A lot of Catholic moralizers seem to really struggle with the fact that teleological arguments aren't even vaguely compelling to people who don't already agree with the conclusion.
Yeah, it really strikes me as tortured reasoning to decide what they already want to say, which is that abortion is bad.
If you view arguments as aimed to convince rather than to discover truth (a newer thing), it makes a lot more sense. People were trying to talk each other into giving them some of their meat way before the Greeks started philosophizing or the Indians and Chinese started recording astronomical events.
Arguments are opportunities to learn, not attempts to convince. There's no argument, no matter how airtight, that will convince a person. It's just not how the human mind works.
Depends. You're not going to convince most tradcaths about abortion like people are doing here, but you might well convince someone rolling by who hasn't formed an opinion yet. If someone doesn't have a strong opinion, you might sway them one way or the other.
Most arguments are more like a lawyer arguing a position than a scientist looking for truth--we evolved to convince each other of things to get food, shelter, and sex, so it makes sense.
We already can't expoſe our own Children anymore, becauſe of Woke, and now you want us to be reſponſible for all Foundlings? Thoſe thrice-damnèd Millennials are ſo entitled…
As a lapsed Catholic, I want to make a correction regarding doctrine. Catholics think extramarital sex and contraception are sinful for the same reason they think both male and female masturbation are sinful but celibacy isn't: because sex is sacred and having unapproved kinds of orgasms is defiling it. If Catholics thought a woman's purpose was to get pregnant, there wouldn't be Catholic nuns. I know this is a minor point, but before I became an atheist I used to hate it when people treated Catholic women like oppressed victims, so I had to leave a comment.
Right. The point is that, while the rules they invented bind both men and women, they wind up inconveniencing and threatening women much more because pregnancy occurs almost entirely in a woman's body. The fact all the theologians were male probably has a lot to do with it, much as modern collegiate rules turning every ambiguous situation into sexual misconduct on the part of the man are made by mostly-female groups.
> If Catholics thought a woman's purpose was to get pregnant, there wouldn't be Catholic nuns.
The purpose of life for any average (and by that I mean married) woman though basically becomes being pregnant though. I can appreciate catholicism historically for giving women an option other than constant pregnancy (a prospect I find completely awful) thanks to convents, but the ethic for "average married woman" really sucks, and is particularly glaring today where plenty of other christian denominations have thankfully made their peace with contraception.
While Catholic ethics does expect married women to get pregnant, and rejects approaches to having sex frequently but getting pregnant *never*, it does not expect women to be pregnant all the time.
The viability issue is kind of a non issue when no doctor will EVER agree to induce pregnancy at 21 or even at 30 weeks simply because you don't want to be pregnant anymore. And women do regularly beg them to, because the last trimester SUCKS. But it seems the universal practice of this country and probably most of the world that if you have made it to 20 weeks, you have no option but to go the distance unless your health is suffering very badly. If your body TRIES to go into labor at 24 weeks, the doctor will put you in a bed and shove you full of very unpleasant meds to make this stop happening.
The main reason for this, I assume, is that premature babies take a ton of expensive care and resources and after all that, may still not live, especially at the low end of the viability range. So although we don't have a law about it that I know of, it's not really less difficult to do than late term abortion, and probably more so.
>As a practical matter, pregnancy is the only situation where one person’s life depends on the ordinary use of another person’s organs. No one has a horrific pacemaker accident and winds up fused at the chest with someone else with a heart beating for two. We don’t have to accommodate any strongly-held intuitions that in this situation you’re allowed to murder your sudden conjoined twin.
Trent seems to believe in a third definition of how medicine works: the purpose of medicine is to advance and enforce his preferred social rules. It is a troublesomely common belief.
I think the responsibility argument makes sense, but only if the person in question willingly had sex they knew was likely to result in a pregnancy. I'm still pro-choice, particularly early on, because I think of an embryo more as a potential person than a currently existent one (over time and especially past viability this changes), but in the world where some hypothetical person says "yes, I will have sex without adequate protection, and if I get pregnant I will just have an abortion, and I am willingly doing this because I feel like it," I still think they are a bad person.
I think Catholics screwed up Aristotle bigly. When Aristotle said things should be used for their natural purposes, I don't think he meant that if the natural purpose of legs is walking, then it is wrong to use them to dance. He was a very pragmatic type who would not come up with something that silly. Rather, I think his point was that if you are not using your legs to walk, dance, exercise at all, then you will have problems. The basic idea is that if we want to be healthy, our lifestyles cannot be too different from that of our ancestors.
