Audio only:
In this episode, Trent shares highlights from his recent abortion dialogue with prominent YouTuber Destiny on the Whatever podcast.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. So at the time I’m recording this, I’m actually on my way from Santa Barbara, where I just finished my debate with Destiny on the Whatever Podcast on the issue of abortion, and now I’m heading to Steubenville to speak at the Defending the Faith Conference and to be on Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd. So today, I just wanted to share with you some highlights from the debate with Destiny, and I think you’ll really enjoy them. So check that out. By the way, if you could help us, if you can like this video and subscribe, that’s really helpful for us, because the more subscribers we have, that makes it easier to go and be able to appear on larger channels, like the Whatever Podcast and other venues like that, to be able to do debates on Christianity, Catholicism. If you could subscribe to the channel, that would really help us grow and reach more people, so without further ado, here are the highlights of my debate with Destiny on abortion.
So I believe that we should treat unborn human beings, human fetuses, human embryos like we would treat born human beings. There can be cases where if a born human being, even an innocent born human being, threatens the life of another innocent born human being, like if somebody, their drink gets spiked at a party, they go crazy, they grab a gun, and they’re going to shoot people, you might have to use lethal force to protect other people. But I believe that most abortions, they’re not meant to protect someone’s life. They, instead, are meant to protect elements of one’s lifestyle. I don’t mean to put it crudely, but social reasons, economic reasons. I think, just as we don’t kill toddlers just because they might be in a difficult situation, like the dad’s left, mom lost her job, we don’t kill toddlers in a really bad situation to try to make it better, we shouldn’t do the same to unborn human beings if they have the same value as a toddler does.
Destiny:
So to go back, when you asked me, is something like objectively right or wrong, I don’t believe that there is an objective right or wrong, just like I don’t think there’s an objective beautiful, an objective best song, or an objective, anything like that, no.
Trent Horn:
I would say it’s evil to rape someone. It is wrong to do that, and it is a fact that no one should ever do that, full stop. Would you just say rape makes you feel bad, you don’t like it, you’d prefer people don’t do that?
Destiny:
Yeah. That’s essentially the non-cognitive position, right? Because I don’t believe there’s a fact to be observed. My challenge would be is, how do I observe a moral fact?
Trent Horn:
Well, I just think that we have a sense of observing morality, just like we have a sense of observing the natural world, and it’s not the matrix. We have an intuitive ability to do that, and I have no reason to deny that that ability exists. Just as I know the world around us is real, even if I can’t prove that, I know that it’s an objective fact that it’s wrong to rape children, for example. Here’s what I think honestly happens. It doesn’t have to just be abortion. Give me any moral dispute.
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
What we’ll say is, all right, here’s moral issue X. You have your view, I have my view, and we critique. And a lot of the ways we critique each other’s views is, “Your view leads to these crazy consequences.”
“But your view leads to crazy consequences.”
So then we kind of say, “Okay. Whose view leads to less crazy consequences?” and that may be the more reasonable view, we are told.
I think that happens a lot in moral discourse. So your view, then, would be this, and then I’ll talk about the consequences, and I’ll talk about just the overall, what I think is wrong with the view. That a person exists, when you lose the immediate ability to be conscious, I guess when you permanently lose it, like if you’re in a persistent vegetative state permanently, you’re no longer a person. When you lose consciousness, you’re not a person. You are when you lose it permanently, so you start to be a person when you gain it. Prior to 20 weeks, there is no person. There’s no one there with a right to life in the fetus, correct? Your view. So I have a few questions then. Would it be wrong to cause a healthy fetus to become permanently unconscious?
Destiny:
No.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So would it be wrong to cause this permanent unconsciousness to use, let’s say you could keep growing the fetus into an older body to use it for organ harvesting, maybe as a kind of sex doll, even?
Destiny:
As long as it never became conscious or didn’t have a [inaudible 00:04:27].
Trent Horn:
Never became conscious.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Related question, but we’ll circle back soon. What are your thoughts on fake child pornography, using AI or virtual images?
Destiny:
Fake child pornography. I’m not going to have a strong opinion on the action itself. It’s going to be consequential in nature in terms of what are the impacts of doing it. So say you create a bunch and people stop actually abusing children, I’d probably be in favor of it. Say you create a bunch and it leads to an increased harm of children, I’d probably be opposed to it.
Trent Horn:
You have a practical objection, not an in principle objection.
Destiny:
No, it wouldn’t be like, no. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So then it circles back, so let’s say we had people who took fetuses, made them permanently unconscious, and made them infant toddler or child sex dolls. So we have unconscious infants and toddlers. They were never conscious. They’re used as child sex dolls. Your only objection to that practice would be if it caused more pedophilia among other conscious [inaudible 00:05:31].
Destiny:
Correct. Yeah, because I would say there’s no person that’s being harmed there.
Trent Horn:
Okay, so child sex dolls could be on the table. Okay.
Destiny:
Kind of, although I would fight the framing of this, because child is intuition, pumping the idea that it’s a fully formed, developed human, and I would never call a brainless thing a child.
Trent Horn:
Fine. Yes, so then I would say-
Destiny:
A human body lacking a brain, I would say you can do whatever you want with it.
Trent Horn:
… A biological human organism that proceeds through the child stages-
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
… That is never conscious. Suppose we had a drug that could, take the Anencephaly case. Normally, if your upper brain conscious doesn’t develop, it’s never going to develop. Suppose we had a drug in the future that could allow an anencephalic fetus to develop consciousness, but if we don’t give it the drug, it’ll never be conscious. Does that fetus, that human being, biological human being, would they have a right to that treatment?
Destiny:
I don’t think they would’ve any rights yet, because rights, I would say, are only afforded to persons, and fetuses are not afforded any rights. So no, it would not have a right to it, no.
Trent Horn:
So even if we had a newborn-
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
… Who could be conscious if we gave them medicine, they don’t have any kind of right to that treatment?
Destiny:
No.
Trent Horn:
And I guess the-
Destiny:
Although again, I would fight on the optics framing, because when you say newborn, we’re intuition pumping a normal, healthy, nine-month fetus that’s now delivered. But I would fight that whatever you’re describing is a very inhuman-
Trent Horn:
Well, it is a newly born human being that has a brain injury or lack of parts of a brain. It is a newly born human being with a congenital, cerebral defect, and we could give this human being medication for them to have a normal and healthy life. But you’re saying this human being would have no right to it, and I guess their parents wouldn’t have a right to say, “This child ought to be treated any more than somebody who has a dog that’s injured would have a right to similar treatment.”
