thoughts, ideas, and concepts in play.

"Inner senses" is a misnomer.

Of course there are inner senses: they are senses of oneself or, more broadly, any sense capable of sensing the being which has those senses. Which leads me to:

I'll agree that proprioception and echolocation are definitely senses, but introspection?

I was assuming by introspection we are talking about self-consciousness, and this requires an inner sense; for one cannot know they are experiencing by merely experiencing: they must also have the capacity to acquire knowledge about their own experience. It is entirely possible to have a brain that is damaged in such a way as to still experience but lack self-experience.

You only have knowledge of yourself insofar as you affect your own senses. Which entails that there is not “I think, therefore I am” kind of direct window into one’s own self.

I don't disagree that republics are the best political system we've got; I am saying that, ideally, allowing people to choose, per se, is not necessarily going to correlate to helping them flourish. E.g., stopping a child from eating too much candy (even though they want to keep enjoying more), stopping people from be able to try hardcore drugs that will ruin their life, etc.

We give people liberties because it is pragmatically the best thing to do; and not because it is ideally the best. See what I mean?

Another way to put this, is that it is perfectly fine to intuit based off of evidence; but a pure intuition lacks all evidence, and is invalid. Pure intuitions are just cop-outs to justify one's position without actually justifying it, and I can prove anything right through a pure intuition because it is circular.

In ethics, you have to have some sort of concept of what actual goodness is and how it relates to right and wrong behavior; or else you are just acting blindly with these pure intuitions of yours. Like I said, anything can be justified with a pure intuition.

Banno, when I say I am a fundamentalist, I think a better way for me to put it is that I am not suggesting that we can justify anything with a fundamental, pure intuition; but, rather, that there are ideas which are so fundamental that a proof is virtually impossible (such as the law of non-contradiction).

However, if I have to deny being a fundamentalist and sublate my view by saying we must have a proof for everything we say in order to avoid these nonsensical "pure intuitions", then I am perfectly happy to do that. It is nonsense to think that one can say X is wrong because it seems wrong. There has to be some evidence to support claims, otherwise we are acting upon blind faith.

Intuitions are a part of ethics: they are not sufficient themselves, as pure intuitions, to justify or annul a position. You are begging the question, and it is impossible for me to change your mind because you lack justification for you view.

Imagine we are debating if it is morally permissible to own slaves; and I say it is and you say it isn't. You bring up all these moral reasons for why it is wrong, and I say "your theory leads to the extreme conclusion that slavery is wrong, so your theory is dead". I have given myself the ultimate cop-out, which is to justify my position I am supposed to be arguing for by intuiting it is right. THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Either you understand what goodness is and how it relates to the problem of abortion and can justify your position, or you are just ignorant and circularly justifying your position because it seems right to you. It's nonsense.

Your whole argument is that X is immoral because it seems immoral to you: is that actually how you are thinking about Mrs. Smith?

I am evaluating whether not Mrs. Smith has the right to, or should, kill the human being developing in her womb in virtue of what is actually good and how I think that relates to behavior. Viz., what is actually good is what is intrinsically valuable, what is most intrinsically valuable is what is the chief good, the chief good is eudaimonia, being a eudaimon requires one to be just, being just requires one to respect other beings relative to their (teleological) natures, a person has a nature such that they have a rational will, and to respect a rational will is to treat it as an end in itself and never as a mere means.

Do you see how in depth my analysis is, even if you completely disagree with it, about why X is wrong? Whereas your analysis is just "uh, X seems wrong so it must be"? That's my problem with your view. Give me an elaborate explanation like I have of my position so I can actually contend with it.

If we just have a clash of pure intuitions, then I can just intuit the opposite about X and you have no basis to say I am wrong; or, at best, you would appeal the masses and make your view straightforwardly a form of moral anti-realism.

What you are describing is a secular view, which removes ethics from politics, as a pragmatic means of allowing people to flourish the best; and I agree with it other than that it doesn't actually completely remove ethics (even though it purports to). There's a difference between normative and applied ethics: I don't trust the government one bit to have the power to ban, e.g., gluttony. Gluttony, e.g., is bad for you; and the idea of banning something because it inhibits the human good is not foreign to America: we've ban, e.g., hard drugs even if those people addicted to them don't harm anyone else.

That type of discussion requires good references.

