Five Emotional Pro-Choice Arguments

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In the last post, I argued for a spectrum from a single cell (not a person) to a newborn baby (a person).  This is in response to pro-life advocates who deny this spectrum to argue that we have a “baby” from newborn all the way back to that single cell.

I’d like to make five arguments in favor of my position.  To do that, I’ll try to bypass the intellect to some extent and appeal to emotion.

1. Child vs. Embryos.  Suppose the fertility clinic were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos.  Which would you pick?

Of course, everyone would save the child.

But now imagine the same situation two years later.  The ten embryos have become one-year-old babies and the child is now seven years old.  Which would you save?  Obviously, the ten babies.

As an aside, note that the decision in the second instance is much tougher.  In the first, we lost ten insensate embryos, but in the second, it’s a child.  No one equates a newborn or a child with an invisible clump of cells.

2. Different Reactions to Abortion Procedures.  Anti-abortionists focus on the horror of a late-term abortion.  Did you ever wonder why they don’t focus instead on a woman swallowing a Plan B (emergency contraceptive) pill?  Or a drug-induced abortion (the most common procedure for first-trimester abortions)?  Imagine anti-abortion activists carrying signs, not with a photo of an eight-month-old fetus but with life-size drawings of a 100-cell human blastocyst.  The signs would appear blank.

By choosing as they do, they admit that all procedures are not equal and that there is a spectrum.  Their story is more powerful the older the fetus is.  A blastocyst is very unlike a person, but an 8-month-old fetus is very much like a person.

3. Slaughtering Animals for Food.  Which would be more horrible to watch: a woman swallowing a pill of Plan B or a cow going through a slaughterhouse?  The cow can experience fear and pain, while the single cell can experience neither.  The cell’s claim to superiority is only its potential to be a person.

There’s a big difference from what is and what might be.  A blastocyst has impressive potential but has vastly fewer cells than the brain of a fly.  The only trait it shares with a person is its DNA, a vague and abstract commonality.

And there’s no guarantee that our imagined cell will develop properly during pregnancy.  A single cell might become a human baby or not, just like betting $1000 on black at the roulette table might win or not.  With half of all pregnancies ending in spontaneous (natural) abortion, the odds for each are about the same.

4. Cloning and Skin Cells.  Imagine that in ten years we are able to clone a human from a single skin cell.  Would you never scratch your skin to avoid killing a potential human being, like the Jain who wears mesh over his face to avoid accidentally breathing in a flying insect?  And if not—if “potential human being” is very different in your mind from “human being”—then why not see that same difference between a single cell and a newborn baby?

5. Saving Another Person’s Life.  If a blastocyst is a person, would you give up your life for it?  You might risk your life to save a stranger; is the same true for a stranger’s blastocyst?

What we value changes across this spectrum, and, while we might intellectually argue that a human is a human is a human, emotionally we don’t see both ends of the spectrum the same.

Let me make clear that I’m simply arguing for the existence of a spectrum.  We can agree on this and still disagree on when the okay/not-okay line is for abortion.  The status quo seems to resolve this well: society decides on the upper bounds and then allows girls and women to choose.

Show me why a single fertilized human egg cell is equivalent to a trillion-cell newborn.  It’s not equivalent in any important biological sense; why should it be equivalent morally?

Next time: What’s Wrong with the Pro-Life Position?

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A Defense of Abortion Rights: the Spectrum Argument

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Christianity and atheism debateA typical pro-life position can be stated this way: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.

We’ll return to that idea shortly, but first let’s look more closely at human life.  I argue that there is a spectrum of personhood during gestation.

Consider a continuous spectrum from blue to green.  Where’s the dividing line?  Where does blue end and green begin?  We can argue about this, but we agree that blue is not green!  The two ends are very different.

What age is the dividing line between child and adult?  Twelve years?  Eighteen?  Twenty-one?  It’s a spectrum, and there is no objectively correct line.  Again, the line is debatable but no one doubts that a child and an adult are quite different.

An acorn is not a tree, a silkworm is not a dress, a water molecule is not a whirlpool, a piece of hay is not a haystack, and a carton of eggs is not a henhouse of chickens.  Similarly, a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.

Note that this is not simply about the number of cells.  At one end of the personhood spectrum, we have arms and legs, fingers and fingernails, liver and pancreas, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, stomach and digestive system—in fact, every body part that a healthy person has.  And at the other, we have none of this.  We have … a single cell.  In between is a smooth progression over time, with individual components developing and maturing.  That’s the spectrum we’re talking about.

Let’s approach this another way.  Consider a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron.  The single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all.  The differentiation of the cells into different cell types and their interconnections in the newborn may count for even more than the enormous difference in the number of cells.