So the idea that the natural purpose of sex is reproduction is I think simply the idea that people should have some kids. It does not mean recreational sex is bad.
But Catholics had the kinda sex-negative Jesus and the super sex-negative Paul to shore up, so they misinterpreted it.
Should people have kids? Well I am not in favour of "shoulding" people. But I notice it with sadness that child-free people are usually educated people with good incomes - exactly those people who would be able to give kids a great upbringing, a great life. So there is certainly some utility loss there.
I think the Catholics, in the back of their heads at least, wanted to make more kids to increase the numbers of their faith, against the other faiths they were fighting with, so they wrote the rules to make childbearing desired and contraception ineffective. Whether it's motivated reasoning or simply evolution in the classic sense--nonreproductive sects like the Shakers die out--it has been quite successful over the past 2000 years. Catholicism is the largest denomination in the world. Catholicism is lindy.
As for the childfree thing? Sure, I agree. But I wonder how many of those people don't want kids and wouldn't make great parents if forced to do it. (My personal cynicism and selfishness are coloring my view, of course.)
You could even make the dysgenic argument, if the midcentury Germans hadn't put it in such bad odor with some of the other things they did. Avoiding children requires self-control and planning, as well as judgement of which people are likely to stick you with an unwanted child by deceit or force.
It is interesting to raise contraception is good these days. So why the hell are so many abortions? I really do hope it does not come from so many rapes. Are people being careless? I know some guys oppose condoms, and also one can guess sometimes women don't really plan on having a hookup, so no IUD, but then it just happens anyway, but still.
Another interesting thing is this. I don't think anyone seriously proposed abortion should be punished as harshly as murder. And there is the part where people travel to another state, commit murder, go back to their home state and expect to not be held legally liable for it? If they do so, they go to prison just the same as if they would have done it in their home state.
So in other words, the pro-lifer already accepts the fetus is not fully a human and abortion is something less than murder.
Some people don't know that the IUD or implant is much more effective than the pill (sex education is bad, and in the US at least often downplays the effectiveness of birth control to keep people from having sex). Some people have nasty side effects from highly reliable contraception. Some people have trouble getting it: for example, you usually need to have two doctor's appointments pretty close together to get an IUD, and a lot of people have trouble lining up childcare and work hours to go to two doctors' appointments close together.
(answering to one point that is not central to the post)
the way i see it, people don't have to save the foundling kid. it's Neutral not to save it (and in Lawful Neutral country you don't have to save people in predispositions you didn't put them in). it's Good the save the child, but it is supererogatory good. and part of why is because there is no coherent story that start with "you must save the kid" and not ending with "donate all your money to EA charity". and donating 10% is much less demanding then taking care of foundling, and yet most people don't do that.
I also find it really really important that in the violinist though experiment, person have the right to disconnect the life support. you might be asshole if you do that (and I'm not even sure about that!) but it's actively Evil to forbid that.
(the foundling baby is almost certainly not a person, it's more fine to let it die then to eat factory-farmed meat, if you try for some sort of "objective" morality and not feelings. evolution, though, make sure people care about babies)
Yeah, I think this metaphor is a little shaky because it's not a situation that actually happens enough for people to have intuitions about.
Like I think the premise of the metaphor is that you and only you can save the child, and you need to dedicated your life to doing so. Like you can't just pick them up and take them to the nearest government building, which is what I imagine a lot of people would actually do in this situation.
Tangentially related fun fact: In Canada it is in fact illegal to abandon a person in need of medical help while in the wilderness
the sentence " it’s your job to take care of her!" struck me as very Western, in hard to describe way. as in, i don't expect people in Africa or Ukraine writing like that - even people who did, actually, take to their homes those children. there is some nonchalance about this.
When Singer write about how people need to donate most of their money, he understand he is asking for a lot, and more then most people will do. and this is MUCH BIGGER ASK, and i don't get the sense that Ozy see it, or take it with the deserving seriousness and gravity.