I skimmed through it, and none of it seemed to reference Kant: it was about, more broadly, how many philosophers have contended we should use the a priori vs. a posteriori distinction (and how it relates to the nature of ‘experience’). There’s so much densely packed into section 4, of which you wanted me to read, that I am clueless as to what you are wanting to discuss about it. If there is something in there you want discuss, then please bring it up specifically so I can address it adequately.

Isn't how we perceive reality also how we empirically experience reality? A color blind person would have a different empirical experience then a normal color sighted person. Is that experience apriori or aposteriori?

“empirically experience” doesn’t make sense, and is the source of your confusion: like I said before, ‘experience’ is both in part a priori and a posteriori; and it necessarily must be that way. The term ‘empirical’ (usually) refers to the content of experience which is of reality,

On a narrow account, “experience” refers to sense experience, that is, to experiences that come from the use of our five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. However, this narrow account implies that justification based on introspection, proprioception (our kinesthetic sense of the position and movements of our body), memory, and testimony are kinds of a priori justification. And if we had different senses, like those of bats (echolocation) and duck-billed platypuses (electrolocation), experiences based on those senses would provide a priori, not empirical, justification on this account which takes a priori justification to be independent of experiences based on the senses we have.

We do not have five senses: any pre-structured means of receptivity of objects (which includes ourselves) is form of sensibility. So, introspection, proprioception, echolocation, and electrolocation are straightforwardly senses; I am not sure what they mean by “testimony”; memory is just the reinvocation of previous experience and so is has both a priori and a posteriori aspects to it; and hallucination, although they didn’t mention it, has for its a posteriori aspects fabricated data.

Suppose there is a significant difference between a priori and empirical justification. This still does not tell us what the basis of a priori justification is

a priori justification is linked closely to knowledge: it would be evidence grounded in the way we experience as opposed to what we experience if we take the Kantian use of the terms, and more broadly it would be any evidence grounded in the way we think about reality as opposed anything about reality itself (e.g., law of identity as a logical law by which we self-reflectively reason about our experience).

What truly separates the two?

I’ve made it clear what separates them: what are you contending is wrong with my distinction?

As I've noted, there really is no mental difference between the empirical and non-empirical

How can they not be different? One is about what is in reality and one is about something other than how reality is itself: they are mutually exclusive categories.

So if I am blind and have no sense of touch, it is true in virtue of the way I experience?

In principle, there can be a human which lacks the faculty of understand and reason such that there is no space in which objects are being represented, because there’s nothing being represented (from the outer senses) at all. What you are positing, is fundamentally a person who not only is blind and doesn’t have a sense of touch, but cannot sense at all. All senses that we have which are outer senses fundamentally are cognized in space (e.g., I close my eyes, touch nothing, feel no outer objects, but can still sense where my left finger is located without touching it—that’s in space).

The point about these sort of a priori propositions being true for human experience; is that they are true for the human understanding: the way we experience; and, yes, it is entirely possible for a human to lack the proper ability to understand reality.

Everything else that we reason about in our head has its root in empirical experience. We create identities, memories, and then have the innate ability to part and parcel those memories into ideas, imagination, dreams, and other thoughts. But to say they are 'true'? What exactly about them is true Bob?

Not everything you said is rooted in the empirical aspect of experience; and that’s what you are equivocating. That a person could think without experiencing anything in space and, let’s grant for your point, which I highly doubt is possible, who lacks a concept of space does not lack it because of lacking empirical data—they lack it because one of the a priori pure forms of sensibility, space, was never used by the brain (because perhaps their brain is damaged and cannot do it). They lack the concept of space self-reflectively because they’ve never had an outer experience (which would include that a priori form).

On a separate note, this hypothetical is impossible in actuality; for one cannot think, self-reflectively, through reason without using the concept of space—even if they have never experienced it. Everything we think about implies separation between, at least, concepts.

Moreover, it is plainly seen that the lack of the concept of space is not due to a lack of the empirical aspect of experience (if I were to grant your hypothetical as possible), because if they were to be given a hardcore drug that causes them to hallucinate utter nonsense, which would not be based off of any empirical data because they have never had any, they would immediately become acquainted with space—thusly, it is a priori.

How does a person who has no senses understand space?

Assuming you mean that they have no outer or inner senses; then they cannot understand space, because they lack the ability to understand anything—what you are describing is a dead person.