Destiny:
I mean, you’d have a right to treat your animals, right?
Trent Horn:
But the question of whether we, as a human society, will treat this infant will be similar as similar.
Destiny:
Is there some moral compulsion, like a healthcare system to provide emergency services or something?
Trent Horn:
Right. Yes.
Destiny:
Yeah, no. I would say no.
Trent Horn:
Okay, so no duty to provide medical care to newly born human beings who have a brain defect?
Destiny:
Kind of, although again, I’m going to fight because when you say “newly born human beings,” you’re intuition pumping a normal, healthy-
Trent Horn:
What do you mean by intuition pumping?
Destiny:
When I say intuition pump, what I mean is, do you think it’s okay to rape a person that doesn’t have a brain? Then, if I say, “Well, I guess. It’s not barely a person,” you’re like, “Okay, so it’s okay to rape people with brain injuries,” I would fight, and I would say, “Well, when you say people or person, the intuition is when somebody thinks of a person, they think of a normal, healthy, functioning person,” and then you’re plugging in all of the normative baggage of raping somebody, which ordinarily we would all agree is an unethical thing to do to a person.
Trent Horn:
Sure, or I could be describing it accurately, a newly born human being, because human being is a biological category. Most people have a deep intuition that newly born human beings are persons, even though they don’t-
Destiny:
Where does that intuition come from, though?
Trent Horn:
It comes from a moral sense that we have, the same sense we have that people are persons regardless of their skin color, first of all.
Destiny:
No, I disagree. I think it probably comes from us seeing human beings that are born and the vast majority of them being healthy, right? It was the case that only five percent of human beings that were born come out with fully functioning brains, that intuition could be markedly different, so that’s the only reason why I fight on the newborn child with a brain injury. We’re talking about an exceptional, kind of like when pro-choice people argue about abortion to save the life of the mother. They’re like, “Shouldn’t this be illegal?” pro-lifers will usually point out, “Well, that’s an exceptional circumstance. It’s a very rare case of abortion.” I would argue that whatever you’re talking about would be a 0.000001%. This is a very rare. I don’t even know if these types of brain injuries exist when people are born, except for the hydrocephalus.
Trent Horn:
Well, anencephaly is real condition. What I’m talking about is a hypothetical example of we develop medicine to treat it.
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
And that’s not as farfetched as a brain transplant or a teleporter. I mean, 150 years ago, a hip replacement would be science fiction, and now we can do that.
Destiny:
That is true, but I don’t know if we’ve made any progress in terms of brain regrowth or transplants, but I mean, who’s to say it couldn’t happen in the future? Sure.
Trent Horn:
Right. I do have a concern. When you say, “I am intuition pumping,” I agree with you, people can have misleading examples. I’m trying to keep the language very clear here, but I would say the way you use the term makes it sound like intuition pumps are bad. That’s not traditionally how the term is used. So for example, the term comes from the philosopher, Daniel Dennett. So he coined the term, I think back in the 80s. He wrote a book in 2013 called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
He says this, “I coined the term in the first of my public critiques of the philosopher John Searle’s famous Chinese room thought-experiment. Some thinkers concluded, “I meant the term to be disparaging or dismissive. On the contrary, I love intuition pumps. That is some intuition. Pumps are excellent. Some are dubious, and only a few are downright deceptive.” So I agree with you; someone could create a thought experiment that’s deceptive in its nature, but the fact that I’m just describing what is happening to members of the human species, I don’t think that’s deceptive in any way.
Destiny:
Sure, and I partially agree. So for instance, if somebody says, “Why would you hit your own wife? That makes about as much sense as keying your own car,” we could argue that there is a pump there that, I think, like the fact that you would compare your wife to a car maybe demonstrates that there’s another issue going over the-
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, I would say that the example has a mistake mistaken set of assumptions built into it.
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
Which you can do for any thought experiment.
Destiny:
Yeah, yeah. Real quick, because I understand that you’ve set up a lot of questions for, I will say, intuition pumping that kind of make my position sound insane.
Trent Horn:
You can ask me questions too. That’s fine.
Destiny:
Well, but these are the questions that I’m more interested in, because you come from a position of moral authority, where you believe that you have a set of objective facts that you want to argue in favor of. But my argument to you would be, I don’t believe that you can ever prove an objective fact without diving into The Bible. There’s no way that we can reconcile moral fact to disagreements, because we don’t have a sensory organ to perceive it. We can argue over color, we can argue over gravity, we can argue over things we can perceive, but morality, we can’t perceive. We just have how we feel about it, and I don’t think that’s a satisfying answer for a lot of people.
Trent Horn:
And I would just say, if that were true, there’s really no point in us talking about this at all right now. You’d have to say it’s not an objective fact. Is it an objective fact that the state should allow women to have abortions?
Destiny:
Is it an objective fact that the state should? Well, that “should” is doing a lot of work there. With regards to my purported morals, I would say yes, it is, that they should be allowed to have an abortion.
Trent Horn:
But it’s not objective. You’re just saying, “I would really like if we-”
Destiny:
We can have “should” without them being objective, right or no?
Trent Horn:
Well, what you’re saying here is that you would just like if the state did what you thought was good.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
What you agreed with, what you-
Destiny:
Yes, correct.
Trent Horn:
Or not even what you thought was good, because that’s a factual category. What makes you feel good if the world were that way.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
Okay. That’s an opinion.
Destiny:
It is.
Trent Horn:
Okay, and that’s why we argue with each other, is to-
Destiny:
But I believe, at the end of the day, we’re engaged in the same game. It’s just, I think, that you feel like you’re standing on more solid ground than you actually have.
Trent Horn:
I do think so. Here’s another question. Do you think post-abortive women who think they’re murderers or women who mourn miscarriage, like it’s the death of a baby, that they’re diluted?
Destiny:
Not necessarily, no.
Trent Horn:
Do you think-
Destiny:
I think that when they’re mourning, I think that they’re mourning a missed opportunity, rather than the thing itself, I think.
Trent Horn:
But if you asked them, women who’ve had abortions, and say, “I’m a murderer,” or a woman who miscarries and says, “My baby died,” I think most of them wouldn’t phrase it, because some of those women may have also gone through periods of infertility, and I’m sure they would say their period of infertility was different than the death of the human being that was residing in their womb. So I guess, let me put it to you this way.
Destiny:
What I’m saying is, I think if a woman miscarries or if she has an abortion, and later comes to have regrets about it, I think that the feeling she has is probably not like, “Oh my God. There was that three week fetus, and I terminated it.” She’s probably thinking like, “There was a baby that could have existed. I could have delivered a baby. I would’ve had a child. There was a person there that’s now gone.”