Like, you can claim that it's right and just for everyone to donate 90% of their money, but if you assume everyone will do that now you just... have very wrong model of reality.
and the source of that, i feel, is the Western affluence, that protect people from having to make those trade-offs, that make it feel like it something that of coerce any nice people will do, because of the reality-distortion field of pretend-niceness of the Western Civilization. the idea that it's UNTHINKABLE that bad things happen, and that someone must prevent those things from happen. there is some reality-denial elements here. because, this world is full of foundlings that are not picked, right now.
I... tried to vaguely gesture on something and i don't think i managed, but i don't know how to do better.
(the Canadian law is not about caring for the person for life. my country have similar law, and i find it very dissimilar to the foundling in the field scenario)
I guess there's also perhaps the case of e.g. right to die stuff as a siamese twin or something like that, but I do agree that in principle the pregnancy case is essentially unique.
I’m curious on what you think of his point on child support and whether fathers who took every precaution that still results in an unwanted pregnancy have a right to refuse to give child support.
Child support is a complete mess that needs reform from the bottom up. We must accept that society bears the primary responsibility for preventing child poverty. Once we have a functional welfare state, I think it will simplify a lot of the hard problems (male victims of rape, victims of reproductive coercion, couples where only one person wants to give the baby up for adoption, people who are too poor to pay their child support orders, and (yes) men who don't want kids).
This is a good point, and I think the USA should have a functional welfare state the way the Europeans and other rich countries do.
However, we don't, and the way things are going, we probably won't for a very long time. The religion of individualism is pretty strong in this country (someone over on ACX gave me a hard time for advocating for the government to bulk-buy pharmaceuticals). You have to live in the world as it exists, not as you would like to be. So it theoretically makes sense for men to advocate for our rights in these particular situations (which, by the way, few men do).
A driver (or their insurance) are usually still liable if they hit a pedestrian, even if a court decides there's nothing they could have done to stop it - the thinking being if you drive something big and dangerous in the first place and hit someone weaker, they get compensation from you (which means your insurance). And then premiums go up if you live in an area where this happens a lot. At least that seems to be how it works in Europe.
One could argue, that anyone who believes a woman is "liable" for carrying a pregnancy to term whether she wanted or not, should logically also hold a man to supporting a child whether they wanted it or not. But funnily enough that's not always the case.
Maybe a tad irrelevant but i have met at least 3 people who think abortion isnt ok because we have widely available contraceptives, so if one doesnt want to risk having a baby then one doesnt have an excuse
I dont care for that line of thinking myself one bit
The idea that "evil == a rational person using one of their natural powers against its purpose" is super bizarre to me as an Aristotelian. Your emphasis is in the wrong place. Closer to the mark: "evil == a rational person using one of their natural powers *qua rational person* against its purpose." For a being with a rational soul, nutritive and sensory-locomotive functions (including organ functions) are normatively subsidiary to the functioning of reason. But even this "closer to the mark" version is still off the mark: it is necessary but not sufficient for evil that rationality be deployed defectively.
Normative medicine. We are discussing the final cause, which is one of Aristotle’s four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. A person’s final cause – their purpose- is not a subjective, value-laden judgment, but something dependent on human nature. In much the same way, what leads to tomatoes growing or lions thriving depends on fulfilling what is best for their nature, not on subjective judgment. You can’t plant tomatoes in clay, neglect to water them, and expect them to flourish. Likewise, lions can’t thrive if lionesses are prone to killing rather than nurturing their cubs. The natures of lions and tomatoes are real and discoverable, and thus what leads to their thriving is not a matter of opinion but a discoverable fact.
The good for a thing is knowable and determined by the end it has by its nature. The argument further assumes that people ought to do good and avoid evil—that is, never act contrary to a faculty’s natural end as discoverable by reason. If a certain ability or trait, natural to a rational person, exists for a specific purpose, then it is impossible for it to be good for the person to use the ability in a way that goes against that purpose. It says nothing about using a faculty for purposes that are not contrary to its nature, like walking on your hands, chewing gum, or using earplugs. It also doesn’t speak to not using a faculty at all, such as never having sex. Furthermore, it says nothing about using plants or animals, as we are only discussing the choices of rational agents. I feel the examples you picked were beside the point. Bypassing your esophagus is not an example of acting contrary to its nature, but rather an example of not using it at all. Anesthesia is not an example of acting contrary to nature but of preserving life to facilitate the natural end of the nervous system. Similarly, examples that might be offered like earplugs or chewing gum also miss what the argument is addressing. Things that would qualify as contrary to nature examples would include contraception, drunkenness, drug abuse, smoking, CTE-inducing sports, and sex change hormones.
