Abortion & Gun Control | Dr. Dustin Crummett
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- Опубліковано 17 жов 2024
- Here is Dustin's website where you can find more information about his research projects and published work: dustincrummett....
And here is his philpapers profile where you can find his papers and access some of them (the gun control paper we talk about is open access):
philpeople.org...
P1: Dustin has cats
P2: People who have cats are usually good and smart people
C: Dustin is probably a good and smart people
I wanted to note that, since we recorded this, I've changed my position on abortion somewhat: I'd now encourage people to avoid abortion outside of fairly extreme cases, even as I continue to oppose the political stance people on the right take towards the issue. Here is a post I wrote elsewhere explaining my new reasoning:
Once I heard Trent Horn say that if the fetus is a human being, then abortion is murder, whereas if the fetus is not a human being, then abortion is “really isn’t a big deal, it’s like a tonsillectomy.” I’m not sure why he said that: the Catholic Church has condemned early abortion even during periods where the early fetus was not believed to be a human being. But I think it does reflect a dichotomy present in a lot of thinking about abortion, which says something like: either the fetus is a person, in which case abortion is murder, or else it’s just a “clump of cells,” in which case it’s trivial, so only “extreme” views about it make sense.
But almost no one actually holds that abortion is morally equivalent to a tonsillectomy. E.g., it seems obvious that “abortion doping,” if it ever happened, would be wrong:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_doping
And at the same time, almost no one really consistently thinks that getting an abortion is in no way morally different from, say, shooting a five-year-old. Here is a recent paper which explores one way in which that’s true:
www.academia.edu/44846648/On_Anti_Abortion_Violence_PPR_forthcoming_
What follows are six reasons one might have for thinking abortion is regrettable, even if it doesn’t violate the fetus’ right to life. My own judgment--which is a change from my earlier stance--is that these reasons are enough for me to encourage people to avoid abortion outside of fairly extreme cases. But someone who doesn’t share that judgment can still agree that they make it different from a tonsillectomy: that there are at least reasons to try to make an unintended pregnancy work (and, insofar as it’s under one’s control, to try to avoid one to begin with).
At the same time, some of these--particularly (3)--embody extremely demanding principles, principles which virtually no one even pretends to live up to. A demanding ethic which is attractive in itself can be a tool of injustice when it is applied to vulnerable people in difficult situations while being flouted by the comfortable and powerful. “Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.” Churches often display a terrible judgmentalism towards people who have had abortions; I think they lack standing for this.
I’ll also note that this opens room for a “morally opposed but legally pro-choice” stance. This is sort of the stance taken by my own church, the Episcopal Church:
www.episcopalnewsservice.org/pressreleases/information-from-office-of-government-relations-general-convention-policy-on-abortion-womens-reproductive-health/
People often think this position makes no sense, since it seems like you’re saying abortion is murder, but should be legal. But the following reasons open space to avoid saying that.
1. Moral risk
There are various arguments for the claim that abortion is murder, or otherwise very seriously wrong. Uncertainty here arises, not only on moral, but also on metaphysical and empirical grounds (e.g., what the correct theory of personal identity is, when the fetus becomes sentient, etc.)
Sometimes pro-life people say something like: you have to be *absolutely certain* that abortion is not murder, or else you shouldn’t do it (and no one can be absolutely certain). No one actually applies that reasoning consistently. But the fact that something might be seriously wrong is obviously *a reason* to avoid it.
2. Sacredness
It seems plausible that human biological life possesses some sort of intrinsic, impersonal value (of the sort possessed by, say, the Grand Canyon, or a sequoia), and that this provides reasons not to destroy it. Ronald Dworkin defends this sort of view in his book Life’s Dominion. A religious person might bolster the weightiness of this reason with the claim that God is “the author of life,” or otherwise has commanded us to respect the value of human life. (This is how Swinburne secures the wrongness of early abortion, even though he doesn’t think it’s murder.) But there are secular ways of defending this sort of view, too (as Dworkin argues).
3. Samaritanism
In *The Moral Vision of the New Testament,* Richard Hays gives an argument like this:
The Bible is unclear about abortion. Philosophical, theological, etc. reasoning are also unclear about abortion. But Christians are committed to a very demanding Samaritan ethic, to always going above and beyond to help the other in need, even if our obligations to them are otherwise unclear. Perhaps non-religious people could also find the ethic an attractive ideal. He doesn’t think this leads to a blanket prohibition on abortion: he recognizes that there may be cases where carrying a pregnancy is asking too much. And he doesn’t think the upshot is that we should try to legally ban abortion. But he thinks that Christians should avoid abortion outside of very special circumstances.
