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.
…
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).

I tend to agree with Banno on this one. If you require argumentation to establish that a bunch of cells trumps the personal autonomy and rights of a woman, there's a problem.

You are, then, begging the question; and using "obviousness" as a cop-out to actually put in the intellectual work to have a coherent position. Anyone can make an argument that X is true because if X is false then something must be wrong: that's just lazy, circular logic.

If you cannot provide any reasons for why the zygote does not have a right to life (in your view); then you are just wasting everyone's time, because you don't have a view.

My apologies on the long delay on my reply! I had intended to reply to this another time as I had some other conversations in play, and only remembered this recently.

No worries at all, my friend!

If we say 'experience' here is 'empirical data', then I'm fine with this. Our thoughts, memories, etc are all 'experience', but I suppose not define here

I would say it is also independent of the imagination, thoughts, memories, etc. being that it is the necessary preconditions for that as well.

True 'non-empirical' based experiences are what we would call 'instincts'.

Not quite: an instinct is a way one is predisposed to reacting to experience; whereas the a priori means of cognizing objects is a way we are pre-structured to experience. To your point, we could very well say that there are a priori instincts we have vs. ones we learn. My point here is just that you are invalidly forming a dichotomy between ‘instincts’ and ‘experience’ which turns out to be a false one.

A JTB theory of knowledge has long been countered by "The Gettier Problem".

I no longer see the gettier problems as problematic at all (tbh); but you are correct.

What is apriori knowledge if apriori is simply instinct? The moment a baby kicks, it knows what its like to kick through its empirical sensations. The moment a child learns about ''the number 1' its now empirical knowledge. 'Apriori knowledge' is a misnomer. It doesn't make any sense.

You aren’t thinking about it properly, and this is what is the root of the confusion. Not everything that is a priori is instinctual (like I noted before); and a priori knowledge is any knowledge which has its truth-maker in the way we experience as opposed to what we experience.

This is why Kant noted that math is a priori; because no matter what you are experiencing, the propositions in math are true in virtue of the way we cognize objects in space and time which is true for anything a human will experience. “1 + 1 = 2” is true as grounded by the way our brains cognize, the mathematical axioms which it has, and not because of something we learned about something which we experienced (in terms of its purely empirical content). This is why Kant famously said that all knowledge begins with experience but that does not mean all knowledge arises out of experience.

All bodies are extended is something we empirically learn by experience, not anything we are born with.

Again, all knowledge begins with experience—not all knowledge arises out of it. The space which objects are presented to you in is purely synthetic: it is something your brain added into the mix—not empirical data.

The problem you are having is that ‘experience’ encompasses both an a priori and a posteriori aspect; and so there are equivocations being made here by both of us in our discussion. I will try to be more clear from now on. What we are discussing is not if knowledge begins with experience, but if there aspects of our experience which are not experiential.

Its similar, but not exactly the same. The most like apriori is distinctive knowledge

No, my point is that your theory sidesteps the question: it doesn’t address it and doesn’t eliminate its possibility. Nothing about distinctive vs. applicable knowledge negates the possibility of a priori knowledge: the a priori vs. a posteriori distinction is a different one than you are addressing in your theory; and I am merely noting that a priori knowledge is not incompatible with your view.

There is no instinct to do math in any base. It takes time for this to develop in humans.

Bases are just different ways to represent numbers: I am talking about numbers themselves

If you are going to claim, like @Banno, that a zygote does not have a right to life or (if I am being overly-charitable) that there are different degrees to a given right, then you must be able to back that up with good reasons and, overall, a cogent and internally coherent ethical theory. Neither of you have demonstrated that at all: Banno just keeps blanketly asserting "it's obvious!".

What???

You just keep asserting it, without giving any ethical reasons for believing it. Why believe that a zygote does not have a right to life? Answer that.

All your argument has been thus far, is that zygotes don't have rights. I want to know why you believe that.

Moreover, no, you cannot give zygotes a degree of rights cogently: that converts it into privileges.

So, why do you believe a zygote does not have rights, such as the right to life? Where or when does a human being get those rights?

It's not clear what you mean by teleology.

I mean it in its standard sense: science of purpose [behind things as opposed to the physical cause of things].

If you just mean that a zygote is highly likely to naturally develop a rational will

No, I mean that a zygote will naturally develop into a being with a rational will all else being equal; no different than how a zygote will naturally develop into having two hands, a body, a brain, etc. per se (whereas, per accidens, it may not fulfill the Telos of which it has for various reasons [e.g., improper gestation, etc.]). When you say it is “highly likely”, you are not noting what it was designed to become but, rather, the probability of, in reality, under the nuanced circumstances, of its environment allowing it to develop into what it was supposed to become.

3. Pulling the lever moves the box containing five zygotes onto the primary track, before the box containing one baby (stopping the trolley from travelling further).

This is an example, if I am understanding it correctly, of a trolley problem which would be analogous to @RogueAI’s example; and it would equally be immoral to do so.

#3 is fundamentally different than #2 and #1 because it is the only example Michael has (in their thought experiment) where the zygotes are a means towards saving the baby. I am suspecting neither of you understand this, and this is the root of your confusion.

But if you still insist that (1) and (3) are morally distinct, then what if you don't know which of (1), (2), and (3) is the manner in which the baby can be saved? Each is equally likely. Should you pull the lever or not?

I would say this would be immoral; because you are not noting the probability of weighing who might likely save but, rather, the probability of doing something immoral vs. permissible. This would be a sadistic game that I would encourage anyone to avoid playing.

If we were talking about probabilities of producing bad side effects then that would be a different story.

In my mind the answer is clear; always do what you can to save the baby, irrespective of how or how many zygotes are killed in the process.

That’s because you don’t believe they have rights; and I do. If you thought they had the right to life, then you wouldn’t make this kind of claim.

How many times are you going to ask the same question?

The answer is still no, I would not use the zygotes to put out the fire. I've elaborated in detail why that would be wrong: please ask questions if you are confused at all on it.



This is a really bad ethical principle. If I take it seriously, then we should kill and harvest the organs of physically disabled people to save the lives of normal, sick people. It is nonsense.

I understand your confusion, but I've clarified this many times now. A zygote is not a person (in that strict sense that you mean) but has a nature that marks it out as going to be a person (aka: "will be" a person, as you put it). It is not, under my view, the immanent personhood that grounds rights but, rather, the teleological nature.

When I said "because they are persons", I was speaking loosely in the sense of the teleological claim; which how persons were defined in the pre-modern sense. In the modern sense, you are right to point out that they are not persons.

To clarify, this teleological account of rights IS NOT equivalent to grounding rights in potential persons; for "potentiality" is a very loose term that covers more than telos (e.g., perhaps a cow has the potential to be a person since we could give it a brain chip).

For your view, as you and I have noted, you have to ground rights in actual personhood; and this leads to absurd results (e.g., a knocked out human has no rights while knocked out).

One cannot just ground rights in the organism nor personhood: it must be grounded in the consideration of the nature of the organism.

In short, to make this painfully clear, in modern terminology a zygote is not a person (nor is a knocked out adult) and I would say they are teleologically marked out to become a person; and in pre-modern terminology (which I prefer) a zygote (and a knocked out adult) are persons because their nature marks them out as such. Either way you prefer, human beings have these rights because they are teleologically set out as (becoming) persons.

It is also worth mentioning that non-persons still have rights---they just aren't the same. E.g., a cow has the right to not be tortured for fun.