Trent Horn:
Do you think those women ever say, “I killed my baby?” not something will be-
Destiny:
Probably, yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay.
Destiny:
They probably say that.
Trent Horn:
Do you think a woman who says, “I’m a murderer because I had my period, and I expelled an egg from my body,” she’s like, “I murdered a human being,” do you think she’s diluted?
Destiny:
If you thought you murdered a human being because you had a period?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. You passed an egg. It didn’t get fertilized, and that egg died.
Destiny:
It’s a loaded word, but I say she’s probably diluted. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Why is she diluted?
Destiny:
I’m not even sure. I mean, periods are part of normal human menstruation. Are you crying every month because you’re murdering?
Trent Horn:
My point is that I agree.
Destiny:
But I would take the same intuitive answer, and I would say, “Does a woman cry or feel bad when she accidentally has a slightly rougher period? She doesn’t even realize that she’s miscarried, because there’s a lot of miscarriages happen early on when women don’t even know they’re pregnant yet.”
Trent Horn:
No, I agree. I am not saying that, because an unborn human being is a person, that everyone who miscarries will react properly or react with intense grief. There’s lots of born people that die. We don’t shed a tear for at all. There’s people dying right now as we’re talking, okay? But my point is that, if the unborn, if a human embryo prior to 20 weeks, would you agree that it has the same moral status as an ovum, an egg?
Destiny:
Same. I mean, they’re different things, but yeah, roughly the same, I guess, yeah. As a no moral status, yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay, so then I would say that if a woman is, we would consider her diluted or off the reservation, or “Hey. There’s nothing to get worked up over here. It was just an ovum. You’re operating with a really mistaken sense of the world.” It seems like, under your view, we should have that same mentality towards post-abortive women prior to 20 weeks, but I think my view better aligns with most people’s intuitions that the death of a human embryo or fetus is far, far different morally than the death of an ovum.
Destiny:
But they’re not valuing that fetus. They’re valuing what it would become. And again, I agree with what you’re saying, but I think that you’re skipping over really important steps. If I steal $10,000 from somebody than I steal $100,000 from them, I didn’t, but if I stole $10,000 from somebody when they’re 20, maybe when they’re 25, they’re like, “Oh, God. If I would’ve invested this, or 27, over seven years, maybe I could have had $100,000.” So when they’re 25, they might feel really bad. They feel like, “I should be $100,000 richer, but that doesn’t change the fact that 7 years earlier, I only stole $10,000, not $100,000.” So if somebody loses a fetus, they might feel bad because now they’re missing the child that could have been, much the same that if somebody would’ve connected with the right person earlier in life, maybe they could have had a wonderful marriage, but just because they’re mourning, the fact that they didn’t meet a person at the right time, it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly divorced. The marriage never happened, the same way the child never-
Trent Horn:
So you’re saying when somebody grieves over a miscarriage at, let’s say, 12 weeks, that’s the same grief as missed connections on Craigslist like, “Oh. He could have been the one”?
Destiny:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay. I’ll leave it up to our listeners to see if that is plausible. What if I gave you this argument, hold on. Let me, I have here. Because the symmetry argument you’re making, I feel like I can make a better one that runs on the same principles. So what about this argument? I don’t endorse this for everything, but let’s just do it for this discussion. A person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual. Do you agree with that?
Destiny:
When future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual? Yeah, they lose the ability to have a conscious. Yeah, sure.
Trent Horn:
All right, so a person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual. Number two, a person exists as long as future conscious experiences are probable for that individual.
Destiny:
And they had one prior. Yes, because otherwise that sentence is meaningless.
Trent Horn:
Then, why don’t I add this rider to it, then? And any conscious experiences they have must be psychologically connected to any previous experiences.
Destiny:
Maybe? It’s just the sentence that you gave, a person exists as long as future conscious experience is possible, so you’ve got the future conscious experience on there. But when you say, “A person exists,” that person, I think, begs the conscious experience. I don’t know what it means for a person to exist if there is no conscious experience yet.
Trent Horn:
I’m just trying to do the exact same symmetry argument you’re doing, that if you stop existing, if you were an individual, and you stop existing, when for this individual future conscious experiences are impossible-
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
Then, the other one would be, “For this individual, this individual is a person as long as future conscious experiences are probable.”
Destiny:
Yeah, but when you’re making the graph and the math thing, you have to have the filled in circle and then the ray.
Trent Horn:
It’s just saying, “Look, this person’s future conscious experiences, they’re impossible. You are not a person.”
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
So the symmetry for that, in fact I’m actually being generous, because the symmetry would not be improbable. It’d be possible.
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
So my point would just be then, a person, if a person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible, why can’t we say a person exists as long as the future experiences are possible, and a person starts existing at the first moment those experiences are possible?
Destiny:
I think that is my position.
Trent Horn:
It isn’t, because I would say, so for example, if somebody ends up in a persistent vegetative state, they’ve lost their immediate capacity to have conscious experiences, but some people do come out of persistent vegetative states.
Destiny:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
All right? So the point is not that they’re able to have conscious experiences. It’s just that, at some point in the future, they will be able to do that.
Destiny:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Okay, so then wouldn’t it follow then for that individual, even when they were in embryo, they’re in the same position? At some point in the future they’ll have conscious experiences. I feel like your rejoinder is just going to be, the PVS person has the machinery for it. The embryo doesn’t, but I just don’t see how that’s relevant to the symmetry here.
Destiny:
Because when you say “the fetus will in the future,” it hasn’t yet. There’s no person yet. A person in a vegetative state or a coma, there is a person to speak of. If I have a coma right now, you can say, “Steven was a person, and he might have a future conscious experience.” If I haven’t even existed yet, there’s no Steven to even speak of. There’s nothing there to speak of.
Trent Horn:
But every being with conscious experiences will have a first experience.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
And I think that happens at 20 to 28 weeks. Do you think a one-cell organism is having an experience? No, it’s not.
Destiny:
Do you think a 20-cell organism is having an experience?
Trent Horn:
But I would say what makes you a person is not the moment you have the experience, but that you are the kind of being who can have those experiences, just as someone who is brain-dead is the kind of being who will never have those experiences.
Destiny:
What is the difference? What’s difference between an embryo and a corpse?
Trent Horn:
The difference is a corpse is a human organism that is lost organic unity. The parts don’t work together for the good of the whole, and so it will decompose. It will lose composition. It’ll fall apart. An embryo is a living organism. Its parts work together to grow other parts. When it becomes sophisticated enough, it will grow a brain to take over to keep development going.