(Development of spatial development in babies)

Babies from birth represent objects in space, but they do not from birth know that in which the objects are represented is space; but once they have the sufficient self-reflective cognitive abilities, they can know it and it is a priori knowledge because it is not justified by any empirical data—it is justified by the non-empirical way that their brain is representing.

Hopefully that helps clear some things up. Good discussion, Philosophim!

Bob

Firstly, again, a mother should not be asking herself if she should abort because she doesn't think she can flourish with a baby in her life: that's not the point I was making.

Secondly, the state is in charge of providing, pragmatically, an adequate basis for human flourishing; but there are limitations, and I would say that the individual should be endowed with a certain level of responsibility to figure out how to flourish themselves. I don't think societies that try to give the government full control to legislate morality end up doing to hot: that's why, pragmatically, in terms of applied ethics, I would lean towards giving the individually as much power to make decisions about themselves; instead of entrusting that to the government. However, the laws which are put in place by the state are there to help with incentivizing the human good and barring immoral acts that are severe enough (e.g., marriage, rights, murder, rape, etc.).

An odd thing to say. Moral theory is about goodness, and about behaviour, but not directly about what is good? I can't make much sense of that.

Traditionally, morality is about right and wrong behavior; and, subsequently, about goodness and badness. My point is that goodness and badness are not evaluated themselves in the theory: the theory is about what an agent should or should not be doing in light of what is good and bad. This is a substantial claim to avoid the issues you originally brought up.

What is not good is counting a cyst as having the same worth as Mrs Smith.

Again, why? What do you think goodness is? How are you relating it, normatively, to behavior?

You claim Moore is "a load of nonsense" then adopt the core of his thinking. Fine.
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That the worth of the cyst is less then the worth of Mrs Smith is what is sometimes called a "basic" claim. It is foundational, in that it is, as you say, "where the buck stops"

That is partially fair: the part of Moore’s thinking where he claims we have to use intuitions, insofar as they are self-evident facts, I think is correct. The part that is a load of nonsense (to me) about his theory is that he thinks we can literally intuit the right thing to do based off of a pure intuition of what goodness itself is; which not just totally obscure but also a cop-out.

This is the same risk you are essentially taking, because you are evaluating your moral theory, whatever it may be, based off of your core moral intuitions; whereas I don’t think there are any such self-evident moral facts, and that doing so ends up causing people to ad hoc justify their own intuitions instead of doing ethics.

EDIT: for Moore, the concept of 'goodness' is this totally mysterious goo-goo-gah-gah.

My answer is really simple, as I agree that one has to evaluate the moral theory through some standard beyond it: goodness. Goodness is not within the ethical theory proper (i.e., normative and applied ethical theories which comprise it proper), and is the presupposition for the evaluation of such.

EDIT: No, metaethics is not a part of the ethical theory; that's why it is called meta-ethics.

Morality is about behavior, and not directly about what is good. On the contrary, what is good is what is used to determine right and wrong behavior.

I would also like point out that your reasoning leads to an infinite regress: for we could ask the same for the standard that is outside of the theory which is being applied, and would have to perform the same steps.

Personally I am a foundationalist, so for me there is a place the buck stops; because it has to.

So, “neo-”Aristotelianism is not itself one specific view: it is just any view that is a modified version, a sublation, of Aristotelianism—it’s a “modded up” version of the original. Thusly, it is hard to talk about “neo-Aristotelianism” other than getting into someone’s specific (modded) view.

In Aristotelianism, the ultimate goal for each human is human flourishing; and society is supposed to be structured in a way to uphold, incentivize, etc. that as best as possible. In that view, abortion seems straightforwardly immoral; because (directly intentionally) killing an innocent human being quite literally is the opposite of contributing to flourishing or allowing them to flourish.

Giving people basic human rights seems to be the best way to respect a human’s rational nature.

Generally speaking, people seek abortion because they’re not prepared to be caregivers. They reason that they, and a child, are not in a position to flourish.

By “flourishing”, what we really mean is eudaimonia (viz., to be a eudaimon) and this is just to say that one is living well by fulfilling their Telos. To allow people to live well (in this sense), we have to respect them as persons: we cannot kill them simply because we don’t believe we can take care of them. Not only is it simply not true in the western, developed world (as there are plenty of pro-life institutions which will provide for the child) but also, even if it were true, you cannot violate someone’s rights: rights are inherently deontological.