Obviously, this ethic has serious implications for other issues, too. For one thing, taking it seriously means you have to give away all your stuff. The Didache, the earliest Christian text to forbid abortion, also commands:
“Never turn away the needy; share all your possessions with your brother, and do not claim that anything is your own.”
If we believe the Book of Acts, they actually took this literally:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
If contemporary Christians lived like this, there would be less demand for abortion, since women in their communities would have more economic, social, etc. support. Further, opposition to abortion would be more credible, since everyone would be making tremendous sacrifices. As it stands, no church even takes the “give your stuff away” stuff seriously. So this ethic doesn’t provide anyone grounds for being high and mighty; by it, we’re all condemned.
4. Religious Tradition
Christianity, at least, has always opposed abortion; with regard to whether the fetus is a person, whether abortion shoud be criminalized, etc., there’s much more variance. I think this is true of many other religious traditions, too.
5. Autonomy
Thomson-style arguments claim that abortion is permissible on bodily autonomy grounds, even if the fetus is a person. But it would obviously be too bad to let the violinist die, even if you’re allowed to do it. If abortion kills (or lets die) a person, that’s obviously *a reason* to avoid it.
There may also be some plausibility to the thought that, in some violinist-style cases, maybe you really should stay hooked up, but no one should force you to. This is why, in *Beyond Roe,* Boonin focuses specifically on arguing that abortion should be legal, whether or not it’s moral. That’s a possible “wrong but should be legal” position.
6. Personal value
There are two ways of denying that an embryo is a person:
Say the embryo is not yet numerically identical with the later person;
Say the embryo is numerically identical to the later person, but was not yet a person.
The former implies that the very embryo was not yet *me*. The latter implies that, while it was me, I wasn’t yet a person. In that case, “person” is a “phase sortal”; rather than being an essential property, personhood is the sort of property you can gain or lose.
Under (b), the embryo might be some sort of moral subject, even if its moral status is not yet equal to ours. I think this is what Margaret Little thinks. That would be a reason not to destroy it.
1:16:08 So, you DON'T think civilians should own nuclear weapons???
1:07:00 "you wouldn't have to donate bone marrow to your own kid even though you are responsible for it"
But you're not responsible specifically for the predicament where your kid has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. Now if you were someone who caused that kid to get bone marrow transplant by engineering then injecting into the kid a CRISPR retrovirus that gave people cancer so you caused him to be in the predicament where he needs the bone marrow transplant, then yeah you would be responsible so you should have to pay a penalty to your rights for causing the predicament.
This is the correct analogy for pregnancy through consensual sex.
Great discussion I’m looking forward to out conversation
24:00 " some people say 'my biology textbook says that life begins at conception so abortion is baby murder' , yeah but no one says that it's wrong to kill living beings in general, like a bacteria"
But people DO say that it's wrong to kill innocent human beings, which unborn babies are from the moment of conception.
26:00-27:00 you're admitting that the unborn babies are human organisms from the moment of conception , and therefore you are admitting that unborn babies are human beings, and since they are human beings they by default have human rights since human rights are commonly understood as : they are commonly understood as inalienable,[3] fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being"[4] and which are "inherent in all human beings",[5] regardless of their age, ethnic origin, location, language, religion, ethnicity, or any other status.[3] They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal,[1] and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone.[3]
So if you want to make the claim that unborn babies do not deserve human rights despite being human, then you need to provide that justification. Note that justification can't be "but unborn babies are unconscious but post-birth babies are conscious so the latter should have human rights but not the former" since it would be wrong to kill people under anaesthetic or babies born into shallow comas, since both would be likely to be conscious in the future.
the meaning of the word "person" always meant the same as human being, that is to say, organism belonging to the human species, it only came to mean something distinct from human being , like "you're a human being but you're not a person" as a result of proabortion people wanting to create some new semantics after they were forced to admit to the obvious scientific fact that the unborn babies they wanted to kill were human beings.
so then the tactic they wanted was " ok yeah they are human beings, but lets start saying that they aren't persons, and make up a proprietary definition of person that excludes unborn babies so that it won't seem so bad when we kill them"
36:00 Dustin's sympathy of souls seems contrived. if he believes in souls then he presumably believes that the mind is not the product of the brain. So why does he just so happen to make the claim that the soul only exists or becomes linked to the body after 28 weeks which just so happens to be after the brain and nervous system have developed to a high degree.
Sounds pretty crypto-physicalist to me.
I mean what gives ? Surely if you really believed that the mind wasn't caused by anything material then a zygote should be just as capable of having a soul as a more developed fetus? why would you have any preference for one over the other?
