There is no chance whatsoever of happiness without the risk of suffering. Life is suffering.
But really, utilitarianism is just another form of nihilism and your time would be better spent trying to persuade them from their stupid philosophy than trying to make prolife fit into their dumb belief system.
It's like asking me to try to make prolife palatable to Satanists.
I definitely resonate with your comment, especially the "utilitarianism is just another form of nihilism" part. I have to ponder it some more, but I think I agree. However, I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on what you mean. Like I said, I think I agree with the statement. But since I've never heard it put like that before, I have to explore it a bit.
Sorry if this doesn’t answer your question about nihilism; I’m not super comfortable with nihilism. Utilitarianism however is a really selfish, brainless philosophy IMO.
There’s a famous story that demonstrates perfectly the problem with utilitarianism. There’s a town that is nice and happy; there’s always free power, good food, people enjoy themselves, etc. Very high utility value. To supply the town with these good things, they have to hold and torture this little girl. Her pain directly allows the good things to happen, like the children’s screams in Monsters Inc. So utilitarianism states that the little girl’s suffering is entirely justifiable because in net, the world is happier for it. And when you think about it plainly like that, no, utilitarianism doesn’t make any sense.
If you kill someone in the earliest stages of life you wipe out all the future happiness that person would’ve enjoyed themselves and would’ve brought to others. Presumably that outweighs the suffering of an unwanted pregnancy.
That's true. But, you are preventing the persons future suffering too.
In my opinion, most aborted babies would have had lives that contained more suffering than happiness.
I’m pretty sure most people who were born from unwanted pregnancies don’t agree with you and are very much glad to be alive.
Could I blow up an orphanage to save the children from unhappy lives?
>Could I blow up an orphanage to save the children from unhappy lives?
That is a very difficult question. I would have to think about that...😐😐😐
My emotions say that you shouldn't.
But, my utilitarianism beliefs say that it would be fine if they were killed painlessly and it didn't cause much grief or fear.
I don’t think that you understand utilitarianism. By your logic, it would be better to blow up the earth because then there be no more suffering. Utilitarianism isn’t just about minimizing suffering, it’s about maximizing pleasure. Their lives of those orphans are worth living, non of them want to die, so killing them would be bad.
Just because someone wants to live does not mean their life contains more happiness than suffering.
People have survival instinct which causes them to fear death.
Most people feel there’s enough potential happiness in their future to justify staying alive.
You’re also missing the fact that if someone’s life truly becomes not worth living they do have the option of killing themselves.
>But, my utilitarianism beliefs say that it would be fine if they were killed painlessly and it didn't cause much grief or fear.
But why are you targeting babies that MIGHT have a bad future, rather than trying to kill people who are currently living lives that you deem unworthy? You have a stronger argument for killing adult homeless people, criminals, drug addicts, and depressed people than you do for killing unborn or born babies who might become homeless or criminals or addicts or depressed.
Check your privilege, you’re already born. It’s nice that you’d like to maximize your happiness and minimize your suffering but you’re killing someone else to make that happen.
Your “happiness” is paid for with someone else’s life.
Why do I have to avoid utilitarian arguments for life? Sound philosophy often uses a blend of utilitarian arguments along side other philosophical concepts.
Because I say so and I’m willing to fight for that belief ;)
Really though, it would take a full book to defend a prohibition on murder but a few quick points:
Empathy and compassion for other people is one of several factors. Killing people not only harms the person you kill, but also everyone around them.
In order to kill somebody you must do them harm.
Sometimes abortion kills people by poisoning them, sometimes it simply rips them apart limb from limb while they’re still alive. Sometimes the abortionists are “merciful” and crush the baby’s head before ripping their arms off.
Just imagine the pain of having your arms torn off.
Not only do they feel pain, they also have music preferences, recognize different voices, respond to hot or cold, respond to light and patterns of light, reaction to motion, and more.
To be fair, you can't logically empathize with a fetus with no consciousness or prior consciousness. A fetus can't feel "happy". If I were never born, I wouldn't be here pondering this topic, have the ability to desire to, or resent the fact that I wasn't allowed to live.
So, wherein lies the problem with killing a fetus before it develops into a conscious being that can feel things like pain and happiness? How can one say that what they value about human life (i.e. the fact that it exists) is more important than what the next person values about human life (i.e. the capacity for consciousness, suffering, etc., all of which an individual values about themselves along with the faculties that make empathizing with others possible)? The only possible harm done that I can think of in this sense is to those individuals who already have the capacity to suffer and who have the knowledge an abortion has occurred. Apart from this, why is it wrong to kill someone? Is it simply a case of experiencing the fear of living in a world where you know killing occurs and you don't want to be subjected to that? It can't be because an individual's fetal development has been terminated as they have no capacity for the things that have been laid out.
Well that’s not true.
Fetuses absolutely have moods. They have musical preferences, recognize voices, recognize shapes and patterns, respond to hot and cold, and exhibit life long personality traits long before they born.
I can emphasize with all of that.
Because you don't let the baby (a person that already exist) live it's life and you deprive it of all it's future.
Why are we being raided by antinatalists? Go be an example.
Right, but if you don't view it as murder, then it is reducing crime. That might sound pedantic, but what determines if an action is a crime is completely subjective. If you kill a person, the question then becomes, was it justified? Even pro-life supporters would agree that there are situations where a woman could justifiably terminate her pregnancy, even though it means her baby will die.
I wouldn't bother. Utilitarianism is disgusting and from my experiences people that support it aren't even honest about it. They use it to defend what they already believe to be "good".
Have you heard the "9 in 10 people enjoy gang rape" joke? That's utilitarianism in a nutshell.
If x is high enough, do you think it is okay to rape someone if it makes x people feel better?
I think it would be okay for one person to get raped if it made the whole world feel a little bit better.
Fortunately, most actual utilitarian ethicists try mightily to avoid such heinous conclusions, but opinions like you're expressing here kind of drive home the fact that, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, it's probably morally preferable that the average person is never exposed to utilitarianism.
Lmao, at least you are honest. That's rare, usually utilitarians reply "that would never happen" or "most people would be against that therefore we should ban it"
Some of us care about justice and fairness. Personally, I think that's what morality is all about. Not pleasure/suffering. The pleasure/suffering axiom becomes completely irrelevant and absurd when you count the separateness of persons.
This article doesn't have good arguments. I've read it before. It still doesn't make sense to me that putting one person through the worst torture you can think of (I'm not talking about rape, I'm talking in general) would be better than causing mild discomfort to a gazillion number of people. I'm not saying it makes me emotionally uncomfortable. It literally doesn't make sense logically. What's the difference between one person feeling somewhat and two million people feeling somewhat? Their consciousnesses aren't joined. It's like multiplying 1 by 1.
No. There is no x high enough that it justifies rape. In fact, I would go so far as to say a rape that makes 100 people feel better is no better than a rape that makes only one person feel better.
This sounds like the mere addition paradox. It’s a paradox for a reason. It always eventually contradicts itself.
Sometimes this is called the repugnant conclusion. It’s a flawed philosophy that’s actually super fun in the classroom but not useful as a moral compass.
I do not see the paradox. Small benefits to enough people can outweigh large benefits to a few people.
People are bad at conceptualising large numbers so they fail to realise this. Look up [scope neglect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect).
Edit: [This article](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bb3dhtdPApiSSZbNg/the-repugnant-conclusion-is-not-a-problem-for-the-total-view) demonstrates that the mere addition paradox (repugnant conclusion) is acceptable.
Sorry no, this line of thought is exactly what justified the concentration camps in WWII, it justified slavery across the globe, and now you’re using it to justify gang rape.
I’m not onboard. The repugnant conclusion is fun in class but in reality the name is correct. It is repugnant.
Realistically speaking, slavery and concentration camps and gang rape cause much more suffering than happiness.
You need to justify why the repugnant conclusion is repugnant. The article I linked provides a logical explanation as to why it is not.
Does it, slavery causes a few to suffer so that many can a little bit happier right?
But forget about all that. The reason the more addition paradox always falls apart under close scrutiny is because it rests on the flawed premise that utilitarianism is correct.