A handful of the many different ways this is wrong:
- It is clearly sometimes wrong to refuse to use a faculty, such as deliberately starving yourself to death, refusing to ever love anyone, or refusing to use reason.
- This implies that chewing gum to help yourself skip a meal is more morally problematic than starving yourself to death, as the former is contrary to eating (in the same way that sodomy is contrary to PIV) and the latter is merely refusing to use your eating faculty.
- You have to be extremely Catholic to understand how celibacy is less contrary to the natural use of the sexual faculty than a couple using contraception to space their five children.
- You have to be extremely, extremely Catholic to understand how a couple deliberately having sex only during the infertile times to space their five children is less contrary to the natural use of the sexual faculty than a couple using contraception to space their five children.
- Trent Horn was only discussing the ordinary uses of bodily organs, and I think it is a reasonable question to ask what he thinks about the ordinary use of the esophagus. If he meant all of the stuff you said, he should have said it himself!
Why is it wrong to refuse to ever love anyone? Plenty of people are aromantic, and lots of people do more harm than good when they get romantically entangled. I'm not actually convinced anyone's life would be improved by being in a relationship with me, for instance. :)
Is it *wrong* to refuse to use reason? Many sensual pleasures are diminished by reason. I get the whole EA-rationality-is-a-way-to-improve-the-world thing, but many people aren't particularly rational, aren't particularly good at reasoning, and don't gain all that much from thinking about things too deeply.
I'm not a fan of hunger strikes--I don't see why I should care if someone chooses to starve themselves to death of their own free will--but they have been effective in pressuring prisons, for example, to treat prisoners better or advocating for various causes.
As for the rest of it...I definitely agree! In my infinite cynicism, I think they just want more kids and find rules to make sure their followers have more kids. And, it works! It's the biggest denomination in the world, and second only to Sunni Islam in terms of religious-groupings-just-below-a-religion.
The purpose of anesthesia isn't saving lives, but preventing suffering. For many kinds of surgeries, it's entirely possible to operate on a fully conscious person without killing them. So if it's acceptable to use anesthesia to suppress the natural function of someone's nervous system in order to prevent suffering, why is it not also acceptable to use contraception to spare someone the suffering of going through pregnancy, or use sex change hormones to alleviate the suffering of gender dysphoria?
>what leads to their thriving is not a matter of opinion but a discoverable fact.
It is a discoverable fact that humans are more complicated than lions and much more complicated than tomatoes, and have many more needs. It's also a discoverable fact that people thrive under very different circumstances. I'm sure you can think of happy, successful people whose lives would make you miserable. And finally, it's a discoverable fact that most humans can tell you what they need in language, and tomatoes and lions can't. Taking care of tomatoes is pretty straightforward - they can't suffer psychologically, so you only have to observe their physical health. On the other hand, many captive animals unnecessarily suffer because the people caring for them don't understand their needs. Humans have a great gift: the ability to tell other people what their needs are. We don't have to carefully observe people's behavior in different circumstances in order to determine their likes and dislikes, we can just ask them. So if someone says that they want to have sex without conceiving a child or take hormones that alter their secondary sex characteristics, I value their words much more highly than any amount of philosophical pondering about the nature of the reproductive system.
As for mind-altering substances, while I want nothing to do with them myself, I also understand that some people thrive better with them than without them. There are people whose ability to numb their pain with drugs or self-injury is the only thing that makes life tolerable for them, or helps them stay functional enough to hold down a job, or even prevents them from becoming destructive or violent or committing suicide. Healthier outlets like exercise or therapy just don't work for some people. That's part of the reason I value personal freedom so highly, even if some people exercise their freedom in ways that seem bizarre and horrible to me.
Oh, sorry, the good for this blogpost is knowable and determined by the end it has by its nature. Its nature is a blogpost refuting teleology; it exists for that purpose. It is impossible to be good for the post to comment on it in defense of teleology, which goes against that purpose.
A lot of Catholic moralizers seem to really struggle with the fact that teleological arguments aren't even vaguely compelling to people who don't already agree with the conclusion.
I don't know about "agree with the conclusion", but it does require some degree of acceptance of teleology.
Yeah, it really strikes me as tortured reasoning to decide what they already want to say, which is that abortion is bad.