This is a joke...right? We derive conclusions and answers to questions. Yes, literally every study has fundamental questions it is trying to answer. Propositions are just truth-apt statements that we formulate to try and answer those questions.

What?

If I understand your position at all, basically because a person has a “rational will” and an ant does not.

Correct; and I would say, to keep things less confusing, they are a person because their nature marks them out as one (even if they never fully realize their Telos—such as in a cognitively disabled person).

If abortion contravenes the telos of a zygote, making abortion illegal also contravenes the telos, rational will, or flourishing of the mother and others involved.

If I am understanding this part correctly, then yes prima facie. The right to life of the zygote is in direct conflict with the right to bodily autonomy of the mother; and my point is that the ends do not justify the means, so the mother cannot abort the child as a means towards the good end of upholding their bodily autonomy.

All moral theories fundamentally begin with "what is actually good?" and then derive principle therefrom. There's nothing intuitional about it (at least not in the Moorean sense).

I don’t know what you mean by a means to an end.

A means is anything which, at least in part, facilitates the end; and the end is the intended reason for committing the act.

E.g., killing someone to harvest their organs to save five sick patients is an example of killing someone as a means; whereas killing someone by pulling the lever to divert the train to save five people is an example of killing as a bad side effect.

Does anyone deliberately get pregnant and have an abortion as a means to some end?

Every action has at least one end; because an action is a volition of will. The end may be as simple as “I don’t want to be pregnant”.

Anyway, sure, we value what is like ourselves. That makes sense.

That’s not at all what I am arguing. Any person (in the pre-modern sense) has a right to life; and this can include, in principle other species or potentially AIs.

Wouldn’t a good moral agent respect the will of a pregnant woman?

Respecting the will of a pregnant woman is per se good; but it cannot be done with a bad means. Ends do not justify means!

It is problematic because it is circular logic: you are saying that moral judgment X is wrong because moral judgment X seems wrong to you. This kind of thinking, lands you in wishy-washy territory where you can justify anything to yourself so long as you have a strong intuition about it. It's nonsense.

EDIT:

That's like me saying it is morally permissible to enslave people because it seems morally permissible, to me (or perhaps to many people), to enslave people. It has been the case where the common intuition was that enslaving people is not per se wrong, and your argument so far would then entail that they were right; because we can evaluate moral theories based off of strong intuitions we have in examples. It is nonsense.

Suppose you believed in moral theory X. Moral theory X entails that, in a trolley car situation, one must never sacrifice an ant (or any insect) to save any people. If a bug is on the tracks, you ought not pull the switch and save the five persons. Would that consequence of moral theory X- that bugs cannot be sacrificed to save people- be devastating to moral theory X?

The intuition that I have that it is wrong to never sacrifice an ant to save a person is insufficient to disprove the theory—that’s what you are missing here. Rather, my understanding of what is actually good and bad, and how to best codify it into moral principles and what not, is sufficient to demonstrate that this theory fails.

You have not provided why it would be, e.g., wrong to never sacrifice an ant to save a person other than an intuition you have; which is not sufficient to disprove it. I want to know, and have been asking @Banno countlessly, why, under your theory, it is wrong to never sacrifice a zygote, in a manner where it is a means towards the end, to save a person (in the modern sense of ‘person’)? I still hear crickets.

Why not? Moore, at least, says that they are. And saying that they are not is presenting a particualr moral theory. Argue your case!

It is a metaethical claim; and, I would like to point out, you still have not presented a normative ethical account of your position.

Metaethically, I think Moore is a load of nonsense; and perhaps that’s the root of our disagreement. You cannot base your normative ethical theory on moral intuition; because intuition is unreliable: you must also have reasonable evidence to back it up. The whole point of normative ethics is to decipher what is actually wrong and right behavior to then correct or validate moral intuitions that we have; what you are doing is backwards.

I quite agree! And pro-life views evaluate the behaviour around abortion in an appallingly bad way! They claim that a cyst has more worth than Mrs Smith!

Why? Back this up. You never back anything you say up, and so, unfortunately, there is nothing for me to rejoin.

Sorry I didn't see this: I wasn't linked to it. Philosophim, I am not going to make your argument for you (:

If there is something in that article that you think is relevant, then you will need to bring it to our attention as it relates to what I have said.

By the way, what is the reasoning for placing high moral value on "rational will."