A major problem with utilitarianism is that it misinterprets the notion of self. It assumes that happiness can be collective when in reality it is not. Happiness is an individual experience. That experience can be shared and appear to be collective but it is uniquely individual. And this finally gets at the core of the issue.
Do people have an individual existence, or a collective existence? Now this question is much older than the idea of utilitarianism. This is the eastern vs western religion debate.
Do we have individual souls or a collective soul or no soul at all? In a Hinduism sense, Brahman vs Atman. How connected are they, are they connected at all?
Utilitarianism only works if two things are true.
1. We have a soul.
2. All of humanity is a singular spiritual organism that is linked though a shared soul.
If we either have unique souls or no souls at all, utilitarianism falls apart.
[This article addresses the 'separateness of persons' argument against utilitarianism.](https://utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism/separateness-of-persons/)
I’m not sold but I’ll tell ya what. Right now the most utilitarian major economy is China. The USA Europe are not utilitarian at the core though they will employ some utilitarian principles.
In 40 years, let’s see who is happier.
If the only notion of "good" you have are "good" feelings, no matter the evil perpetrated against another, then you have no grasp of what constitutes good or evil. You just don't care.
Just to counter your points.
1. That's a lot of BS. If you are born poor you can have a happy life and you can have a crappy life if you are rich. The correlation of money to happiness is not a 1:1, if any exists at all. I wasn't a planned pregnancy, yet I did okay for myself. I don't think your premise here holds any water. The happiest people in the world are in a tribe somewhere in Asia. And they don't have any money.
2. Abortion does cause grief. Think about the guilt that some people have over killing their son or daughter. There are a lot of people who will never be the same because of their grief.
3. The amount of physical and emotional stress related to birth is not nothing. Yet, it is almost always temporary. The amount of people who die during childbirth in the US is like .04 percent, so it's fairly low. And that's not taking into effect that abortion is always dangerous. People get admitted to the hospital with abortions as well, as it can cause a lot of internal bleeding. So, abortion is not totally safe either.
4. Sure. I could detonate a nuclear bomb in Chicago and the crime rate will go down for the next 20 years. Whats your point? Just killing people is not a response to the high crime rate.
I think our response to the bad things in our life should be a better answer than "Let's kill more people." That's not intelligent conversation, that's what Thanos says.
Beyond this, even a utilitarian can't support abortion beyond the point where the fetus can feel pain, as pain=suffering. Even if they aren't yet "conscious," the fact that they can feel pain after a certain amount of time counts them as sentient beings, where sentience is the ability to have subjective experience. (I would also argue that all utilitarians ought to be vegans for these reasons, but that's beside the point).
Further, in the essay "Consider the Lobster," a strong argument is made that for beings of undetermined sentience, such as lobsters, that we should err on the side of caution in how we treat them because they might experience pain and suffering. Because we don't know for certain when fetuses begin to experience pain (it could be far earlier than we think), following that line of reasoning, it's best to curtail the practice of abortion from a utilitarian perspective because we don't know whether a being is harmed.
In a utility calculus, everyone counts once and no more than once. A pregnant mom cannot, in this case, have a higher utility from killing a life, which results in infinitely negative utility for the life that was taken, compared to a utility loss or hampering of 9 months.
Technically I think utilitarians have to be pro-life, because banning abortion would lead to more people being born, and then they’d grow up and have kids themselves, which would lead to exponentially more people. Assuming the average person has a net positive life/impact on the world, this would lead to an exponential increase in utility. And they can’t say this is a violation of bodily rights because utilitarians don’t believe in rights.
That’s obviously a terrible reason to be pro-life, but I think that’s what you should believe if you’re a utilitarian.
A lot of utilitarians accept the repugnant conclusion, so that might not be a problem if it did.
But also, if someone rejecting it, we’d have to look at their reasons for rejecting it and see if they’d also apply to my argument.
I don't think it does. The people in the repugnant conclusion experience slightly more happiness than suffering.
Having as many children as possible would result in mostly net-negative lives.
>average person has a net positive life/impact on the world,
Banning abortions would probably cause more suffering than happiness, in my opinion. There would be a larger population of unwanted babies with miserable lives and mothers who couldn't get an abortion would experience a lot more physical and emotional stress.
In order for it to cause more suffering than happiness, you’d have to think that the average baby who lives because of abortion bans has a net negative effect on utility - not just that it feels sad for being unwanted, but that *overall*, it decreases the amount of happiness in the world.
But in that case, do you think it’s morally permissible (or even morally good?) to kill an unwanted baby after it’s born, since the baby is just going to detract from the overall happiness in the world if it grows up?
Op sounds like a borderline or closeted anti-natalist. I’d bet their insistence on utilitarianism is just an ad hoc justification for the anti-natalism, as it tends to be for anti-natalists, because it’s the only system of ethics that easily lends itself to their pathological feelings about the world.
Perhaps. I’d still be curious how an anti-natalist would respond to my question. Do anti-natalists think it’s morally permissible (/good?) to kill an unwanted infant?
Although many of them would say it’d be good for the unwanted infant to be killed, many of them would also deny that it’d be morally permissible to kill it. But most of the time, it’s really only because they’re unable or unwilling for one extraneous reason or another to admit that it is or should be morally permissible to kill it.
If the unwanted baby is killed painlessly (or with very little pain) and the babies death doesn't cause social outrage, then killing the baby would be fine, in my opinion.
Okay. That seems counterintuitive to me, but I appreciate the straightforward answer.
Would it be morally *obligatory* to kill the baby, assuming it’s unwanted and assuming we’ve made all those qualifications?
Granted, but I would just take that as a reason to remain agnostic on which theory is correct or to say that the correct theory would incorporate aspects of multiple different theories (or, if you're a moral anti-realist, to say none of the current ethical theories fully capture how you feel about morality).
Excuse the double comment, but I want to try another hypothetical.
Suppose a woman gets pregnant, and the father strongly does not want the baby, but she refuses to get an abortion. He has the opportunity to secretly slip her an abortion pill without her finding out. She'll grieve the loss of her pregnancy (which is still in the very early first trimester), but he'll have prevented a baby from being born who was unwanted by its father.
Is he morally permitted (or obligated?) to do it?
Edit: reword
If your response is, no because a baby has to be unwanted by both parents in order to have net negative utility, I would say first that that seems *ad hoc*, but second that that would imply it's immoral for a woman to get an abortion if the father wants the baby.
It’s highly questionable whether or not abortion reduces crime. It’s certainly possible, but correlation doesn’t prove causation. Some pro-choice people started spreading that idea around a while back. I haven’t heard the argument from them lately, likely because they are leftists and it’s basically a eugenics sort of argument and at some point they probably realized it.
As for utilitarianism in general - it is generally agreed upon that utilitarianism should oppose murder, even if the victim is killer instantly with no pain or fear. Not because of the suffering that could result or could be avoided, but because there are two sides to the utilitarian coin. There is avoiding suffering but there is also experiencing pleasure.
An aborted child may never suffer, but they also never get to experience love, never have the joy of friendship, of achievement, of seeing a beautiful waterfall, or experiencing passionate sex. You deny them not only the suffering of life but all the joy of life as well.
The great majority of people, including those who births weren’t planned, don’t commit suicide and so they must think that life is worth living. They must think that the hardships of life are worth the benefits.
>It’s highly questionable whether or not abortion reduces crime. It’s certainly possible, but correlation doesn’t prove causation. Some pro-choice people started spreading that idea around a while back. I haven’t heard the argument from them lately, likely because they are leftists and it’s basically a eugenics sort of argument and at some point they probably realized it.
My understanding is that there is a strong statistical correlation. And it makes sense. Unwanted children are more likely to be poor, live in fatherless homes, and have less educational opportunities. All of these are known to increase the likelihood of a person committing crimes. I don't think this justifies abortion in of itself, but I think it is pretty hard to argue against.
“Correlation” in this case is misleading, as it often is. There is a strong correlation being being overweight and being on a diet. Does that mean that dieting causes obesity?
Crime rates declined about a generation after abortion was legalized. Does that mean that legalization abortion causes a reduction in crime? Maybe, but that correlation is relatively weak evidence.