Destiny:
That’s only with the help of the mother though.
Trent Horn:
Well, all of us need our mom’s help when we’re little. We need to be fed. We need to be sheltered.
Destiny:
Nothing else past birth needs to be connected biologically to another thing, right? So whatever definition you give of the zygote, the single cell, the union, I would argue you could give that same definition for a sperm or an egg. You can argue that a sperm or an egg on its own will never develop in anything. The sperm or the egg need an egg or a sperm; however, the fetus will never develop in anything. It needs the sustenance from the mother, right?
Trent Horn:
So here’s the difference. I believe that something is an organism if you can give it time, nutrition and a proper environment, and it has the capacity to develop into a mature member of a species, and it only needs those three things: time, nutrition, proper environment; however-
Destiny:
That’s great, but that’s entirely arbitrary.
Trent Horn:
Why? It’s a definition of an organism. That’s why sperm and egg and cancer cells, they are body parts. You give them time, nutrients, and environment, they’ll always be that same type of thing. They cannot develop.
Destiny:
It depends on how we define environment, right? Because a sperm put in the environment of an egg will eventually join and become as it grows inside the womb into something, like a human eventually, right?
Trent Horn:
Right, but I would say that when the sperm and the egg combine, the sperm and egg no longer exist anymore. They’ve undergone a substantial change. They’re defined as being-
Destiny:
What do you think is more different? A sperm or a one-celled organism from a nine-month baby? What do you think is more different there?
Trent Horn:
Wait. Come again. What is-
Destiny:
Yeah. There’s one sperm or one egg. What’s more different? The one sperm and the one egg to the zygote or the zygote to the nine-month fetus?
Trent Horn:
They are different in a myriad of ways.
Destiny:
Sure, but your argument, you’re saying that that nine-month fetus is more in common with the single-cell zygote than a sperm or an egg has with a single-cell zygote.
Trent Horn:
A nine-month fetus and zygote are the same kind of thing, because the words zygote and fetus, if you look them up, we’d say, “This is the stage of development in the life of a human being,” so a nine-month fetus and a zygote are very different. One’s going to have billions of more cells, for example. But a sperm, egg, and a zygote, the difference there is greater, because we’re not talking about degree. A zygote and a fetus, they’re different in degrees; more cells, more abilities, but the sperm egg and the human embryo, they’re different in kind. These are organs. They’re body parts. They’re not a whole body.
Destiny:
I understand what you’re saying. I just don’t know. I’m pushing you on the arbitrariness of your saying a difference in kind, because that single-cell organism is nothing and kind. It’s got genes. It’s got a genetic profile, but without the nutrients from the mom, it’ll grow into two, four, eight cells and then what die. So in your world, the in kind of that single cell-
Trent Horn:
If you don’t give nutrients to an infant, what will happen to them?
Destiny:
The infant can die as well.
Trent Horn:
Could or will?
Destiny:
But that conscious experience is already there, so it escapes my issue.
Trent Horn:
No, but I’m saying that the point you’re making, I don’t see how it shows that the embryo is not a person or doesn’t have moral value, just because-
Destiny:
I’m just saying-
Trent Horn:
… Humans at that stage are-
Destiny:
You have a strange definition of time, nutrition, and proper environment, and then you are drawing an arbitrary border around-
Trent Horn:
I’m saying that’s what makes something an organism.
Destiny:
Yeah, but we’re not arguing over something being an organism or not. Right? We’re arguing over when something gets personhood.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and I’m saying persons are kinds of organisms. A person is a kind of being, capable of rational existence.
Destiny:
Well, yeah. It’s a kind of being capable of rational existence, though that stops when the being is dead, correct?
Trent Horn:
Right, because the being doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone back to body parts.
Destiny:
Well, it does exist. Or what do you mean it doesn’t exist?
Trent Horn:
I would say that-
Destiny:
What part stops existing?
Trent Horn:
The organic unity. So when you are dead, so when I die, however you want to define that, let’s say-
Destiny:
It’s pretty important.
Trent Horn:
It is important, but just because we can’t define the moment when somebody dies, we know the difference between dead people and living people. Dead people, their bodies start to decompose because their blood’s not being pumped. It’s not being oxygenated. The parts aren’t working together for the good of the whole. From fertilization onward, a human organism has this. My point is just that human organisms are persons because they belong to a rational kind. I guess, let me put it out here. This is what I think when it comes down to the abortion debate. I think there’s really only three defensible views, and yours is not one of them.
Destiny:
Just to be clear on that, just real quick, because human organisms are part of a rational kind, I agree with you. We’re just fighting over if the brackets extend to the 20 weeks to 0 weeks, basically.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Destiny:
But I do agree with that statement, but the statement is begging the question of what is a human organism?
Trent Horn:
I’m saying you don’t need the immediate capacity. You don’t need the immediate capacity to be conscious to be a person, because I think you’re still a person, even if you have a brain injury and you’ve lost that ability temporarily. And just with the examples that I gave earlier, I think that most people would say it is wrong to take a healthy fetus, permanently make them unconscious, and do God knows what with them.
I think the only thing that can explain why that’s wrong is because that human fetus has a right to properly develop in virtue of being a person, and I think it’s a very strong moral intuition most people would share. There’s two questions. Is this individual a person? And what should the punishments be for harming this person? I feel like we don’t answer the first, we don’t answer the punishment. We don’t get the answer of the person question by answering the punishment one first. We answer, “Is this a person or not?” first, and then we figure out everything else. Otherwise, we’re working backwards with our intuitions.
Destiny:
I kind of agree, but I would argue that you were working backwards from intuitions as well when you presuppose a human body that exists without parts of its brain, which I would argue is not even necessarily a human, that you can probably remove enough parts of a person and you ship a [inaudible 00:28:17] them into another type of organism.
So if you want to work backwards from that, then obviously I’m going to ask you similar questions and work backwards from intuition around our ability to harm people, right? Because I actually think, even though it sounds strange, and it sounds like it’s working backwards, I actually think it’s hitting at the core of the issue. When we think of harming, we think of a conscious experience that’s being harmed, that’s being hurt, right? If I harm a person, I’m not thinking of poking a person that is a corpse, right?
Trent Horn:
But people could have massively incorrect intuitions. I remember a scene from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck, I think it’s Aunt Polly, he tells her in the book, “Oh. There was a steamship that exploded.”
And she said, “Oh. Did anyone die?”
He said, “No, just a few Negroes.”