Because I must, in order to be a morally good agent, respect a thing relative to its nature; and in order to respect a fellow will, like mine, I must treat them as an end in themselves and never a mere means.

How are theories of morality to be judged unless on the basis of the actions they justify?

Moral theories are not analyzed based off of moral intuitions: moral intuitions are analyzed in terms of moral theories. Moral theories are evaluated based off of how well they evaluate what is actually good qua (right and wrong) behavior.

So your view follows Neo-Aristoelianism in believing that abortion is wrong because it interrupts the natural potential of the fetus to become a virtuous, rational human being, which contravenes its telos and human flourishing.

Sort of: not sure exactly what you are saying here. It is neo-aristotelian because I view personhood and rights as ground fundamentally in rational Telos—viz., in the Telos of a being such that they are marked out as supposed to be developing into a being with a rational will.

Yes, it also disrupts the human virtue that a being could have; but that’s not why. Killing a person in self-defense disrupts their ability to achieve human virtue…

I feel that it's wrong also, though I'm not anti-abortion.

Ethics doesn’t care what you feel: it cares about what moral reasons you have.

Are you anti-abortion or would you support making it legal up to, say, thirteen weeks (when over 90% are performed)?

No. Abortion is always immoral, unless you are including “abortions” in the sense of side effects, as opposed to means, of upholding the woman’s right to bodily autonomy and life (e.g., hysterectomy on a pregnant cancer patient).

All you have offered is examples which presuppose your own ethical position without offering moral reasons for accepting your position. E.g.,:

I say "yellow is the best color".
You say "why is that?".
I say "because if you have to choose between yellow and any other color you are going with yellow".
You say "how does that answer the question?".

You are analogously begging the question: I want to know why you think we can morally evaluate the zygotes as not having basic human rights which would bar you from making the conclusions you keep making in your examples. All you keep doing is presupposing your own position in your examples, just like I could presuppose yellow is obviously the best color and my example is that I would pick yellow over any other color...that just presupposes my position that yellow is the best color, and that's why I would pick it. When you say "we would pour the zygotes on the burning building", you are literally presupposing what you are supposed to be proving: the zygotes don't have a right to life.

Do you see what I mean?

I appreciate your elaboration on your thoughts, and I cannot possibly dissect all of it in one response; so I will address some key points that you may find worth digesting.

1. Persons are not, traditionally, identical to human beings. You used them interchangeably throughout the conversation, and most people are going to deny that rights are grounded in the organism—they usually believe it is grounded in personhood. The question becomes: “(1) when does a human being become a person, and (2) what is personhood?”. Conventionally (right now), personhood is mindhood: it is to be a person. The more I think about it, the more I want to use ‘personhood’ in the pre-modern sense: to have a nature that sets own out as developing into having a mind with a proper, rational will.

2. For those who are pro-choice, if I were to iron man there position, they have no problem with providing the asymmetry between infanticide and abortion: the latter is the killing of a person, the former (in all permissible cases) is not. The reason I think you, specifically, think this is a problem, is because you are equivocating ‘human beingness’ with ‘personhoodness’.

3. When life begins, does nothing to comment on when a life has rights. You are right that, scientifically, it is uncontroversially true that your life began with conception; but this doesn’t directly address if you have any rights upon beginning to exist. You need some further argument for that.

4. “killing people is bad”, as you put it, is not really a good representation of pro-life positions (if we iron man it): a pro-life person (usually) thinks that human beings acquire their rights immediately upon beginning to live and the ends do not justify the means, so it is straightforwardly immoral to abort.

5. Whether or not “we want” a “universal morality” is irrelevant to ethics: either you really should or should not do such-and-such, or there isn’t.

Just food for thought for you too chow down on and digest.

Technically, neo-aristotelian. The part I was discussing was Aristotelian in nature; but you pointed out some other point that Aristotle made, assuming you are right, about souls. I am not sure he actually believed that, and don't want to re-comb through all his literature to find out.

Yeah, I don't buy that (sorry Aristotle).

You're using math, but as I'll note, I still don't see that as knowledge independent of experience.

It is grounded in—i.e., make true in virtue of—something which is not empirical. The space which objects take up on your conscious experience is not empirical—it is not a posteriori. Any knowledge which one has which is true in virtue of the way, e.g., objects work in space is a priori.

I think you are thinking that a priori knowledge is knowledge which one has independently of ever having experienced anything; and I am partially to blame to for that: I was misusing the term a while back.