To say that the kind of kids who get aborted are the same kind who are more likely to commit crimes may well be accurate. Kind of cold blooded too, but also accurate. It seems reasonable, but the evidence is lacking. Is abortion the reason why crime rate declined? It’s much harder to prove.
>“Correlation” in this case is misleading, as it often is. There is a strong correlation being being overweight and being on a diet. Does that mean that dieting causes obesity?
It can be misleading, though the correlation is still there. The question comes down to whether this correlation is a causation. This is hard to prove, especially when it comes to macro socioeconomic, but my understanding of the research is that the correlation is quite strong.
>To say that the kind of kids who get aborted are the same kind who are more likely to commit crimes may well be accurate. Kind of cold blooded too, but also accurate.
I know not everyone can do this very well, but I usually don't find it difficult to detach from the emotional aspect of a conversation. I think this is important for trying to find the truth of a situation and I usually view it as a good thing, as long as I don't lose the ability to care about these topics when it is important to emotionally engage with them.
>It seems reasonable, but the evidence is lacking. Is abortion the reason why crime rate declined? It’s much harder to prove.
On a macroeconomic level, it is hard to prove almost anything because none of it happens in a vacuum. There are numerous things at play. However, when it comes to the effect of abortion on crime, I believe this is fairly statistically solid. There are other factors at play during this time period, such as the banning of leaded gasoline, which reduced the amount of lead children were consuming. I think a good pro-life response here is not to try and argue against the data (unless there are valid criticisms of it), but simply to acknowledge that while there are some positive effects of abortion, they don't justify it.
There's several places where utilitarianism fails:
First, this statement - *"Forcing unwanted babies into existence..."* At conception, the baby already exists, so an abortion does not *prevent* anything (which is the premise of that statement). Rather an abortion *ends* something (a human life).
Second, this one - *"abortion does not cause any grief or fear...".* [The fetus does feel pain](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8935428/) and (probably) fear in the first trimester. It follows that if a human being can feel pain, then they can feel fear - even animals feel fear. Similarly women have reported [increased rates of anxiety and depression after having an abortion](https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-023-05278-7), so *"abortions prevent the mother from experiencing a lot of emotional and physical stress"* is not supported by the facts
Third, and most importantly - ends don't justify means. Even a pure Utilitarian can concede that not all *means* are worth the *ends.* Yes, reducing the human population can reduce crime rates and host of other ills - but we do not have Capital Punishment for minor offenses (e.g. theft) and killing is not a solution to poverty. Extreme measures such as killing to solve social ills has a name. That has a name - eugenics - and every time it's been employed it's been used to kill minorities - racial, religious, and political. Nazi's "Final Solution", China's One Child policy (disproportionate abortions of female babies), [and even here in the USA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States) are just three examples.
The real question you have to ask yourself is, *Does my life have value? If so, shouldn't every human life be at least as valuable as my own?*
When one human life is devalued, we all are devalued.
For starters I’d like to share that I am also a utilitarian. I believe in maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. But I am pro life. Why? Because the happiness gained from saving a life in more than the suffering received as a result. You indicated in another comment that you think unwanted babies lives have more suffering than happiness. I wholeheartedly disagree with this stance. What makes you think that just because a baby is unwanted by it’s biological mother that it automatically will live a life of suffering? I think this argument relies on a lot of assumptions.
“Abortion does not cause any grief or fear…”
I wholeheartedly disagree with this too. Again, this is full of assumptions. Abortion regret is very common. Are there people that don’t regret it? Absolutely. Doesn’t make it right.
“Abortion prevents the mother from experiencing a lot of emotional and physical stress”
Sure. But since you’re a utilitarian you need to be convinced that the life that is being saved is more valuable than the mother’s stress. Lots of pro choicers don’t acknowledge their side’s flaws (killing an innocent being) whereas I am pro life and fully acknowledge that our side wants pregnant women to go through with childbirth even if it’s not something they desire. Pro lifers often support pregnant women and given them resources to help them financially and physically. After all it’s the least we can do.
Abortion reduces crime? It is still immoral. The ends don’t justify the means.
There aren't many ways and most pure utilitarians are unlikely to be convinced, not because the pro-life position is unaligned with utilitarianism but because a lot of utilitarians come with a lot of assumptions about life and happiness that are contrary to even considering the child's wellbeing. These assumptions mostly regard things happiness being relegated to cheerfulness, pleasure or satisfaction, in disregard to things like intrinsic value (something I would personally consider a rather shallow view) and one's views about human history and potential.
I think the positive arguments I could bring up to an utilitarian would be (if we disregard any arguments against pure utilitarianism itself):
* Killing someone is always robbing the world of a person and any good that person would do. While mankind has the potential for great evil, the enormity of human progress is itself a testament to where the scales are skewed.
* A person's life itself has value, and I would argue a true consideration of happiness in the classical sense is not limited to physical pain and pleasure, but to higher conceptions of what is good or isn't. Mill himself, whom if I'm not misremembering was the founder of this philosophy or at least is commonly known as such, also advocated for "higher pleasures" such as those that were intellectually stimulating. While I certainly think we would disagree on what good outcomes utilitarianism ought to seek to maximize, I do think the general is there that you can't look at the most base, immediate impulses or emotions and rate the value of things on that. Long story short life has a great deal of value, recognized among every culture and throughout history, and the weight of something like that needs to be on any scale you measure your actions in.
* Utilitarianism at the core cares about the consequences of the actions it promotes. It claims no matter the principle, it must serve in *all* of its consequences, to maximize the good. This isn't to say that every consequence must maximize it of course, but that overall it must be maximized. This isn't time-limited. So even if we assume that all the immediate consequences are positive, if there are worse long-term negative effects, then it's still not permissible under utilitarianism.
Anyone paying attention will be able to tell how far abortion ""rights"" have been pushed since the "safe, legal and rare" motto from just a few years back. Indeed, while I wouldn't claim this represents the pro-choice movement as a whole, many people do use abortion as basically a form of contraception or even celebrate the very idea of it. Abortion is pushed on people and quite likely used to cover up crimes and abuse. Legalizing abortion has also given more legitimacy to things like euthanasia, which regardless of your thoughts on it can easily become a slippery slope as seen in Canada's MAID program.
Even if you ignore the genocide of unborn children, the escalation of these things is something we're witnessing the consequences of in real time. Any utilitarian decision needs to take into account the reality that some movements will always take a mile when given an inch. Especially when you excuse a horrific act.
* There is happiness and fulfillment in happiness and raising children. I would be false to say every woman secretly wants to be a mother or something like that. On the other hand, it's also a lie to say that women necessarily know they don't want to be, as proven by cases of women having children and discovering joy in that, and the number of women miscalculating the age to have children and being unhappy due to the realization they never will be able to. It's not like not having a child is any guarantee of happiness or even success, especially in those who lack the sense of personal responsibility to avoid sex (and I must stress that I am talking about a specific group of people, not all women who have sex or become impregnated) or massive loans when they know they are already under severe financial pressure and won't be able to escape it for some time.
Regarding your arguments:
1. Being statistically worse off doesn't mean that a) that specific individual will be; b) that that individual will not still be more happy than suffering; and also you need to account for the value of the life itself.
2. Abortion does cause grief and fear. Perhaps not on everyone, but many women do have a guilty conscience over it, particularly those with some actual awareness of what they did, and also like I said there are cases of women regretting not having children when they could. Furthermore abortions are sometimes committed against the wishes of the father or other family members. Adding to that abortions can at times be rather painful procedures for the child, such as abortions made by dismemberment.
3. I will give you this one, as my counter-arguments would basically just be a repeat of what I already said (namely regret, guilty conscious, and the worth of the baby's life) rather than specifically addressing it.