Well, that’s not exactly what he said, but you get the point, and Aunt Polly says, “Oh, good. I’m glad nobody got hurt.” So people can have massively incorrect intuitions about-
Destiny:
I don’t don’t think they can in your world though, because you told me that you’re moral realist who relies on people’s intuitions, and you’re saying that any two people’s intuition should be sufficiently similar enough to agree an objective moral fact.
Trent Horn:
No. That would be on basic intuitions.
Destiny:
So now there’s different types of? Yeah. Tell me the different types.
Trent Horn:
Sure, there are. Just to say that “we ought to do good and not evil,” that’s the most basic intuition of them all.
Destiny:
But that’s not begging the question. The things we ought to do are, by definition, good. A good thing is the thing you ought to do. It’s like saying murder is unjustified when murder is defined as the unjust killing of somebody, right?
Trent Horn:
There are things you ought to do, irrespective of the consequences to you, for example, even if you end up suffering a great deal. In some cases there’s things you ought to do or refrain from because it just is good, things like that. But then, for example, you ought not directly kill an innocent human being. That’s just a general intuition everybody shares, but can you kill human beings in war, for example? Because you don’t mean to, but you’re trying to destroy an enemy base.
It’s going to be a little bit more difficult in the applied cases, but we have the most basic intuition. So for me, if the basic intuition is that we don’t kill infants, all right? We don’t kill adults. We don’t kill disabled humans. We do kill pigs, cows, and other non-human animals, why is that? To me, the only explanation? It cannot be rooted in consciousness, because what is the relevant difference between those non-human animals and the human beings? I know you say human consciousness, but there’s a difference between human consciousness and a human who is conscious, right?
Destiny:
Yeah. I just think that some of these intuitions that you’re hitting at, for taking such a solid, I guess, realist position on morality, it feels like we can find, even fundamentally, somebody could argue, for instance, in the animal world, I think I saw a video of a cheetah, where when the babies are born, they lick them. They try to get them to move, and sometimes the baby can’t move, so the cheetah will just abandon the baby and walk away.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Destiny:
So who’s to say, if a person says, “Well, I think, intuitively, if a kid can’t walk, then the kid isn’t entitled to anything,” like if you have to retreat from an area, if you need to go hunt and gather, if a child can’t walk, then you leave them? What if somebody comes at you with an intuition like that? Say, there’s a tribe where those intuitions exist? How do you figure out whose intuition is correct?
Trent Horn:
Well, we look at how we’ve come to understand human beings, and there might be really rare cases where you only have enough food to feed certain people.
Destiny:
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just saying-
Trent Horn:
Are you saying they abandon?
Destiny:
They just leave them there. Yeah, they abandon the child.
Trent Horn:
Did they abandon the child because they’re not able to care for the child?
Destiny:
No. Because the child can’t move, so they feel like until the child can move and acquire resources for itself, the child’s not really worthy of participating in the social contract, participating in that tribe. So up until the child can move, you-
Trent Horn:
They’re wrong. We would call that barbaric.
Destiny:
Okay, but why? Under what objective ground?
Trent Horn:
Under the objective ground that all human beings have dignity, no matter. And in fact, that was the difference in ancient Rome 2000 years ago. The Romans did place disabled children in the wilderness for them to be eaten by animals, and Christians went and rescued them because they recognized all human beings have this dignity, regardless of what they can do.
Destiny:
But I’m asking you, how do you resolve that difference, that disagreement and intuition? I don’t think you can.
Trent Horn:
What do you mean?
Destiny:
You can say it’s wrong or barbaric.
Trent Horn:
But that’s the same thing. You could have somebody who says, “Look, I think that marriage just means you have 24/7 access to your wife.”
Destiny:
Hold on. We don’t need another analogy. Just on that example, somebody says, “If it’s a disabled child, if they can’t walk on their own, I should be able to just leave it and carry on, because the child’s never going to be able to walk or whatever.” Why are they wrong? That’s their intuition. Intuition points there. The reason why I’m highlighting this is because you told me earlier that you made it seem like-
Trent Horn:
Because then we could use reasoning, and we could say, “Look, when you as an adult, when you get injured, we try to help you out. We don’t abandon you,” so then there’s an example where we might apply moral reasoning to help them see they’re being incoherent, for example. Why wouldn’t you apply this to someone who’s just a younger version of you, for example?
Destiny:
Yeah, but they’ll say, “I can walk again.” What about for disabled children? You said the Romans did this. They left a disabled child.
Trent Horn:
Right?
Destiny:
And then what if you say to the person, “Well, you wouldn’t want this to happen if you were disabled.”
They’re like, “Yeah. That’s part of the agreement, actually. If I was disabled, I would expect to be left.”
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I would agree. Like I said, there’s going to be cases where people have a consistent horrifying morality. They’re going to-
Destiny:
Horrifying is absolutely begging the question. I’m want to ask this.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think it’s horrifying to leave children, just because you can’t stand the side of their disability and you think they’re not worthy because of it.
Destiny:
That might be the case, but they might argue that it’s horrifying that maybe they come to America, and they say, “You can kiss my ass.”
Trent Horn:
That’s fine.
Destiny:
But they say you’ve got a society, where there are people that are able-bodied, that are capable of helping in society, and you don’t have the medical resources for them, but you’re spending billions of dollars on disabled children that are going to die before they hit nine years old.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Destiny:
Why do you have homeless people on the street, but you’re spending money on disabled children that are going to die in a few years anyway. They might be horrified about that. Then, my question goes back to you, because you told me earlier that intuition is how we determine moral fact. What I’m saying is morality is the only qualia, I guess, that exists where we can only reconcile it with arguments. I don’t have to argue with you about gravity. I don’t have to argue with you about the color of something. I don’t have to argue with you about how loud something is, but for moral fact, this is why I believe it’s subjective and not objective. You can never reconcile disagreements between two parties. They’re different intuitions.
Trent Horn:
But people do this all the time. CS Lewis, the Christian author, gave lots of examples of this, that when people have a disagreement, they’ll appeal to universal norms. They’ll say, “I was sitting in that seat first. It’s not fair for you to take it. I helped you with this. You ought to help me with that.” When people have moral disagreements, they don’t just resort to their mere opinions about the matter, or what they like or dislike. Most people appeal to some kind of universal norm to apply, and they assume it to be true for everybody. Let’s get back to brass tacks.
Destiny:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Whose view on abortion leads to more unusual cases of killing or exploiting beings? Because I asked you a bunch of questions about, and you admitted that you can create unconscious human beings, harvest their organs, make them sex dolls, kill newborns who have never been conscious. You’re not sure about one-year-olds who’ve lost their memories. There’s no obligation to give medical care to an cephalic child if we discovered it. I think your view leads to a lot of counterintuitive views that lead to a lot of killing and exploitation people would disagree with. Would you agree that there’s more of that in your view than my view?