If you view arguments as aimed to convince rather than to discover truth (a newer thing), it makes a lot more sense. People were trying to talk each other into giving them some of their meat way before the Greeks started philosophizing or the Indians and Chinese started recording astronomical events.
Yes but why is abortion bad?
Arguments are opportunities to learn, not attempts to convince. There's no argument, no matter how airtight, that will convince a person. It's just not how the human mind works.
Comment was removed for calling Mike a defeatist idiot. (Thank you for the person who reported it.)
Depends. You're not going to convince most tradcaths about abortion like people are doing here, but you might well convince someone rolling by who hasn't formed an opinion yet. If someone doesn't have a strong opinion, you might sway them one way or the other.
Most arguments are more like a lawyer arguing a position than a scientist looking for truth--we evolved to convince each other of things to get food, shelter, and sex, so it makes sense.
We already can't expoſe our own Children anymore, becauſe of Woke, and now you want us to be reſponſible for all Foundlings? Thoſe thrice-damnèd Millennials are ſo entitled…
I don't know if people should be *punished by the law* for allowing a foundling to die, but someone who does is most likely a fucking asshole.
As a lapsed Catholic, I want to make a correction regarding doctrine. Catholics think extramarital sex and contraception are sinful for the same reason they think both male and female masturbation are sinful but celibacy isn't: because sex is sacred and having unapproved kinds of orgasms is defiling it. If Catholics thought a woman's purpose was to get pregnant, there wouldn't be Catholic nuns. I know this is a minor point, but before I became an atheist I used to hate it when people treated Catholic women like oppressed victims, so I had to leave a comment.
Right. The point is that, while the rules they invented bind both men and women, they wind up inconveniencing and threatening women much more because pregnancy occurs almost entirely in a woman's body. The fact all the theologians were male probably has a lot to do with it, much as modern collegiate rules turning every ambiguous situation into sexual misconduct on the part of the man are made by mostly-female groups.
> If Catholics thought a woman's purpose was to get pregnant, there wouldn't be Catholic nuns.
The purpose of life for any average (and by that I mean married) woman though basically becomes being pregnant though. I can appreciate catholicism historically for giving women an option other than constant pregnancy (a prospect I find completely awful) thanks to convents, but the ethic for "average married woman" really sucks, and is particularly glaring today where plenty of other christian denominations have thankfully made their peace with contraception.
While Catholic ethics does expect married women to get pregnant, and rejects approaches to having sex frequently but getting pregnant *never*, it does not expect women to be pregnant all the time.
The viability issue is kind of a non issue when no doctor will EVER agree to induce pregnancy at 21 or even at 30 weeks simply because you don't want to be pregnant anymore. And women do regularly beg them to, because the last trimester SUCKS. But it seems the universal practice of this country and probably most of the world that if you have made it to 20 weeks, you have no option but to go the distance unless your health is suffering very badly. If your body TRIES to go into labor at 24 weeks, the doctor will put you in a bed and shove you full of very unpleasant meds to make this stop happening.
The main reason for this, I assume, is that premature babies take a ton of expensive care and resources and after all that, may still not live, especially at the low end of the viability range. So although we don't have a law about it that I know of, it's not really less difficult to do than late term abortion, and probably more so.
There's a proposed bill in South Australia to replace abortion past 28 weeks with induction. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-23/liberal-mp-pushes-changes-to-sa-abortion-laws/104384176 That said, it's not likely to pass.
>As a practical matter, pregnancy is the only situation where one person’s life depends on the ordinary use of another person’s organs. No one has a horrific pacemaker accident and winds up fused at the chest with someone else with a heart beating for two. We don’t have to accommodate any strongly-held intuitions that in this situation you’re allowed to murder your sudden conjoined twin.
What about regular conjoined twins?
Trent seems to believe in a third definition of how medicine works: the purpose of medicine is to advance and enforce his preferred social rules. It is a troublesomely common belief.
Motivated reasoning is a thing. Religions have gotten pretty good at it over a few thousand years.
I think the responsibility argument makes sense, but only if the person in question willingly had sex they knew was likely to result in a pregnancy. I'm still pro-choice, particularly early on, because I think of an embryo more as a potential person than a currently existent one (over time and especially past viability this changes), but in the world where some hypothetical person says "yes, I will have sex without adequate protection, and if I get pregnant I will just have an abortion, and I am willingly doing this because I feel like it," I still think they are a bad person.