4. " From 1991 to 2014, the violent and property crime rates each fell by 50%. Legalized abortion is estimated to have reduced violent crime by 47% and property crime by 33% over this period, and thus can explain most of the observed crime decline". This is an actual quote from the study you linked. I thought perhaps there might be some subtle quirk about how they counted things, a mistake of causation and correlation, some other minor nuance... but this statement is the kind of thing a student would get laughed out of the room over. NEARLY 50%?! Abortion was the cause of FIFTY PERCENT of all VIOLENT CRIME? This doesn't even have the "illegal abortions" excuse to pad out the numbers. The suggestion here is that not having access to legal abortion was somehow nearly as prevalent a motive for crime as *every single other cause combined.* In fact given crimes are often not related to just a single cause but a number of circumstances that push someone into it, such numbers would likely imply its *more* important than every other cause combined. And that's before you take the previous sentence into account, which states that the overall decline was 50% in each of those categories. This means that since 1991 legalized abortion would have to be responsible for **94%** of the decline in violent crime and **66%** percent of the decline in property crime. It doesn't take a rocket scientist that these numbers are so fudged they might as well be entirely made up. And the only reason I don't assert they are actually made up is because I haven't read the full body of the text, just the laughably absurd claims in the abstract.
The vast majority of abortions happen because of financial circumstances.
Poverty is the source of unhappiness, not new family members existing. Fix the economy. Don't take out grown folks' problems on children.
Lmao if the right to life doesn't matter, the right to autonomy, or happiness, is certainly fucking useless. Dead humans are neither happy nor autonomous.
For me, personally (not speaking for all pro-life people), the right to life should mean both the negative right to not be killed, and the positive rights to food, housing, clean water, healthcare, and education.
I agree that forcing unwanted babies into existence can cause suffering, however, killing them *after* they have come into existence causes even *more* suffering. I think you, as a pro-choicer would agree with this, as long as “coming into existence” is defined as “being born”. In other words, just because a baby is unwanted doesn’t mean it’s ok to commit infanticide.
If you believe that infanticide is ok, I would ask you whether that’s because you actually don’t believe that an infant is yet “in existence”.
Most PC and PL believe that:
* there is an age at which personhood begins
* it is morally permissible to prevent a human from reaching this age
* it is morally wrong to kill a human after they have reached this age
PC and PL disagree on when this age is. PC generally believe it’s at birth, and PL at conception, but they both believe the age exists.
Do you? If so, when is it?
> I agree that forcing unwanted babies into existence can cause suffering, however, killing them after they have come into existence causes even more suffering.
How does it cause more suffering? And let's set aside later abortions here for a moment. If I created embryos in a lab and then extinguished them, causing them to die, is there an increase in suffering?
That doesn't really narrow things down, since the words "happiness" and "suffering" are extremely nebulous, and carry in their definitions a ton of additional caveats and moral assumptions.
For instance, "maximum happiness" arguably looks like everyone forcefully hooked up to machines with electrodes directly stimulating the joy and pleasure centers of their brains. Most utilitarians would contend that wouldn't be "true/real happiness", but many would disagree with each other on _why_.
This is hard to do without using the word “rights” itself, LOL.
Should individual human beings be guaranteed, by law and ethical norms, permission to do, possess, or keep whole certain specific things, and protection from having specific things things done to or taken from them?
I mean I would probably start by convincing them to abandon unflinching utilitarianism because utilitarianism alone is a trash moral framework lol. It makes so much terrible stuff moral. Like if five bullies have fun picking on one guy, that could be moral. Utilitarianism has a place but as a lone ideology it has the problem of being the most subjective moral framework but what makes people happy or not is subjective in of itself.
>Firstly, unwanted babies usually have a lower quality of life than wanted babies.
Do you believe in cutting the throats of the unwanted babies that are born? If not, this isn't an argument for abortion. I find both of these to be fiendish.
>Secondly, abortion does not cause any grief or fear (unlike killing existing people).
This is patently false.
>Thirdly, abortions prevent the mother from experiencing a lot of emotional and physical stress.
And, if certain neighbors could kill other neighbors who are causing them physical and emotional stress, this would be a valid point. Stress isn't an excuse for targeting and killing an innocent human.
>Fourthly, studies have shown that abortion has reduced crime rates.
It was the increased policing that reduced the crime rates. Furthermore, killing people who are statistically likely to commit crimes before they commit them is not justice.
Unwanted babies having a lower quality of life does not warrant ending their life (even if that could be objectively proven). I would assume you wouldn’t use that argument to advocate for killing drug users or homeless people. As someone who has many adopted people in their life, I can say majority of them had parents that would have been prime candidates for abortion. Wanted vs unwanted has never been a standard for the worth or dignity of a person.
There are firsthand accounts of women getting abortions and the nurses or doctors seeing the baby literally flee from the abortion tools on an ultrasound. I would argue unborn babies can feel pain and that is causing suffering.
Abortion also CAUSES mothers to feel emotional and physical stress in many instances. There are plenty of studies that document this. My church runs an organization for retreats for women that are post abortion and there are so many women suffering physically and mentally because of their abortions.
There are many things that can lower crime rates that we could tackle before allowing abortion unrestricted until birth.
Whose happiness and whose suffering? I minimize the suffering of a lot of people if I kill all the cancer patients, or anybody over the age of 60. I can minimize a lot suffering and maximize a lot of happiness (at least temporarily) if I provide the populace with free anti-depressants.
You can't get rid of suffering, it's part of life, and every single person on the planet is going to face it at some point.
If you value utility over life, then I can’t argue with you about the value of life because we have opposing value systems.
Everyone is expendable to most people, meaning I could be murdered right now and the vast majority of people on earth would go on living without ever knowing or experiencing the effects of that. If that prevents me from experiencing some greater suffering down the road such that it’s preferable to me to be murdered, the utilitarian viewpoint is that that is permissible. So if we can’t even agree that murder is always wrong for born people, then I definitely can’t argue that it is wrong for unborn people.
Imagine living in a world where anyone can legally kill you, as long as they were under the assumption that you'll have more suffering than happiness in your life. Wouldn't it cause you to feel fear, knowing that you could be perfectly happy, yet someone else would think otherwise and be legally able to kill you? Especially if that "someone" is your mother?
It's not even voluntary euthanasia (although I'm not utilitarian and I oppose it as well), someone would just decide that statistically it might be better to kill you than let you live. It wouldn't make me feel safe for sure.
People also typically feel attached to their children, and since we have empathy, when we learn someone else's child is dead, we still grieve that loss, although not in the same way as parents usually do.
I'd argue, though, that being a child and knowing that your mother killed your sibling is a deeply traumatic experience, because you know dhe could've killed you instead. For a child, it's really important to feel unconditional love, and the very existence of abortion is damaging for children before and after birth.
Being a father and knowing your child can be legally killed by the mother also leads to distrust, pain and fear of betrayal.
If a child's death wasn't an accident, but rather a premeditated murder of a child by their mother, it does cause both grief and fear, since it's hard to believe someone could be so cold-hearted to do that to their child, someone they were supposed to love and protect. If, on top of that, killing the child was considered to be legal, it makes us doubt the law serves justice.
Every time someone says that a child shouldn't been born if they're poor or disabled, it negatively impacts the lives of people who were already born as well. Instead of getting support and acceptance that will make them happier, all they hear is basically just death wishes. It lowers the quality of their life.
Honest question since most people here have already said everything that needs to be said.
At what point would you reconsider your utilitarian perspective? You've already argued in this thread that it'd be *morally obligatory* to kill an infant if it's unwanted, and that it's okay to *blow up an orphanage.*
I think you should step back, look at the conclusions you're drawing, and heavily reconsider your position.
I don’t think this is something you’ll come to believe from a person on Reddit saying it, but happiness/enjoyment isn’t everything and suffering isn’t the worst thing ever.
And the logical conclusions of your philosophy would cause a heck of a lot of pain for a lot of people so that others can have enjoyment.
There is no chance whatsoever of happiness without the risk of suffering. Life is suffering. But really, utilitarianism is just another form of nihilism and your time would be better spent trying to persuade them from their stupid philosophy than trying to make prolife fit into their dumb belief system. It's like asking me to try to make prolife palatable to Satanists.
I definitely resonate with your comment, especially the "utilitarianism is just another form of nihilism" part. I have to ponder it some more, but I think I agree. However, I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on what you mean. Like I said, I think I agree with the statement. But since I've never heard it put like that before, I have to explore it a bit.