Destiny:
No.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Can you give examples of where my view leads to weird cases of killing or exploiting?
Destiny:
Killing or exploiting? I would argue that the exploitation is forcing women to [inaudible 00:36:04] and give birth to things that aren’t even persons yet. So basically, mandating that women, as soon as they think they might even possibly be pregnant, that they have now a moral obligation to find out if they are pregnant, and if they are, that they’re forced to carry that thing to term, regardless of how many precautions they took to prevent getting pregnant.
I also think we’re placing a very high burden on our medical system, where we now have an obligation to care for every single zygote up to the moment metabolism terminates. So if a woman feels like she might be having a miscarriage, that woman can’t go to the bathroom and miscarry. She needs to go to a hospital immediately. Even if it’s six weeks old, even if it’s 10 weeks old, that miscarriage needs to be dealt with the same way that you would operate on any living human being. You need to extract it. You need to put it in a dish, and you need to feed that and keep it alive for as long as the metabolic functions will carry on for it.
Trent Horn:
Well, why can’t I just say hospitals are required to give a woman progesterone to help her child? We don’t have the technology yet to extract.
Destiny:
You were asking me to give you the potential harms in your world. Now you want to reframe it in the best possible light, but I’m just saying, in your world, there’s hospitals and hospitals and hospitals dedicated to keeping alive, potentially, these 64, 128 cell organisms that may never even develop into people.
Trent Horn:
So you’re saying that the weirdest thing about my view is that we might care about human beings too much?
Destiny:
Well, that’s one way to phrase it, but I would argue that you’re not caring about the women human beings. You’re caring about the 12-cell organisms that now need to be indefinitely cared for in hospitals in petri dishes.
Trent Horn:
Well, under my view, what about those women who want those children to live? Shouldn’t they be able to go to the hospital and get help?
Destiny:
In my view, they can go to the hospital and get help.
Trent Horn:
I agree; that’s what makes it really weird.
Destiny:
So nothing about what you just said is exclusionary, in my view, right?
Trent Horn:
No, because your view isn’t actually applied. Most people in the world outside there don’t hold your view. They have a schizophrenic view. They give respect, care, and legal protection to unborn humans that are wanted, and then create justification to kill the unwanted ones.
Destiny:
That’s great. You can ask them about their schizophrenic views, but I think I’m pretty consistent, through and through, for all [inaudible 00:37:52]-
Trent Horn:
And I agree. That’s why both of our views, I think people should abandon their schizophrenic view and pick one of our consistent views, and I think mine is more humane.
Destiny:
Sure.
Trent Horn:
Here’s what I think you’re doing. When you use human conscious experience as a criteria, you use the word human to get rid of animals that are very conscious and aware, can do tricks, have memories.
Destiny:
But they don’t have a sapient conscious experience, like a human does. None of them do.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Destiny:
Not even remotely close. To shortcut all this, if you came with this argument, you wanted to fight really hard, and you actually just dominated and thrashed this part of the argument, the only thing you would do is you would get me to move the abortion age later and later and later. It would become a Daniel Dennett, abort-at-two-years position.
Trent Horn:
Or it would be Peter-
Destiny:
Or Peter Singer. I’m sorry.
Trent Horn:
Infanticide.
Destiny:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
That’s exactly what I’m doing.
Destiny:
Sure, and if you want to push it further out, I’m not compelled by any of the arguments argument. You can, but it’s not getting me to a point to where the 12-cell thing needs to be kept alive in a Petri dish, or women needs to be charged with double homicide if they have an abortion at 12 weeks in its [inaudible 00:38:48].
Trent Horn:
Because I think most people will find it arbitrary, so let me finish what I was saying, and then I’ll go back to you. You use human conscious experience. You use conscious experience to disqualify fetuses, and you use human to disqualify the animals, even though the human, I think most people listening would say the time and our development, when we have conscious experiences that are richer and more complex than a chimp or a dog, is long after birth.
That’s why I believe Peter Singer is consistent when he would say what matters is that you have rationality. You have abilities non-human animals don’t have, so he says infanticide is fine; however, most people have an unbreakable intuition that infanticide is wrong. And so in order to keep that intuition, if you’re going to protect human infants because they will have rational abilities in the future, even though they don’t have them now, you’d have to apply that to fetus’ and embryos as well.
Destiny:
Okay. I completely disagree, but we can loop back on this if you want.
Trent Horn:
No. What’s wrong with this argument? We value are rational abilities beyond what non-human animals can do. That does not develop in humans until sometime after birth; therefore, infanticide is permissible. What’s wrong with that argument?
Destiny:
Because what I’ve said before is there is a kind of human conscious experience. That kind of experience starts about 20 weeks. It might be in some diminished capacity, as you said, but that experience has begun, that at some point, you as a person were that experienced at 20 weeks, that same conscious experience that starts there, that’s the thing that we protect up until the point where you can no longer deploy it.
Trent Horn:
And you think that, let’s say a newborn who’s stuck at the newborn level forever-
Destiny:
When you say newborn?
Trent Horn:
Newly born human being, who is conscious.
Destiny:
Yes, it would be a protected experience. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
That’s where I can’t understand it. A newborn stuck at that level forever, newborn infant disabled, person deserves legal protection-
Destiny:
Mm-hmm. Because it’s all under that bucket of human conscious experience, yes.
Trent Horn:
Because it is a human. No. Your argument seems to be because it is a human who is conscious. I think humans that are conscious are always having a human conscious experience, correct.
Destiny:
If you want to give me an analogy. You take a human, you implant a dog brain into it, then maybe we’re having a different conversation.
Trent Horn:
But when a human speaks, do they always utter human speech?
Destiny:
We’re getting definitionally, but when a human speaks, it’s always a human speaking.
Trent Horn:
Right. The argument you’re making is a bit circular here. What makes human speech unique would be grammar, syntax, abstract concepts, idea, language, that kind of human speech. A human could utter all different kinds of sounds-
Destiny:
But it’s always going to be a human speaking.
Trent Horn:
Right, but what someone would say is, “Why does it matter? Why does a newborn?” The fact that you would say, “Look, a human, someone who’s stuck at the newborn level, they are a human who is conscious. They are a human who is minimally conscious; therefore, they deserve legal protection.”
Destiny:
For which, for what?
Trent Horn:
The newborn.
Destiny:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
Someone’s stuck at a newborn. They are a human who is minimally conscious, but an animal who is more conscious does not have rights.