I think Catholics screwed up Aristotle bigly. When Aristotle said things should be used for their natural purposes, I don't think he meant that if the natural purpose of legs is walking, then it is wrong to use them to dance. He was a very pragmatic type who would not come up with something that silly. Rather, I think his point was that if you are not using your legs to walk, dance, exercise at all, then you will have problems. The basic idea is that if we want to be healthy, our lifestyles cannot be too different from that of our ancestors.
So the idea that the natural purpose of sex is reproduction is I think simply the idea that people should have some kids. It does not mean recreational sex is bad.
But Catholics had the kinda sex-negative Jesus and the super sex-negative Paul to shore up, so they misinterpreted it.
Should people have kids? Well I am not in favour of "shoulding" people. But I notice it with sadness that child-free people are usually educated people with good incomes - exactly those people who would be able to give kids a great upbringing, a great life. So there is certainly some utility loss there.
I think the Catholics, in the back of their heads at least, wanted to make more kids to increase the numbers of their faith, against the other faiths they were fighting with, so they wrote the rules to make childbearing desired and contraception ineffective. Whether it's motivated reasoning or simply evolution in the classic sense--nonreproductive sects like the Shakers die out--it has been quite successful over the past 2000 years. Catholicism is the largest denomination in the world. Catholicism is lindy.
As for the childfree thing? Sure, I agree. But I wonder how many of those people don't want kids and wouldn't make great parents if forced to do it. (My personal cynicism and selfishness are coloring my view, of course.)
You could even make the dysgenic argument, if the midcentury Germans hadn't put it in such bad odor with some of the other things they did. Avoiding children requires self-control and planning, as well as judgement of which people are likely to stick you with an unwanted child by deceit or force.
It is interesting to raise contraception is good these days. So why the hell are so many abortions? I really do hope it does not come from so many rapes. Are people being careless? I know some guys oppose condoms, and also one can guess sometimes women don't really plan on having a hookup, so no IUD, but then it just happens anyway, but still.
Another interesting thing is this. I don't think anyone seriously proposed abortion should be punished as harshly as murder. And there is the part where people travel to another state, commit murder, go back to their home state and expect to not be held legally liable for it? If they do so, they go to prison just the same as if they would have done it in their home state.
So in other words, the pro-lifer already accepts the fetus is not fully a human and abortion is something less than murder.
Some people don't know that the IUD or implant is much more effective than the pill (sex education is bad, and in the US at least often downplays the effectiveness of birth control to keep people from having sex). Some people have nasty side effects from highly reliable contraception. Some people have trouble getting it: for example, you usually need to have two doctor's appointments pretty close together to get an IUD, and a lot of people have trouble lining up childcare and work hours to go to two doctors' appointments close together.
(answering to one point that is not central to the post)
the way i see it, people don't have to save the foundling kid. it's Neutral not to save it (and in Lawful Neutral country you don't have to save people in predispositions you didn't put them in). it's Good the save the child, but it is supererogatory good. and part of why is because there is no coherent story that start with "you must save the kid" and not ending with "donate all your money to EA charity". and donating 10% is much less demanding then taking care of foundling, and yet most people don't do that.
I also find it really really important that in the violinist though experiment, person have the right to disconnect the life support. you might be asshole if you do that (and I'm not even sure about that!) but it's actively Evil to forbid that.
(the foundling baby is almost certainly not a person, it's more fine to let it die then to eat factory-farmed meat, if you try for some sort of "objective" morality and not feelings. evolution, though, make sure people care about babies)
Yeah, I think this metaphor is a little shaky because it's not a situation that actually happens enough for people to have intuitions about.
Like I think the premise of the metaphor is that you and only you can save the child, and you need to dedicated your life to doing so. Like you can't just pick them up and take them to the nearest government building, which is what I imagine a lot of people would actually do in this situation.
Tangentially related fun fact: In Canada it is in fact illegal to abandon a person in need of medical help while in the wilderness
the sentence " it’s your job to take care of her!" struck me as very Western, in hard to describe way. as in, i don't expect people in Africa or Ukraine writing like that - even people who did, actually, take to their homes those children. there is some nonchalance about this.
When Singer write about how people need to donate most of their money, he understand he is asking for a lot, and more then most people will do. and this is MUCH BIGGER ASK, and i don't get the sense that Ozy see it, or take it with the deserving seriousness and gravity.