Taking space as another example, the axiom in geometry that “the shortest path between two points is a straight line connecting them” is a proposition that is true in virtue of the way we experience as opposed to what we experience—it doesn’t matter the empirical data which our brains represent, the a priori mode of representing them in space remains the same.

What I think you are thinking, is that because we can only knowledge this after beginning to experience that we do not have a priori knowledge; but the “a priori” in “a priori knowledge” is conveying how it is grounded—specifically that it is not grounded in empirical data.

a posteriori knowledge is knowledge which is grounded in empirical data, and is, thusly, about reality; whereas a priori knowledge is about how we perceive reality.

The apriori of a fish would be very different from a human.

This isn’t a coherent sentence: the a priori...what?

I'm talking about instincts as the being of a person prior to any experience.

Then the root of our disagreement there is merely semantical: that’s not usually what an “instinct” means. For example, Webster’s is “a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason”.

Instincts are behavior patterns not attributable to being learned through reason; and most the a priori pre-structure of cognition, intuition, judgment, etc. do not fit that bill.

The point that I was making with “applicable” vs. “distinctive” knowledge, is that it doesn’t preclude a priori knowledge; and it would be applicable knowledge in your theory (assuming I grant our theory in its entirety).

Here’s the definitions you have in your summary:

A discrete experience is not a claim about the truth of what is being experienced. It is the act of creating an identity within the sea of one’s experience...Knowledge is a deduction that is not contradicted by reality.
...
What I discretely experience is distinctively known. Yet my distinctions assert more than the most basic discrete experiences about reality, such as applying meaning, consistent identities, and claims about greater reality beyond these distinctions. These types of distinctions are known to myself, but it is unknown whether their claims about reality apart from the distinction itself can be known. I find the only way to know such beliefs is to apply it beyond the distinction itself. This will be called applicable knowledge.

I discretely experience, and I extract from it the necessary forms of that experience (as opposed to the empirical data of that experience); and I apply my hypothesis without contradiction to reality, thusly making it applicable knowledge that is a priori knowledge. I don’t see anything incorrect going here, even in terms of your position.

Ok, @Mww, I see your point now: “reality” cannot include the a priori modes of cognizing it; so our a priori faculties are not technically “real” in that sense, but must be grounded ontologically in something which allows for those faculties to exist—we just can’t know definitively what that is (viz., I do not know myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself).

I noted that math is the logic of discrete experience. But it still needs to be learned through experience.

I can’t tell if you are saying we just self-reflectively use math to navigate experience, or that math is a form of how we experience—the difference between saying, e.g., the ball has mathematically features itself (phenomenally), or that we just use math to nominally understand the ball (phenomenally).

This is why Kant famously said that all knowledge begins with experience but that does not mean all knowledge arises out of experience. — Bob Ross

A fun and poetic saying, but it does not make logical sense

You aren’t understanding it (with all due respect); and I can see now this is the root of our disagreement. You are thinking that a priori knowledge is knowledge one comes born with in the sense that they don’t have to glean it from the forms of experience—that’s not what it means.

All empirical data is from your brain Bob. All experience is in your brain.

Space data is not empirical—you are using the terms to loosely. There are aspects of your experience which your brain produces as a matter of how it is pre-structured to represent vs. the actual empirical data it is representing.

How can one have experience and also not have experience?

I was noting that not all aspects of experience are empirical; and I can’t tell if you agree with that or not (yet).

I think that evolution and biology are the groundings for Teleology: I don't think that there needs to be an agent that designed it for there to be design.

@RogueAI

When your moral theory arrives at an immoral position, then your moral theory is wrong. Giving a zygote standing over Mrs Smith is immoral, and hence so is any moral theory that reaches that conclusion. Your moral theory reaches that conclusion. Hence it is wrong.

You are begging the question: whether or not my theory arrives at an “immoral position” is exactly the essence of the abortion debate, which you are supposed to be engaging with me on.

By positing that any moral theory which arrives an immoral position is wrong, you are not wrong (in that claim); but the problem is that you must provide an alternative moral theory in order to demonstrate that an immoral position actually was reached (unless you want to appeal to moral intuitions).

I haven't denied that zygotes have rights, but instead have maintained neutrality on that odd issue. My position is that whatever rights the zygot might have are far outweighed by those of Mrs Smith.

