Abortion and Stem Cell Research (Part 2)

Kyle discusses the debate on abortion and stem cell research.

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Comments

[Berto]

Hey guys, great new topic... again.

I don't know if I'm sticking my foot in my own mouth by coming up with this possible objection to your argument, since I don't know whether you'll explain this flaw in a future episode, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

First off, nice job ignoring the personhood question, if for no other reason than its philosophical and/or religious difficulty.

So, if I understood the argument correctly, it goes something like this: abortion is wrong because it would deprive the fetus from having experiences it would have had had it been left alone.

The first problem is that this could equally apply to animals we eat: killing them for food (or for whatever other reason) denies them the possibility of having experiences they could have had if left alone. Of course, you could bite the bullet, become vegetarians and stick to your argument, thereby remaining consistent.

But the deeper problem, I think, is that you are treating the idea of having experiences as a predicate, and a positive one at that. In other words, you seem to be assuming that it is better to have experiences than not to have them. This sounds a lot like Descartes's argument that God must exist because existing is better than not existing, which works only when existence is "good" existence. I would not want to follow a logic that says that it would be better if evil existed because existence is better than non-existence, or that having bad experiences is better than not having any experiences at all.

Imagine a fetus whose only prospects in life are suffering, abuse, pain, deprivation, and all kinds of horrible things. According to your argument, aborting her would be wrong, since abortion would deny her the possibility of having all these experiences, which implies, consequently, that we have some sort of moral obligation to allow her to have these experiences of constant suffering. A very odd proposition indeed...

Of course, you could modify your argument and say that abortion is wrong when it would deprive a fetus from having positive experiences, but then the whole idea of experiences would no longer be the criterion of whether abortion is right or wrong, so the argument would become obsolete, since that might be the reason many women have abortions in the first place (though not all women).

When we do say that murder is wrong it is not simply because we deny the person from having experiences, but because we deny some sort of agent, who has some conception of the kinds of experiences it would want to pursue, from having such experiences. This includes an element of consciousness and forethought that would not apply to fetuses, so I don't think it would follow that this argument could be applied to them. So, the reason why we think murder is wrong is not the same reason why we think abortion is wrong...

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one.
Peace out,
Berto