Like, you can claim that it's right and just for everyone to donate 90% of their money, but if you assume everyone will do that now you just... have very wrong model of reality.
and the source of that, i feel, is the Western affluence, that protect people from having to make those trade-offs, that make it feel like it something that of coerce any nice people will do, because of the reality-distortion field of pretend-niceness of the Western Civilization. the idea that it's UNTHINKABLE that bad things happen, and that someone must prevent those things from happen. there is some reality-denial elements here. because, this world is full of foundlings that are not picked, right now.
I... tried to vaguely gesture on something and i don't think i managed, but i don't know how to do better.
(the Canadian law is not about caring for the person for life. my country have similar law, and i find it very dissimilar to the foundling in the field scenario)
I guess there's also perhaps the case of e.g. right to die stuff as a siamese twin or something like that, but I do agree that in principle the pregnancy case is essentially unique.
Great post.
I’m curious on what you think of his point on child support and whether fathers who took every precaution that still results in an unwanted pregnancy have a right to refuse to give child support.
Child support is a complete mess that needs reform from the bottom up. We must accept that society bears the primary responsibility for preventing child poverty. Once we have a functional welfare state, I think it will simplify a lot of the hard problems (male victims of rape, victims of reproductive coercion, couples where only one person wants to give the baby up for adoption, people who are too poor to pay their child support orders, and (yes) men who don't want kids).
This is a good point, and I think the USA should have a functional welfare state the way the Europeans and other rich countries do.
However, we don't, and the way things are going, we probably won't for a very long time. The religion of individualism is pretty strong in this country (someone over on ACX gave me a hard time for advocating for the government to bulk-buy pharmaceuticals). You have to live in the world as it exists, not as you would like to be. So it theoretically makes sense for men to advocate for our rights in these particular situations (which, by the way, few men do).
A driver (or their insurance) are usually still liable if they hit a pedestrian, even if a court decides there's nothing they could have done to stop it - the thinking being if you drive something big and dangerous in the first place and hit someone weaker, they get compensation from you (which means your insurance). And then premiums go up if you live in an area where this happens a lot. At least that seems to be how it works in Europe.
One could argue, that anyone who believes a woman is "liable" for carrying a pregnancy to term whether she wanted or not, should logically also hold a man to supporting a child whether they wanted it or not. But funnily enough that's not always the case.
(Note that the driver only has civil liability and not criminal liability.)
Maybe a tad irrelevant but i have met at least 3 people who think abortion isnt ok because we have widely available contraceptives, so if one doesnt want to risk having a baby then one doesnt have an excuse
I dont care for that line of thinking myself one bit
The idea that "evil == a rational person using one of their natural powers against its purpose" is super bizarre to me as an Aristotelian. Your emphasis is in the wrong place. Closer to the mark: "evil == a rational person using one of their natural powers *qua rational person* against its purpose." For a being with a rational soul, nutritive and sensory-locomotive functions (including organ functions) are normatively subsidiary to the functioning of reason. But even this "closer to the mark" version is still off the mark: it is necessary but not sufficient for evil that rationality be deployed defectively.
Oops, this @Mike lol
Normative medicine. We are discussing the final cause, which is one of Aristotle’s four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. A person’s final cause – their purpose- is not a subjective, value-laden judgment, but something dependent on human nature. In much the same way, what leads to tomatoes growing or lions thriving depends on fulfilling what is best for their nature, not on subjective judgment. You can’t plant tomatoes in clay, neglect to water them, and expect them to flourish. Likewise, lions can’t thrive if lionesses are prone to killing rather than nurturing their cubs. The natures of lions and tomatoes are real and discoverable, and thus what leads to their thriving is not a matter of opinion but a discoverable fact.
The good for a thing is knowable and determined by the end it has by its nature. The argument further assumes that people ought to do good and avoid evil—that is, never act contrary to a faculty’s natural end as discoverable by reason. If a certain ability or trait, natural to a rational person, exists for a specific purpose, then it is impossible for it to be good for the person to use the ability in a way that goes against that purpose. It says nothing about using a faculty for purposes that are not contrary to its nature, like walking on your hands, chewing gum, or using earplugs. It also doesn’t speak to not using a faculty at all, such as never having sex. Furthermore, it says nothing about using plants or animals, as we are only discussing the choices of rational agents. I feel the examples you picked were beside the point. Bypassing your esophagus is not an example of acting contrary to its nature, but rather an example of not using it at all. Anesthesia is not an example of acting contrary to nature but of preserving life to facilitate the natural end of the nervous system. Similarly, examples that might be offered like earplugs or chewing gum also miss what the argument is addressing. Things that would qualify as contrary to nature examples would include contraception, drunkenness, drug abuse, smoking, CTE-inducing sports, and sex change hormones.