Note also that the difference between a newborn and an adult is trivial compared to the difference between the cell and the 1,000,000,000,000-cell newborn.

Some pro-life advocates argue that the humans at either end of this spectrum are identical in every meaningful way and use the term “baby” for every point along the spectrum.  I’ve raised babies (with help, of course), and that makes me something of an expert in identifying babies.  As an expert, I can assure you that an invisible cell isn’t a baby.

This inept attempt to collapse the spectrum by using the term “baby” for both ends is like the slogan used by the animal rights group PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”  In other words, there is no spectrum here: vermin are the same as livestock, which are the same as pets, which are the same as people.

No, a rat is not a boy, blue is not green, and a single cell is not a newborn baby.

A lot revolves around what we call this spectrum.  Do we call it Homo sapiens?  With this term, there is no spectrum, because the species is the same—the single cell is Homo sapiens, as is the newborn baby.

What about “human”?  That seems a good name for the spectrum—that is, we would call the newborn human but not the cell.  Or, we might call the cell human but not a human.  Pro-lifers typically reject this, wanting to use “human” for both ends of the spectrum.

All right, can we all agree on “person”?  I’ve heard pro-lifers reject this as well.

This game where pro-lifers deny names to the spectrum can get tiring.  I really don’t care what the spectrum is called—humanity, personhood, human development, like-me-ness, whatever—call it what you want as long as the naming acknowledges the stark difference between the newborn (with arms and legs and a circulatory system and a nervous system and eyes and ears and so on) and the single fertilized human egg cell.

Now, back to the original pro-life argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.  This argument is invalid because it is oblivious to the spectrum.

Pro-lifers claim to be celebrating life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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The “God is Simple” Argument

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In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins said, “God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable.”  But is God complex?  Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued that he is not:

According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense.…  So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.

Seriously?  We’re consulting a 13th century scholar to understand modern cosmology?  Modern science takes us to the Big Bang, and we need Thomas Aquinas to figure out the remaining riddles?

Here’s philosopher William Lane Craig’s input:

As a mind without a body, God is amazingly simple.  Being immaterial, He has no physical parts.  Therefore to postulate a pure Mind as the explanation of fine-tuning is the height of simplicity!

So anything that isn’t physical is simple?  Sure—something that isn’t physical is maximally simple physically because it doesn’t exist physically.  But that doesn’t help us with immaterial things, whatever they are.  I don’t know what it means to be an immaterial mind, so I have no way of evaluating its complexity.  Incredibly, neither apologist gives any evidence of the claim that God is simple.  They seem to have no way of evaluating its complexity either and propose we just take their word for it.

Of course, science has shown that complex can come from simple.  For example, we see this in the formation of snowflakes, in erosion, or in evolution.  From a handful of natural rules comes complexity—no intelligence required.

But we’re talking about something quite different—an intelligent creator.  And in every creative instance we know of (the creation of a car, the creation of a bee hive, the creation of a bird’s nest), the creator is more complex than the creation.  Plantinga’s God would be the most stupendous counterexample to the axiom that, in the case of designed things, simple comes from complex, and yet we’re supposed to take this claim on faith.

But there’s a way to cut through all this.  Is God as simple as Plantinga or Craig imagine?  Then demonstrate this—make us one.  Humanity can make complex things like a microprocessor, the worldwide telephone system, and a 747, so making this “amazingly simple” thing shouldn’t be hard.  Or, if we don’t have the materials, they can at least give us the blueprints.

Surely they will fail in this challenge and admit that they have no clue how to build a God.  In that case, how can they critique the simplicity of such a being?  Now that their argument that God is simple has evaporated, we’re back to Dawkins’ argument that a complex God is improbable.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related links:

  • Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion (A Review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion),” Christianity Today, March 2007.
  • William Lane Craig, “Dawkins’ Delusion,” Reasonable Faith, 2009.
  • “Divine Simplicity,” Wikipedia.  (Note: neither Craig nor Plantinga accept this view.)

Word of the Day: Systems and Wicked Problems

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Lots of wires, but ENIAC didn't replace GodWe all deal with systems—computers, cars, or communities, for example—and a few concepts may help see things a little more clearly.

This is an excerpt from another book of mine, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change.

 

Perfection means not perfect actions in a perfect world,
but appropriate actions in an imperfect one.
— R. H. Blyth

Systems are difficult to work with, and seeing things for what they are is an essential first step.  Horst Rittel in the late 1960s distinguished between “tame” and “wicked” problems.  This is not the distinction between easy and hard problems—many tame problems are very hard.  But wicked problems, while not evil, are tricky and malicious in ways that tame problems are not.  The unexpected consequences we’ve seen have been because systems problems are wicked.  We will understand systems better—and why they spawn unexpected consequences—if we understand a little more of the properties of wicked problems and approach them with appropriate respect.