Destiny:
Yeah. I reject that comparison, that an animal is more conscious. They’re having an animal conscious experience. It doesn’t resemble a human conscious experience.
Trent Horn:
Well, you say you reject it, but then you can’t tell me what is that newborn infant’s experience so that you know they-
Destiny:
A fully formed, conscious experience of any animal doesn’t reach the level of sapiens or sophistication of a human conscious experience.
Trent Horn:
Of a human conscious experience like you or I are having.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
But a newborn, what kind of experiences do they have?
Destiny:
I don’t know. If you take a newborn, stick it there, and then train it for a while, I imagine that even their subjective conscious experience can be closer to ours than a lizard or a monkey.
Trent Horn:
So you think that a human newborn is more intelligent, let’s say, like a chimpanzee?
Destiny:
Intelligent is not the right word.
Trent Horn:
Or more aware of the world.
Destiny:
More having a human conscious experience than the-
Trent Horn:
All you’re saying is it’s more of a genetic human being. That’s true, but so what? If makes you valuable, then all genetic human beings need to be valuable.
Destiny:
Well, a human conscious experience-
Trent Horn:
The human is doing all the work in your argument.
Destiny:
Well, of course, because I value humans and human life.
Trent Horn:
Me too.
Destiny:
Yeah, so it’s doing a lot for both of our arguments, and genetics, as our definition of human, is a certain genetic code. So of course, the human conscious experience is necessarily going to be deployed by a genetic human, right?
Trent Horn:
Right. Humans will have various levels of conscious experience through their lives. They’ll start very minimally. It’ll grow, and they might lose it, and maybe even temporarily lose it or permanently lose it. I do think your position is going to be inconsistent here. If someone temporarily loses it and has to regrow parts of their brain to get it back, because at that point, they’re no longer a person anymore. But most of us would give them medicine and care to help them.
Destiny:
Yeah, probably.
Trent Horn:
I feel like the intuition here is, “Oh. I wouldn’t want to live in that state,” or “We think that that life is not worth living in a persistent vegetative state.” We could easily reach that intuition for locked in, for quadriplegics. A lot of people would make those similar intuitions, and I would be very reticent to move that into saying, “Oh. Well, we only care for disabled people if we think their lives are worth living.” That’s a dangerous road to go down.
Destiny:
No, it’s not. We do studies. Even people with locked-in syndrome generally report decent quality of life. We can do empirical analysis on these people. We can do studies, case studies, broad longitudinal studies. People tend to adjust to their level and have a decent quality of life.
Trent Horn:
But some people do want to die, right?
Destiny:
If you want to die, you should probably have that option, but there’s a difference between somebody wanting to die versus saying, “We ought to kill everybody with this type of a case.”
Trent Horn:
But do we do this? Some people who want to die, we say, “That’s not a good enough reason. I know your girlfriend left you, but that’s not a good enough reason.”
“Oh, you have bone cancer,” or something like that, or even you’re locked in and you don’t want to live, fine. We make judgements there about, you’re giving me a good reason, and you’re not. I think that’s a dangerous road to go down, to decide whose reason is good enough to help them out of suicide and whose reason is good enough to help them into it.
Destiny:
Okay. I would disagree. I would say it’s a really dangerous road to compel people to live for the happiness of others around them.
Trent Horn:
And I don’t believe we should compel people. I think-
Destiny:
Well, that’s what you’re saying. It’s compelling somebody to live. If you’re saying that you’re not allowed to take your life, you’re depriving them of, arguably, one of the most fundamental-
Trent Horn:
I’m saying doctors shouldn’t kill people. I’m saying doctors shouldn’t be killers.
Destiny:
Sure. Should a person be allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
They should be allowed to refuse disproportionate care.
Destiny:
Should they be allowed to jump off a building or a bridge?
Trent Horn:
No.
Destiny:
So they shouldn’t be allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
No, they shouldn’t be allowed. Do you think people should be allowed to kill themselves?
Destiny:
Yeah. I think, depending on the circumstances, yes.
Trent Horn:
Should they be allowed to kill themselves for any reason?
Destiny:
For any reason? Probably not.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. They don’t want to live.
Destiny:
Probably not.
Trent Horn:
Why?
Destiny:
Because I think that, oftentimes, the desire to kill yourself without a good stated reason is probably more evidence of some sort of mental problem that should probably be alleviated before the person can make that decision. So it’d be an issue of, we would argue, from an informed consent perspective, that you’re not capable of making this decision in a mentally compromised state. But if you take somebody who’s 75, they’ve got stage four lung cancer, they’ve got 6 to 12 months ahead of them, they know it’s going to be an excruciating experience, and they don’t have any desire to live anymore, do you think that person should be deprived of the right to kill themselves, jump off a building, jump off a bridge?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, right.
Destiny:
Because in your world, they would have to do that because the doctors-
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I don’t make judgments that, “Oh, yeah. You have a good reason to kill yourself,” because then what about the quadriplegic? You’re a 75-year-old with cancer, what about the 20-year old who will never move their arms and legs again and says, “I can’t live like this for my whole life. Should they just be allowed to roll themselves into the pool?
Destiny:
I think that there is plenty of research that shows that people that are even quadriplegics live healthy, happy lives.
Trent Horn:
If they say, “Screw your research. I don’t want to live this way”?
Destiny:
Then, I think it’s more likely that there’s something unhealthy with them, so they shouldn’t be allowed to do it.
Trent Horn:
Why can’t we say that for the 75-year-old? “You know what?”
Destiny:
Because I think, for the 75-year olds, we do know the prognosis with stage four lung cancer at certain stages, and we could say, “It is going to be bad, and you are going to die with 6 to 12 months.”
Trent Horn:
Right, but if anything, so you’re saying that-
Destiny:
I’m saying that a person who’s 75 with lung cancer-
Trent Horn:
Someone should be allowed to kill themselves so they don’t have to go through six months of agony, but a quadriplegic who might go through 60 years of agony, no go.
Destiny:
Because, at the end of the day, I’m making an empirical reference. I can say, “If we look at the pool of people that are quadriplegic at this age, 99% of them live and have decently happy, fulfilling lives.”
Trent Horn:
So you’re saying people don’t really have a right to make autonomous medical choices. They only have the right to do what you think the research says?