A handful of the many different ways this is wrong:
- It is clearly sometimes wrong to refuse to use a faculty, such as deliberately starving yourself to death, refusing to ever love anyone, or refusing to use reason.
- This implies that chewing gum to help yourself skip a meal is more morally problematic than starving yourself to death, as the former is contrary to eating (in the same way that sodomy is contrary to PIV) and the latter is merely refusing to use your eating faculty.
- You have to be extremely Catholic to understand how celibacy is less contrary to the natural use of the sexual faculty than a couple using contraception to space their five children.
- You have to be extremely, extremely Catholic to understand how a couple deliberately having sex only during the infertile times to space their five children is less contrary to the natural use of the sexual faculty than a couple using contraception to space their five children.
- Trent Horn was only discussing the ordinary uses of bodily organs, and I think it is a reasonable question to ask what he thinks about the ordinary use of the esophagus. If he meant all of the stuff you said, he should have said it himself!
Why is it wrong to refuse to ever love anyone? Plenty of people are aromantic, and lots of people do more harm than good when they get romantically entangled. I'm not actually convinced anyone's life would be improved by being in a relationship with me, for instance. :)
Is it *wrong* to refuse to use reason? Many sensual pleasures are diminished by reason. I get the whole EA-rationality-is-a-way-to-improve-the-world thing, but many people aren't particularly rational, aren't particularly good at reasoning, and don't gain all that much from thinking about things too deeply.
I'm not a fan of hunger strikes--I don't see why I should care if someone chooses to starve themselves to death of their own free will--but they have been effective in pressuring prisons, for example, to treat prisoners better or advocating for various causes.
As for the rest of it...I definitely agree! In my infinite cynicism, I think they just want more kids and find rules to make sure their followers have more kids. And, it works! It's the biggest denomination in the world, and second only to Sunni Islam in terms of religious-groupings-just-below-a-religion.
The purpose of anesthesia isn't saving lives, but preventing suffering. For many kinds of surgeries, it's entirely possible to operate on a fully conscious person without killing them. So if it's acceptable to use anesthesia to suppress the natural function of someone's nervous system in order to prevent suffering, why is it not also acceptable to use contraception to spare someone the suffering of going through pregnancy, or use sex change hormones to alleviate the suffering of gender dysphoria?
>what leads to their thriving is not a matter of opinion but a discoverable fact.
It is a discoverable fact that humans are more complicated than lions and much more complicated than tomatoes, and have many more needs. It's also a discoverable fact that people thrive under very different circumstances. I'm sure you can think of happy, successful people whose lives would make you miserable. And finally, it's a discoverable fact that most humans can tell you what they need in language, and tomatoes and lions can't. Taking care of tomatoes is pretty straightforward - they can't suffer psychologically, so you only have to observe their physical health. On the other hand, many captive animals unnecessarily suffer because the people caring for them don't understand their needs. Humans have a great gift: the ability to tell other people what their needs are. We don't have to carefully observe people's behavior in different circumstances in order to determine their likes and dislikes, we can just ask them. So if someone says that they want to have sex without conceiving a child or take hormones that alter their secondary sex characteristics, I value their words much more highly than any amount of philosophical pondering about the nature of the reproductive system.
As for mind-altering substances, while I want nothing to do with them myself, I also understand that some people thrive better with them than without them. There are people whose ability to numb their pain with drugs or self-injury is the only thing that makes life tolerable for them, or helps them stay functional enough to hold down a job, or even prevents them from becoming destructive or violent or committing suicide. Healthier outlets like exercise or therapy just don't work for some people. That's part of the reason I value personal freedom so highly, even if some people exercise their freedom in ways that seem bizarre and horrible to me.
Oh, sorry, the good for this blogpost is knowable and determined by the end it has by its nature. Its nature is a blogpost refuting teleology; it exists for that purpose. It is impossible to be good for the post to comment on it in defense of teleology, which goes against that purpose.