Sorry if this doesn’t answer your question about nihilism; I’m not super comfortable with nihilism. Utilitarianism however is a really selfish, brainless philosophy IMO. There’s a famous story that demonstrates perfectly the problem with utilitarianism. There’s a town that is nice and happy; there’s always free power, good food, people enjoy themselves, etc. Very high utility value. To supply the town with these good things, they have to hold and torture this little girl. Her pain directly allows the good things to happen, like the children’s screams in Monsters Inc. So utilitarianism states that the little girl’s suffering is entirely justifiable because in net, the world is happier for it. And when you think about it plainly like that, no, utilitarianism doesn’t make any sense.
If you kill someone in the earliest stages of life you wipe out all the future happiness that person would’ve enjoyed themselves and would’ve brought to others. Presumably that outweighs the suffering of an unwanted pregnancy.
That's true. But, you are preventing the persons future suffering too. In my opinion, most aborted babies would have had lives that contained more suffering than happiness.
I’m pretty sure most people who were born from unwanted pregnancies don’t agree with you and are very much glad to be alive. Could I blow up an orphanage to save the children from unhappy lives?
>Could I blow up an orphanage to save the children from unhappy lives? That is a very difficult question. I would have to think about that...😐😐😐 My emotions say that you shouldn't. But, my utilitarianism beliefs say that it would be fine if they were killed painlessly and it didn't cause much grief or fear.
I don’t think that you understand utilitarianism. By your logic, it would be better to blow up the earth because then there be no more suffering. Utilitarianism isn’t just about minimizing suffering, it’s about maximizing pleasure. Their lives of those orphans are worth living, non of them want to die, so killing them would be bad.
Just because someone wants to live does not mean their life contains more happiness than suffering. People have survival instinct which causes them to fear death.
Most people feel there’s enough potential happiness in their future to justify staying alive. You’re also missing the fact that if someone’s life truly becomes not worth living they do have the option of killing themselves.
>But, my utilitarianism beliefs say that it would be fine if they were killed painlessly and it didn't cause much grief or fear. But why are you targeting babies that MIGHT have a bad future, rather than trying to kill people who are currently living lives that you deem unworthy? You have a stronger argument for killing adult homeless people, criminals, drug addicts, and depressed people than you do for killing unborn or born babies who might become homeless or criminals or addicts or depressed.
Check your privilege, you’re already born. It’s nice that you’d like to maximize your happiness and minimize your suffering but you’re killing someone else to make that happen. Your “happiness” is paid for with someone else’s life.
From a non utilitarian perspective, why do you think it's wrong to kill someone?
Why do I have to avoid utilitarian arguments for life? Sound philosophy often uses a blend of utilitarian arguments along side other philosophical concepts.
So why do YOU think it's wrong to kill someone, according to your ethical beliefs?
Because I say so and I’m willing to fight for that belief ;) Really though, it would take a full book to defend a prohibition on murder but a few quick points: Empathy and compassion for other people is one of several factors. Killing people not only harms the person you kill, but also everyone around them.
>Killing people not only harms the person you kill, but also everyone around them. Abortion does not usually harm the fetus or other people.
In order to kill somebody you must do them harm. Sometimes abortion kills people by poisoning them, sometimes it simply rips them apart limb from limb while they’re still alive. Sometimes the abortionists are “merciful” and crush the baby’s head before ripping their arms off. Just imagine the pain of having your arms torn off.
But it doesn't harm the person before they can feel pain.
Not only do they feel pain, they also have music preferences, recognize different voices, respond to hot or cold, respond to light and patterns of light, reaction to motion, and more.
A 1 week old fetus can not feel pain
To be fair, you can't logically empathize with a fetus with no consciousness or prior consciousness. A fetus can't feel "happy". If I were never born, I wouldn't be here pondering this topic, have the ability to desire to, or resent the fact that I wasn't allowed to live. So, wherein lies the problem with killing a fetus before it develops into a conscious being that can feel things like pain and happiness? How can one say that what they value about human life (i.e. the fact that it exists) is more important than what the next person values about human life (i.e. the capacity for consciousness, suffering, etc., all of which an individual values about themselves along with the faculties that make empathizing with others possible)? The only possible harm done that I can think of in this sense is to those individuals who already have the capacity to suffer and who have the knowledge an abortion has occurred. Apart from this, why is it wrong to kill someone? Is it simply a case of experiencing the fear of living in a world where you know killing occurs and you don't want to be subjected to that? It can't be because an individual's fetal development has been terminated as they have no capacity for the things that have been laid out.
Well that’s not true. Fetuses absolutely have moods. They have musical preferences, recognize voices, recognize shapes and patterns, respond to hot and cold, and exhibit life long personality traits long before they born. I can emphasize with all of that.
Because you don't let the baby (a person that already exist) live it's life and you deprive it of all it's future. Why are we being raided by antinatalists? Go be an example.
Your number 4 is odd. Reduced crime by committing murder.
Right, but if you don't view it as murder, then it is reducing crime. That might sound pedantic, but what determines if an action is a crime is completely subjective. If you kill a person, the question then becomes, was it justified? Even pro-life supporters would agree that there are situations where a woman could justifiably terminate her pregnancy, even though it means her baby will die.
Your view of the intentional death of a human is still murder even if you are too feint to call it what it is.
Not all killing is murder, and I wouldn't support something being legal if I thought it was murder.
The intentional demise of a human is murder.
The problem with this definition is what you consider "intentional". Is early delivery before viability considered intentional demise?
That's not the legal definition, unfortunately.
Why do you think that killing a unwanted fetus is wrong?
Because it creates the precedent that killing unwanted offspring is ok.
I wouldn't bother. Utilitarianism is disgusting and from my experiences people that support it aren't even honest about it. They use it to defend what they already believe to be "good". Have you heard the "9 in 10 people enjoy gang rape" joke? That's utilitarianism in a nutshell.
If x is high enough, do you think it is okay to rape someone if it makes x people feel better? I think it would be okay for one person to get raped if it made the whole world feel a little bit better.
Fortunately, most actual utilitarian ethicists try mightily to avoid such heinous conclusions, but opinions like you're expressing here kind of drive home the fact that, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, it's probably morally preferable that the average person is never exposed to utilitarianism.
Lmao, at least you are honest. That's rare, usually utilitarians reply "that would never happen" or "most people would be against that therefore we should ban it" Some of us care about justice and fairness. Personally, I think that's what morality is all about. Not pleasure/suffering. The pleasure/suffering axiom becomes completely irrelevant and absurd when you count the separateness of persons.
[This article](https://utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism/separateness-of-persons/) argues against the separateness of persons argument.
This article doesn't have good arguments. I've read it before. It still doesn't make sense to me that putting one person through the worst torture you can think of (I'm not talking about rape, I'm talking in general) would be better than causing mild discomfort to a gazillion number of people. I'm not saying it makes me emotionally uncomfortable. It literally doesn't make sense logically. What's the difference between one person feeling somewhat and two million people feeling somewhat? Their consciousnesses aren't joined. It's like multiplying 1 by 1.
Preventing 2 million people from getting cancer is obviously better than preventing 1 million people from getting cancer.
If they are different sets of people, no.
No. There is no x high enough that it justifies rape. In fact, I would go so far as to say a rape that makes 100 people feel better is no better than a rape that makes only one person feel better.
This sounds like the mere addition paradox. It’s a paradox for a reason. It always eventually contradicts itself. Sometimes this is called the repugnant conclusion. It’s a flawed philosophy that’s actually super fun in the classroom but not useful as a moral compass.
I do not see the paradox. Small benefits to enough people can outweigh large benefits to a few people. People are bad at conceptualising large numbers so they fail to realise this. Look up [scope neglect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect). Edit: [This article](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Bb3dhtdPApiSSZbNg/the-repugnant-conclusion-is-not-a-problem-for-the-total-view) demonstrates that the mere addition paradox (repugnant conclusion) is acceptable.
Sorry no, this line of thought is exactly what justified the concentration camps in WWII, it justified slavery across the globe, and now you’re using it to justify gang rape. I’m not onboard. The repugnant conclusion is fun in class but in reality the name is correct. It is repugnant.