That is exactly the issue: you aren’t engaging with any of the ethical considerations of this dilemma. You are just keeping it vague and appealing to a moral intuition that you have (at best) that we should allow women to violate a zygote’s rights.

That little parenthetical withdrawal made me smile. You rights are ABSOLUTE, except for...

:smile: We can split hairs on what exactly the right to practice religion entails, but my point is that if it is a right than whatever it entails is absolute—surely you can agree with that?!? Otherwise, we are talking about privileges...I think we can find common ground here.

Rights are not found in the world. They are given, by us.

They are given by us to best uphold the respect we deserve; and, in this sense, are innate. If there were no societies, one would still have basic human rights.

The rights of Mrs Smith outweigh the rights of a mere cyst.

This is internally incoherent; for a right is absolute, and saying someone has the right to X but only by a degree such that someone else’s right to X can trump it is to say, in a convoluted fashion, at best, that the former only has a privilege to X. If they have a right to X, then that cannot be taken away even for someone else’ right to X.

E.g., if I have a right not to be murdered, then I cannot rightfully be murdered even if someone else could be saved from being murdered, who also has a right not to be, by sacrificing me. To say I have a degree of a right to not be murdered, is to really say I have a privilege to not be murdered (in some scenarios).

CC:@RogueAI

There is no purpose….There is no design

Then, e.g., you cannot say that a baby should have been born with two arms but was born with one instead.

I fail to see why this is morally relevant. In every case you are performing some action which kills the zygotes and saves the baby. That is all that matters

So you think a tactical bomber that kills an innocent bystander when blowing up a military building is intending the same thing in terms of killing in every morally relevant sense than a terror bomber who also kills in innocent person?

So you think that pulling the lever to save the five by killing the one is the same kind of intention [of killing] as killing an innocent person to harvest their organs to save five sick patients?

Your view is too naive. Intentions matter.

I'm claiming that even if they have a right to life this right to life is not absolute.

A right is a entitlement which one can exercise about themselves on other people which is irrevocable. What you just described is a privilege—not a right.

Whatever “right to life” entails or means, it must be absolute if it is a right. E.g., if you have a right to practice any religion (peacefully) that you want, then there is absolutely no circumstances where the nation in which you live can stop you from practicing your religion (peacefully). What you are arguing, is the nonsensical and internally incoherent position that, e.g., the right to freedom of religion isn’t always applicable; which would, in all honesty, convert the “right” to a “privilege”.

We see this in the case where we are willing to sacrifice (as an unfortunate consequence) five zygotes to save one baby. Some things are worth more than the life of a zygote (e.g. the life of a baby, or the life of the mother).

You don’t understand what a right is. Rights are not circumstantial. You cannot go and kidnap an old person who is about to die and harvest their organs to save a young sick patient: the cops would stop you, because that old person has a right not to be killed when innocent. You can’t say “well, in this circumstance, although I think they have that right, we can kill them because I value this young patient more than a really old person who is about to die anyways”. THAT’S NEVER HOW RIGHTS HAVE EVER WORKED.

this rational telos is what grounds human zygotic right to life

It grounds the right to life for all members of any rational species: it is the fundamental principle that grounds rights for persons—of any kind.

Are you suggesting that rational telos is somehow virtuous

This doesn’t make any sense to me: virtue is excellence relative to something, whereas Telos refers to the purpose(s) behind something. The Telos is what grounds what is virtuous; whereas your question presumes that virtue is absolute and wonders if a specific Telos is virtuous or not. For an aristotelian, this makes no sense at all. Virtue is determined by whether or not a thing is excellent at being something (e.g., itself, a farmer, a spoon, a clock, etc.) and usually in terms of what it is itself (e.g., the virtue of a clock, the virtue of a human, etc.).

The virtue of a person is simply certain states of being, behavioral habits, and intellectual dispositions which make a person excellent at being a person.

or maybe suggesting that human zygotes should have the right to life simply because they’re like you (instinctually valuing what is like you)?

What do you mean by “like you”? If you mean that they look like me, then that is obviously false (unless you think a zygote looks like an adult). If you mean that they have a nature such that they are marked out as a person, because their Telos dictates that they will develop rational capacities; then yes; but this does not only apply, in principle, to humans: any rational species would suffice, or even, honestly, a member of an irrational species that happens to be rational (by freak accident) or a being which is rational (in the proper sense) which is not a member of a species (e.g., certain AI).