Tame problems can be clearly stated, have a well-defined goal, and stay solved.  They work in a Newtonian, clockwork way.  The games of chess and go are tame.  Wicked problems have complex cause-and-effect relationships, human interaction, and inherently incomplete information.  They require compromises.

For example, mass transit is a wicked problem.  Everyone likes mass transit—unless it comes through their neighborhood, it consumes road lanes, or they have to pay for it.  The difference between something that works in the lab, on paper, or in one’s head versus something that works in the real world and is practical to real people is a characteristic only of wicked problems.

Tame and wicked problems differ in many ways.*  See if the traits of wicked problems as described below sound familiar, either with the examples mentioned here or with situations you have experienced yourself.

  • Problem Definition.  A tame problem can be clearly, unambiguously, and completely stated.  Math problems are tame.  By contrast, there is no absolute statement of a wicked problem.  To state a wicked problem means to also state its solution.  That is, the problem can’t be stated without a proposed solution in mind, and coming up with a new solution means seeing the problem in a new way.  Avoid locking in a problem definition too soon.
  • Goal.  A tame problem has a well-defined goal, such as the QED in a proof or the checkmate in chess.  With a wicked problem, you could keep iterating and refining your solution forever—or go back and consider other solutions.  After all, if a wicked problem is something you can’t define, how can you tell when it’s resolved?  You don’t stop because you’re done (you’ve reached the goal) but rather because of external constraints (you’ve run out of money, time, or patience, for example).  You must strive for an adequate solution, not a perfect one.
  • Solutions.  Solutions are unambiguously correct or incorrect with tame problems.  The solution to a wicked problem is not judged as correct or incorrect but somewhere in the range between good and bad.
  • Time.  The solution to a tame problem can be judged immediately (that is, there is no maturation time), and the problem stays solved.  Euclid’s geometry proofs are still valid today.  Evaluating the solution to a wicked problem takes time (because the results of implementing the solution take time to be appreciated) and is subjective.  Is that a good design?  Maybe, but maybe not.  Like the response to art, different people will have different answers, and the solution causes many side effects (unintended consequences), like medicine in the body.  Additionally, a “solved” wicked problem may not stay solved—wicked problems aren’t solved but are only addressed; they’re treated, not cured.  Your perception of how good the solution is may change over time.
  • Consequences.  Trial and error may be an inefficient approach with a tame problem, but it won’t cause any damage.  Implementing or publicizing a proposed solution doesn’t change the problem.  With a wicked problem, however, every implementation changes reality—it’s no longer the same problem after an attempted solution.  After a failed attempt, the solution you realize you should have tried may now not work.
  • Reapplying Past Solutions.  A class of tame problems can be solved with a single principle.  A general rule for finding a square root or applying the quadratic formula will work in all applicable cases.  By contrast, the solution to a wicked problem is unique.  We can learn from past successes, but an old solution applied unchanged to a new problem won’t produce the old result.  Many unexpected consequences arise when we rush to reapply (without customization) a particular solution we’ve seen before—there will likely be unseen differences between the old and new problems.
  • Problem Hierarchy.  A tame problem stands alone.  It is never a symptom of a larger problem, but a wicked problem always is.  For example, if the cost of something is too high, this can be a symptom of the higher-level problem that the company doesn’t have enough money.  Often, we can’t see the higher-level problem (“This new software is terrific!  I can’t imagine what could be better.”).

Systems are large, complex, and real-world, and they are the domain in which technology is applied.  Industry’s dreams and expectations for its new high-tech products are formed in the lab, but it is in the system of society that they’re put to use.  This brief summary of wicked problems as well as these cautionary examples give some insight into the inherent difficulty of meddling with systems.  This is not to say that we can’t address systems problems but that they should be approached with caution and respect.

Let’s end this chapter with a final example of unexpected consequences due to technology.  In the 1954 short story “Answer,” Fredric Brown envisions many great scientists working for years to build a giant computer network, connecting the computing power of billions of planets.  As the inaugural question for this technological marvel, the gathered dignitaries ask, “Is there a God?”

The computer doesn’t hesitate before answering, “There is now!” 

Everything has both intended and unintended consequences. 
The intended consequences may or may not happen;
the unintended consequences always do.
— Dee Hock, president of VISA

* Rittel and Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences, 4:155–169, 1973.

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The Christian Message

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The Thinking Atheist has put together another high-quality and humbling video (humbling because this sets the bar very high for the rest of us trying to add to the discussion).

Here’s the Christian message told in a frank but sympathetic way (4:16).