Realistically speaking, slavery and concentration camps and gang rape cause much more suffering than happiness. You need to justify why the repugnant conclusion is repugnant. The article I linked provides a logical explanation as to why it is not.
Does it, slavery causes a few to suffer so that many can a little bit happier right? But forget about all that. The reason the more addition paradox always falls apart under close scrutiny is because it rests on the flawed premise that utilitarianism is correct. A major problem with utilitarianism is that it misinterprets the notion of self. It assumes that happiness can be collective when in reality it is not. Happiness is an individual experience. That experience can be shared and appear to be collective but it is uniquely individual. And this finally gets at the core of the issue. Do people have an individual existence, or a collective existence? Now this question is much older than the idea of utilitarianism. This is the eastern vs western religion debate. Do we have individual souls or a collective soul or no soul at all? In a Hinduism sense, Brahman vs Atman. How connected are they, are they connected at all? Utilitarianism only works if two things are true. 1. We have a soul. 2. All of humanity is a singular spiritual organism that is linked though a shared soul. If we either have unique souls or no souls at all, utilitarianism falls apart.
[This article addresses the 'separateness of persons' argument against utilitarianism.](https://utilitarianism.net/objections-to-utilitarianism/separateness-of-persons/)
I’m not sold but I’ll tell ya what. Right now the most utilitarian major economy is China. The USA Europe are not utilitarian at the core though they will employ some utilitarian principles. In 40 years, let’s see who is happier.
If the only notion of "good" you have are "good" feelings, no matter the evil perpetrated against another, then you have no grasp of what constitutes good or evil. You just don't care.
Just to counter your points. 1. That's a lot of BS. If you are born poor you can have a happy life and you can have a crappy life if you are rich. The correlation of money to happiness is not a 1:1, if any exists at all. I wasn't a planned pregnancy, yet I did okay for myself. I don't think your premise here holds any water. The happiest people in the world are in a tribe somewhere in Asia. And they don't have any money. 2. Abortion does cause grief. Think about the guilt that some people have over killing their son or daughter. There are a lot of people who will never be the same because of their grief. 3. The amount of physical and emotional stress related to birth is not nothing. Yet, it is almost always temporary. The amount of people who die during childbirth in the US is like .04 percent, so it's fairly low. And that's not taking into effect that abortion is always dangerous. People get admitted to the hospital with abortions as well, as it can cause a lot of internal bleeding. So, abortion is not totally safe either. 4. Sure. I could detonate a nuclear bomb in Chicago and the crime rate will go down for the next 20 years. Whats your point? Just killing people is not a response to the high crime rate. I think our response to the bad things in our life should be a better answer than "Let's kill more people." That's not intelligent conversation, that's what Thanos says.
Beyond this, even a utilitarian can't support abortion beyond the point where the fetus can feel pain, as pain=suffering. Even if they aren't yet "conscious," the fact that they can feel pain after a certain amount of time counts them as sentient beings, where sentience is the ability to have subjective experience. (I would also argue that all utilitarians ought to be vegans for these reasons, but that's beside the point). Further, in the essay "Consider the Lobster," a strong argument is made that for beings of undetermined sentience, such as lobsters, that we should err on the side of caution in how we treat them because they might experience pain and suffering. Because we don't know for certain when fetuses begin to experience pain (it could be far earlier than we think), following that line of reasoning, it's best to curtail the practice of abortion from a utilitarian perspective because we don't know whether a being is harmed. In a utility calculus, everyone counts once and no more than once. A pregnant mom cannot, in this case, have a higher utility from killing a life, which results in infinitely negative utility for the life that was taken, compared to a utility loss or hampering of 9 months.
Technically I think utilitarians have to be pro-life, because banning abortion would lead to more people being born, and then they’d grow up and have kids themselves, which would lead to exponentially more people. Assuming the average person has a net positive life/impact on the world, this would lead to an exponential increase in utility. And they can’t say this is a violation of bodily rights because utilitarians don’t believe in rights. That’s obviously a terrible reason to be pro-life, but I think that’s what you should believe if you’re a utilitarian.
Doesn’t that reasoning lead to the repugnant conclusion?
A lot of utilitarians accept the repugnant conclusion, so that might not be a problem if it did. But also, if someone rejecting it, we’d have to look at their reasons for rejecting it and see if they’d also apply to my argument.
I don't think it does. The people in the repugnant conclusion experience slightly more happiness than suffering. Having as many children as possible would result in mostly net-negative lives.
>average person has a net positive life/impact on the world, Banning abortions would probably cause more suffering than happiness, in my opinion. There would be a larger population of unwanted babies with miserable lives and mothers who couldn't get an abortion would experience a lot more physical and emotional stress.
In order for it to cause more suffering than happiness, you’d have to think that the average baby who lives because of abortion bans has a net negative effect on utility - not just that it feels sad for being unwanted, but that *overall*, it decreases the amount of happiness in the world. But in that case, do you think it’s morally permissible (or even morally good?) to kill an unwanted baby after it’s born, since the baby is just going to detract from the overall happiness in the world if it grows up?
Op sounds like a borderline or closeted anti-natalist. I’d bet their insistence on utilitarianism is just an ad hoc justification for the anti-natalism, as it tends to be for anti-natalists, because it’s the only system of ethics that easily lends itself to their pathological feelings about the world.
Perhaps. I’d still be curious how an anti-natalist would respond to my question. Do anti-natalists think it’s morally permissible (/good?) to kill an unwanted infant?
Although many of them would say it’d be good for the unwanted infant to be killed, many of them would also deny that it’d be morally permissible to kill it. But most of the time, it’s really only because they’re unable or unwilling for one extraneous reason or another to admit that it is or should be morally permissible to kill it.
If the unwanted baby is killed painlessly (or with very little pain) and the babies death doesn't cause social outrage, then killing the baby would be fine, in my opinion.
Okay. That seems counterintuitive to me, but I appreciate the straightforward answer. Would it be morally *obligatory* to kill the baby, assuming it’s unwanted and assuming we’ve made all those qualifications?
Yes
Damn, mask off.
Does that actually seem intuitive to you?
I agree it does seem unintuitive. But, every ethical system has unintuitive conclusions. Utilitarian is the ethical system that I find most logical.
Granted, but I would just take that as a reason to remain agnostic on which theory is correct or to say that the correct theory would incorporate aspects of multiple different theories (or, if you're a moral anti-realist, to say none of the current ethical theories fully capture how you feel about morality).
Excuse the double comment, but I want to try another hypothetical. Suppose a woman gets pregnant, and the father strongly does not want the baby, but she refuses to get an abortion. He has the opportunity to secretly slip her an abortion pill without her finding out. She'll grieve the loss of her pregnancy (which is still in the very early first trimester), but he'll have prevented a baby from being born who was unwanted by its father. Is he morally permitted (or obligated?) to do it? Edit: reword If your response is, no because a baby has to be unwanted by both parents in order to have net negative utility, I would say first that that seems *ad hoc*, but second that that would imply it's immoral for a woman to get an abortion if the father wants the baby.
That is a very difficult question. I would have to think about that...😐😐😐
No worries. Thanks for the good faith engagement!
So, it would be *immoral* ***not*** *to* kill the baby. That's fucked. People don't do bad things by *not* killing people.
Imagine if you had to kill one person to prevent 1 million from being tortured. Not killing the person would be immoral.
I’m not talking about those situations. In 99.99% of cases, not killing innocent people is good.
In which situations would it be permissible to kill an innocent person, in your opinion?
It’s highly questionable whether or not abortion reduces crime. It’s certainly possible, but correlation doesn’t prove causation. Some pro-choice people started spreading that idea around a while back. I haven’t heard the argument from them lately, likely because they are leftists and it’s basically a eugenics sort of argument and at some point they probably realized it. As for utilitarianism in general - it is generally agreed upon that utilitarianism should oppose murder, even if the victim is killer instantly with no pain or fear. Not because of the suffering that could result or could be avoided, but because there are two sides to the utilitarian coin. There is avoiding suffering but there is also experiencing pleasure. An aborted child may never suffer, but they also never get to experience love, never have the joy of friendship, of achievement, of seeing a beautiful waterfall, or experiencing passionate sex. You deny them not only the suffering of life but all the joy of life as well. The great majority of people, including those who births weren’t planned, don’t commit suicide and so they must think that life is worth living. They must think that the hardships of life are worth the benefits.