Is it because the later developed fetus starts showing movement and reaction to stimuli via their nervous system? i.e. once their physical structures are developed enough to allow the activity of their brain to be perceived?
is that another coincidence? like you really believe that the mind is non-physical and actually caused by the soul, but you just so happen to only think that the human organism has a soul after its physical brain and nervous system have developed enough to show the beginnings of behaviour and cognition and brain activity.
1:08:00 the point isn't taking a risk and bad things happening. The point is that you knowingly took a risk that you knew could create a predicament so you are responsible for that predicament, specifically you're responsible for the new life you created by knowingly performing an action that you knew had a chance of creating that life.
what is the analogy meant to be to getting burgled after leaving your door unlocked?
another human being with agency carried out the burglary so obviously they're the one morally responsible.
But in the case of pregnancy through consensual intercourse, it's not like you two had sex and "left the door open" then some other agent decided to take that opportunity to create a new life and put it in you.
No, you two are the last agents to have any effect on the new human life being created, after that it's just natural processes (like the person squeezing the trigger is the last agent to have any effect on the bullet hitting someone , they can't say "well yeah I took a risk by squeezing the trigger knowing that it might have hit the person standing in front of the barrel but I didn't consent to that horrid outcome so I'm not responsible") so you two are the only ones responsible for the predicamentso it's you who have to pay some cost because of the predicament you caused, not the innocent party of the unborn babies who played no part in himself being brought into existence and so has no responsibility.
59:35
his example shows the opposite of what he's trying to claim. If you're saying it;s ok for the person to kill the violinist plugged into them, then why would it be wrong for the person to do inflict foetal alcohol syndrome on the violinist which is less harmful than killing the violinist?
Plus in nearly all cases of pregnancy, the person actually caused the violinist to be linked up to them in the first place by willingly performing an act that they knew had the risk of bringing the violinist into existence, so obviously given that they caused the predicament they 're responsible and they're the one who has to suffer some penalty to resolve the predicament.
the violinist argument is abysmal.
You don't wanna get mooned by Trump?
1:04:00 there is no legal inconsistency when you take into account that in nearly all cases the mother knowingly caused the predicament of bringing the baby into existence and causing the baby to be dependent on her and htere's a legal principle that the guilty, responsible party has to pay the damages. Suppose two neighbours both have the legal right to enjoy the view from their adjacent apartment balcony without it being blocked out. But one neighbour plants some magic beans on her balcony which overgrow and block both their balcony views. The plants can’t be cut because they’re magic, but they can be tied and bent to one side so that they only block one of the neighbours views. Obviously it should be the neighbour that planted the beans that should pay the price to their right to enjoy the balcony view so that the neighbour who didn’t cause the predicament can maintain their right to enjoy the balcony view.
of course this only applies for pregnancies where the woman is a consenting adult who is legally responsible for her decision to have sexual intercourse which risks creating a new human life.
but there are other arguments against abortion where this does not hold, the argument against abortion is simply even stronger in the majority of cases where this does hold.
I don think Mike Huemer would say everyone should own any weapon they want.
He almost certainly wouldn't. he says one should be able to own the most efficient means to defend oneself. I'd recommend his recent 2020 paper "Gun Rights as Deontic Constraints" where he responds to objections by Nicholas Dixon and Jeff McMahan. He discusses the uncertainty based objection at length. Also it's wrong to think that his argument only concerns gun bans or extreme measures, i'd recommend this debate between Huemer and Shermer where he gives a summary of his complete view:
ua-cam.com/video/UT6PWZnktAs/v-deo.html
Well Huemer is an ancap so it’s hard to see how he could believe anything else in actuality. But as far as papers go, Dustin’s recent one in response to Huemer is very good and it of course doesn’t rely on the idea that people should be able to own any gun. Huemer just uses that to set up the thought experiment
@@medvenson I'm not just talking about his actual beliefs but about what his argument takes aim at which is not just gun bans and extreme restrictions. There's a sense in which weaker restrictions may be even harder to justify for him since there's less of a potential upside but to have any upside at all the law must sufficiently prohibitive. Also Dustin's paper addresses Huemer's 2003 and 2016 article not this recent 2020 article which he wrote in response to Dixon and McMahan. I was talking about.
Yea I know. And so does Dustin, his argument doesn’t rely on the assumption that Huemer is only talking about total bans.
@@medvenson I'm not claiming it does, just that his characterization at the start of the discussion was not accurate.
I think your quick summary of the risk objections when it comes to bodily autonomy arguments wasn't very charitable. Being killed by a murder isn't connected to leaving your front door open by the same kind of relation as getting pregnant is to having sex: pregnancy is a natural consequence of having sex, in fact it's the reason why sex exists in the first place.
God the Huemer argument is so unbelievably stupid
all morals are just a spook bro
stop spouting nietzschian garbage
Not really relevant to a discussion on applied ethics