Destiny:
No, they have the right to make a decision, but whether or not the decision is informed or not is important. Just like we would say a 12-year-old doesn’t have the right to make certain decisions because we don’t think their consent is informed, right?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Destiny:
We would say the same for a 20-year old that wants to kill themselves, because they might be disabled, probably isn’t the same as a 75-year old who does have all the information, who wants to make that same decision.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Destiny:
But in your world, you’re saying a 75-year-old with stage four cancer is not allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
I am saying that I don’t make distinctions about who has a good enough reason to kill themselves and who doesn’t. I help anyone who is suicidal and not be suicidal. Now, if you have an 85-year-old who’s-
Destiny:
Why are they 10 years older?
Trent Horn:
75. Fine.
Destiny:
Okay. 75.
Trent Horn:
A 75-year-old who is experiencing organ failure, and they don’t want to do dialysis because it might give them a few more months, and it’s expensive and painful? No. They might not do dialysis, or you have someone who is very, very elderly and says, “You know what? If I go into cardiac arrest, don’t give me CPR.” I think that could be-
Destiny:
Okay. Hold on.
Trent Horn:
… Understandable.
Destiny:
All of your examples are very easy ways out. Sometimes people are going to die in ways that aren’t going to be quick. It’s going to be six months.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Destiny:
So for a person that’s going to die in six months, are you saying, “You’re compelled to suffer for that entire six months,” or-
Trent Horn:
It’s fine to. Well, we’re getting away from the topic.
Destiny:
No, no. Hold on. You keep saying that. I’m going to force you to answer this question.
Trent Horn:
I’ll answer it, but-
Destiny:
You’re not answering it though. You keep aggravating mitigating circumstances, and then you try to change to something else.
Trent Horn:
I will answer the question, but you’ll agree, euthanasia is a different topic than abortion?
Destiny:
Well, yeah. Of course.
Speaker 4:
Let’s have Trent answer it.
Trent Horn:
I’ll answer.
Destiny:
I just want the answer to this question.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
And then I’ll have a couple questions.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. The answer is I don’t think doctors should kill people, especially when that is an option for doctors to do, it becomes tempting for that to be the prescribed course of treatment instead of more expensive things to keep somebody alive; however, I do think that you could administer medication and pain medication to ease someone’s suffering, even if it has a secondary effect of shortening their lifespan.
Destiny:
Okay, so you would say a 75-year-old who has the prognosis of six months of suffering, he’s not allowed to terminate his life?
Trent Horn:
I don’t think we should kill people who are suicidal.
Destiny:
I don’t know why you can’t answer that question? I’m not talking about people that are suicidal. I’m saying he doesn’t want to live, because his prognosis is six months of suffering. So people with a prognosis OF six months of suffering and are dying, they’re not allowed to terminate their life early. You would deprive them of that right?
Trent Horn:
I would like to answer the question, and it will sufficiently answer what you’re asking me in the way that I’m most comfortable. If someone wants to commit suicide, they don’t want to live, because life has too much suffering for them, this person wants to die. They want to kill themselves because of too much suffering. Correct?
Destiny:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay. I am not in the business of saying who has too much suffering or not enough suffering. In many cases, those who would kill themselves, it’s not because of physical pain, it’s because of loss of dignity.
Destiny:
Yeah. We can move on to another.
Trent Horn:
That’s fine. So my point is, because then there’s no stopping points. 6 months, 12 months, 5 years, 10 years, there’s no principal place to stop the gap.
Destiny:
But also, you can’t say that, “I’m not in the business of,” because you are. You’re in the business of saying, “None of you can make that decision.”
Trent Horn:
Right. I want to treat all humans equally, so anyone who is suicidal, their life has value. I’m going to help them out of a destructive decision.
Destiny:
Well, when you say their life has value-
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Destiny:
But they’re not the ones who decide when it has value or not. You’re deciding that for them?
Trent Horn:
No. I say every human being has intrinsic value.
Destiny:
Yeah, but they’re saying, “Part of the value of my life is I should get to decide when I want to go. I want to leave on my terms.”
But you’re saying, “No, no, no, no. I’m going to decide for you. You can’t do that. You don’t have that right.”
Trent Horn:
I’m going to say we both do that, because you’re doing that with your research gambit to say, “No, no, no, no. You, with your reason, if it’s anything that’s not six months left to live of a terminal illness, it turns out the research shows you don’t have a good enough reason.” Both of us are doing that. I’m just applying it to every single human being. You’re trying to apply it to just a few, and there’s no way you’re able to really do that with our system framework.
Destiny:
I think I can. If you want, we can dive into that. I can give you a super clear criteria.
Trent Horn:
But we were both forcing a pregnant woman to not allow someone else to kill or dismember her child.
Destiny:
But the difference is I’m forcing somebody to care about that 20-week picture, and you’re forcing them to care about the two-cell picture.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, and I’m saying that human value does not depend on what we look like. There’s AI that looks just like us that doesn’t have value. There are disfigured people who don’t look like us. We evolved. The problem is that we evolved to care about people that look like us. That’s why humans have a problem with racism. We evolved an ability to trust the members of our tribe. “If you don’t look like me, maybe you’re a danger,” so we have an evolutionary predisposition to not trust people who don’t look like us, or we think people who are in the uncanny valley, like weird robots.
I think that’s due to the fact that we stay away from sick people that might get us infected, so we have an evolutionary predisposition to not care for people who look dramatically different. I don’t think that should guide our decision about whether early human embryos have value. If you’re only arguing women have a right not to abortion, but the right to not be pregnant, then the artificial womb can play in, because you wouldn’t have a right to necessarily kill the fetus. The only right you have is, “I don’t want to be pregnant anymore. Fine, move the fetus to this womb.”
Speaker 4:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
Then, you’d really lose the argument that, “I also want the fetus to be dead, because I don’t want to deal with that child out there.” If your argument is just you have a right to not be pregnant, you can’t really get to that, but if you say that the fetus is not a person anyways, if you can make them unconscious, if you can do anything to them before 20 weeks, which is basically Destiny’s position, you can’t be compelled to put them in an artificial womb.
Speaker 4:
Assuming that you could, in an artificial womb, you could bring the child to term just as healthily as in the mother’s womb, I don’t know if that’s even possible, but let’s say it is, I suppose my only concern with the artificial womb, just looking at it from this one narrow lens of abortion, is what are the sort of other ramifications?
Trent Horn:
Well, here’s a ramification. If you could deliver at 18 weeks, right now the earliest is like 20, but we could get there where you can keep an 18-week-old fetus alive in an incubator, so it could be sitting there in an incubator, and for the next two weeks, the parents would have, under destiny’s view, a free decision whether or not they want to kill that fetus in that hospital incubator right in front of them, correct?
Speaker 4:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay, so I think many people would find that pretty disturbing.
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