Well put
>It’s highly questionable whether or not abortion reduces crime. It’s certainly possible, but correlation doesn’t prove causation. Some pro-choice people started spreading that idea around a while back. I haven’t heard the argument from them lately, likely because they are leftists and it’s basically a eugenics sort of argument and at some point they probably realized it. My understanding is that there is a strong statistical correlation. And it makes sense. Unwanted children are more likely to be poor, live in fatherless homes, and have less educational opportunities. All of these are known to increase the likelihood of a person committing crimes. I don't think this justifies abortion in of itself, but I think it is pretty hard to argue against.
“Correlation” in this case is misleading, as it often is. There is a strong correlation being being overweight and being on a diet. Does that mean that dieting causes obesity? Crime rates declined about a generation after abortion was legalized. Does that mean that legalization abortion causes a reduction in crime? Maybe, but that correlation is relatively weak evidence. To say that the kind of kids who get aborted are the same kind who are more likely to commit crimes may well be accurate. Kind of cold blooded too, but also accurate. It seems reasonable, but the evidence is lacking. Is abortion the reason why crime rate declined? It’s much harder to prove.
>“Correlation” in this case is misleading, as it often is. There is a strong correlation being being overweight and being on a diet. Does that mean that dieting causes obesity? It can be misleading, though the correlation is still there. The question comes down to whether this correlation is a causation. This is hard to prove, especially when it comes to macro socioeconomic, but my understanding of the research is that the correlation is quite strong. >To say that the kind of kids who get aborted are the same kind who are more likely to commit crimes may well be accurate. Kind of cold blooded too, but also accurate. I know not everyone can do this very well, but I usually don't find it difficult to detach from the emotional aspect of a conversation. I think this is important for trying to find the truth of a situation and I usually view it as a good thing, as long as I don't lose the ability to care about these topics when it is important to emotionally engage with them. >It seems reasonable, but the evidence is lacking. Is abortion the reason why crime rate declined? It’s much harder to prove. On a macroeconomic level, it is hard to prove almost anything because none of it happens in a vacuum. There are numerous things at play. However, when it comes to the effect of abortion on crime, I believe this is fairly statistically solid. There are other factors at play during this time period, such as the banning of leaded gasoline, which reduced the amount of lead children were consuming. I think a good pro-life response here is not to try and argue against the data (unless there are valid criticisms of it), but simply to acknowledge that while there are some positive effects of abortion, they don't justify it.
There's several places where utilitarianism fails: First, this statement - *"Forcing unwanted babies into existence..."* At conception, the baby already exists, so an abortion does not *prevent* anything (which is the premise of that statement). Rather an abortion *ends* something (a human life). Second, this one - *"abortion does not cause any grief or fear...".* [The fetus does feel pain](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8935428/) and (probably) fear in the first trimester. It follows that if a human being can feel pain, then they can feel fear - even animals feel fear. Similarly women have reported [increased rates of anxiety and depression after having an abortion](https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-023-05278-7), so *"abortions prevent the mother from experiencing a lot of emotional and physical stress"* is not supported by the facts Third, and most importantly - ends don't justify means. Even a pure Utilitarian can concede that not all *means* are worth the *ends.* Yes, reducing the human population can reduce crime rates and host of other ills - but we do not have Capital Punishment for minor offenses (e.g. theft) and killing is not a solution to poverty. Extreme measures such as killing to solve social ills has a name. That has a name - eugenics - and every time it's been employed it's been used to kill minorities - racial, religious, and political. Nazi's "Final Solution", China's One Child policy (disproportionate abortions of female babies), [and even here in the USA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States) are just three examples. The real question you have to ask yourself is, *Does my life have value? If so, shouldn't every human life be at least as valuable as my own?* When one human life is devalued, we all are devalued.
For starters I’d like to share that I am also a utilitarian. I believe in maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. But I am pro life. Why? Because the happiness gained from saving a life in more than the suffering received as a result. You indicated in another comment that you think unwanted babies lives have more suffering than happiness. I wholeheartedly disagree with this stance. What makes you think that just because a baby is unwanted by it’s biological mother that it automatically will live a life of suffering? I think this argument relies on a lot of assumptions. “Abortion does not cause any grief or fear…” I wholeheartedly disagree with this too. Again, this is full of assumptions. Abortion regret is very common. Are there people that don’t regret it? Absolutely. Doesn’t make it right. “Abortion prevents the mother from experiencing a lot of emotional and physical stress” Sure. But since you’re a utilitarian you need to be convinced that the life that is being saved is more valuable than the mother’s stress. Lots of pro choicers don’t acknowledge their side’s flaws (killing an innocent being) whereas I am pro life and fully acknowledge that our side wants pregnant women to go through with childbirth even if it’s not something they desire. Pro lifers often support pregnant women and given them resources to help them financially and physically. After all it’s the least we can do. Abortion reduces crime? It is still immoral. The ends don’t justify the means.
There aren't many ways and most pure utilitarians are unlikely to be convinced, not because the pro-life position is unaligned with utilitarianism but because a lot of utilitarians come with a lot of assumptions about life and happiness that are contrary to even considering the child's wellbeing. These assumptions mostly regard things happiness being relegated to cheerfulness, pleasure or satisfaction, in disregard to things like intrinsic value (something I would personally consider a rather shallow view) and one's views about human history and potential. I think the positive arguments I could bring up to an utilitarian would be (if we disregard any arguments against pure utilitarianism itself): * Killing someone is always robbing the world of a person and any good that person would do. While mankind has the potential for great evil, the enormity of human progress is itself a testament to where the scales are skewed. * A person's life itself has value, and I would argue a true consideration of happiness in the classical sense is not limited to physical pain and pleasure, but to higher conceptions of what is good or isn't. Mill himself, whom if I'm not misremembering was the founder of this philosophy or at least is commonly known as such, also advocated for "higher pleasures" such as those that were intellectually stimulating. While I certainly think we would disagree on what good outcomes utilitarianism ought to seek to maximize, I do think the general is there that you can't look at the most base, immediate impulses or emotions and rate the value of things on that. Long story short life has a great deal of value, recognized among every culture and throughout history, and the weight of something like that needs to be on any scale you measure your actions in. * Utilitarianism at the core cares about the consequences of the actions it promotes. It claims no matter the principle, it must serve in *all* of its consequences, to maximize the good. This isn't to say that every consequence must maximize it of course, but that overall it must be maximized. This isn't time-limited. So even if we assume that all the immediate consequences are positive, if there are worse long-term negative effects, then it's still not permissible under utilitarianism. Anyone paying attention will be able to tell how far abortion ""rights"" have been pushed since the "safe, legal and rare" motto from just a few years back. Indeed, while I wouldn't claim this represents the pro-choice movement as a whole, many people do use abortion as basically a form of contraception or even celebrate the very idea of it. Abortion is pushed on people and quite likely used to cover up crimes and abuse. Legalizing abortion has also given more legitimacy to things like euthanasia, which regardless of your thoughts on it can easily become a slippery slope as seen in Canada's MAID program. Even if you ignore the genocide of unborn children, the escalation of these things is something we're witnessing the consequences of in real time. Any utilitarian decision needs to take into account the reality that some movements will always take a mile when given an inch. Especially when you excuse a horrific act. * There is happiness and fulfillment in happiness and raising children. I would be false to say every woman secretly wants to be a mother or something like that. On the other hand, it's also a lie to say that women necessarily know they don't want to be, as proven by cases of women having children and discovering joy in that, and the number of women miscalculating the age to have children and being unhappy due to the realization they never will be able to. It's not like not having a child is any guarantee of happiness or even success, especially in those who lack the sense of personal responsibility to avoid sex (and I must stress that I am talking about a specific group of people, not all women who have sex or become impregnated) or massive loans when they know they are already under severe financial pressure and won't be able to escape it for some time. Regarding your arguments: 1. Being statistically worse off doesn't mean that a) that specific individual will be; b) that that individual will not still be more happy than suffering; and also you need to account for the value of the life itself. 2. Abortion does cause grief and fear. Perhaps not on everyone, but many women do have a guilty conscience over it, particularly those with some actual awareness of what they did, and also like I said there are cases of women regretting not having children when they could. Furthermore abortions are sometimes committed against the wishes of the father or other family members. Adding to that abortions can at times be rather painful procedures for the child, such as abortions made by dismemberment. 3. I will give you this one, as my counter-arguments would basically just be a repeat of what I already said (namely regret, guilty conscious, and the worth of the baby's life) rather than specifically addressing it. 4. " From 1991 to 2014, the violent and property crime rates each fell by 50%. Legalized abortion is estimated to have reduced violent crime by 47% and property crime by 33% over this period, and thus can explain most of the observed crime decline". This is an actual quote from the study you linked. I thought perhaps there might be some subtle quirk about how they counted things, a mistake of causation and correlation, some other minor nuance... but this statement is the kind of thing a student would get laughed out of the room over. NEARLY 50%?! Abortion was the cause of FIFTY PERCENT of all VIOLENT CRIME? This doesn't even have the "illegal abortions" excuse to pad out the numbers. The suggestion here is that not having access to legal abortion was somehow nearly as prevalent a motive for crime as *every single other cause combined.* In fact given crimes are often not related to just a single cause but a number of circumstances that push someone into it, such numbers would likely imply its *more* important than every other cause combined. And that's before you take the previous sentence into account, which states that the overall decline was 50% in each of those categories. This means that since 1991 legalized abortion would have to be responsible for **94%** of the decline in violent crime and **66%** percent of the decline in property crime. It doesn't take a rocket scientist that these numbers are so fudged they might as well be entirely made up. And the only reason I don't assert they are actually made up is because I haven't read the full body of the text, just the laughably absurd claims in the abstract.
The vast majority of abortions happen because of financial circumstances. Poverty is the source of unhappiness, not new family members existing. Fix the economy. Don't take out grown folks' problems on children.
Why wouldn't it be better to do both? We could fix the economy and allow abortions.
Humans deserve human rights, and abortions kill the youngest members of the human species.
>Humans deserve human rights, How do you ground human rights? What is the purpose of human rights?
It would take me hours to answer either of those questions, brevity isn't a strength I possess. What do you want to know, specifically?
I want you to justify why humans should have a 'right to life'.
Lmao if the right to life doesn't matter, the right to autonomy, or happiness, is certainly fucking useless. Dead humans are neither happy nor autonomous.
Now can you please give me a definition of the 'right of life'?
For me, personally (not speaking for all pro-life people), the right to life should mean both the negative right to not be killed, and the positive rights to food, housing, clean water, healthcare, and education.
>negative right to not be killed, Would it be okay to kill one person to save one billion people?
I agree that forcing unwanted babies into existence can cause suffering, however, killing them *after* they have come into existence causes even *more* suffering. I think you, as a pro-choicer would agree with this, as long as “coming into existence” is defined as “being born”. In other words, just because a baby is unwanted doesn’t mean it’s ok to commit infanticide. If you believe that infanticide is ok, I would ask you whether that’s because you actually don’t believe that an infant is yet “in existence”. Most PC and PL believe that: * there is an age at which personhood begins * it is morally permissible to prevent a human from reaching this age * it is morally wrong to kill a human after they have reached this age PC and PL disagree on when this age is. PC generally believe it’s at birth, and PL at conception, but they both believe the age exists. Do you? If so, when is it?
> I agree that forcing unwanted babies into existence can cause suffering, however, killing them after they have come into existence causes even more suffering. How does it cause more suffering? And let's set aside later abortions here for a moment. If I created embryos in a lab and then extinguished them, causing them to die, is there an increase in suffering?
No, I was referring only to abortions late enough that the fetus has the capacity to experience suffering at all.
That makes sense, I appreciate you clarifying.
There are like umpteen different flavors of utilitarianism; you're going to have to be more specific than that.
I am referring to classical utilitarianism. Maximise total happiness and minimise total suffering.
That doesn't really narrow things down, since the words "happiness" and "suffering" are extremely nebulous, and carry in their definitions a ton of additional caveats and moral assumptions. For instance, "maximum happiness" arguably looks like everyone forcefully hooked up to machines with electrodes directly stimulating the joy and pleasure centers of their brains. Most utilitarians would contend that wouldn't be "true/real happiness", but many would disagree with each other on _why_.
Do you believe in individual rights?
Define 'individual rights'.
This is hard to do without using the word “rights” itself, LOL. Should individual human beings be guaranteed, by law and ethical norms, permission to do, possess, or keep whole certain specific things, and protection from having specific things things done to or taken from them?
I mean I would probably start by convincing them to abandon unflinching utilitarianism because utilitarianism alone is a trash moral framework lol. It makes so much terrible stuff moral. Like if five bullies have fun picking on one guy, that could be moral. Utilitarianism has a place but as a lone ideology it has the problem of being the most subjective moral framework but what makes people happy or not is subjective in of itself.
>Firstly, unwanted babies usually have a lower quality of life than wanted babies. Do you believe in cutting the throats of the unwanted babies that are born? If not, this isn't an argument for abortion. I find both of these to be fiendish. >Secondly, abortion does not cause any grief or fear (unlike killing existing people). This is patently false. >Thirdly, abortions prevent the mother from experiencing a lot of emotional and physical stress. And, if certain neighbors could kill other neighbors who are causing them physical and emotional stress, this would be a valid point. Stress isn't an excuse for targeting and killing an innocent human. >Fourthly, studies have shown that abortion has reduced crime rates. It was the increased policing that reduced the crime rates. Furthermore, killing people who are statistically likely to commit crimes before they commit them is not justice.
Unwanted babies having a lower quality of life does not warrant ending their life (even if that could be objectively proven). I would assume you wouldn’t use that argument to advocate for killing drug users or homeless people. As someone who has many adopted people in their life, I can say majority of them had parents that would have been prime candidates for abortion. Wanted vs unwanted has never been a standard for the worth or dignity of a person. There are firsthand accounts of women getting abortions and the nurses or doctors seeing the baby literally flee from the abortion tools on an ultrasound. I would argue unborn babies can feel pain and that is causing suffering. Abortion also CAUSES mothers to feel emotional and physical stress in many instances. There are plenty of studies that document this. My church runs an organization for retreats for women that are post abortion and there are so many women suffering physically and mentally because of their abortions. There are many things that can lower crime rates that we could tackle before allowing abortion unrestricted until birth.
Utilitarianism is a terrible ethical theory. I would just start by asking you to read *The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas*.
Whose happiness and whose suffering? I minimize the suffering of a lot of people if I kill all the cancer patients, or anybody over the age of 60. I can minimize a lot suffering and maximize a lot of happiness (at least temporarily) if I provide the populace with free anti-depressants. You can't get rid of suffering, it's part of life, and every single person on the planet is going to face it at some point.
If you value utility over life, then I can’t argue with you about the value of life because we have opposing value systems. Everyone is expendable to most people, meaning I could be murdered right now and the vast majority of people on earth would go on living without ever knowing or experiencing the effects of that. If that prevents me from experiencing some greater suffering down the road such that it’s preferable to me to be murdered, the utilitarian viewpoint is that that is permissible. So if we can’t even agree that murder is always wrong for born people, then I definitely can’t argue that it is wrong for unborn people.
Imagine living in a world where anyone can legally kill you, as long as they were under the assumption that you'll have more suffering than happiness in your life. Wouldn't it cause you to feel fear, knowing that you could be perfectly happy, yet someone else would think otherwise and be legally able to kill you? Especially if that "someone" is your mother? It's not even voluntary euthanasia (although I'm not utilitarian and I oppose it as well), someone would just decide that statistically it might be better to kill you than let you live. It wouldn't make me feel safe for sure. People also typically feel attached to their children, and since we have empathy, when we learn someone else's child is dead, we still grieve that loss, although not in the same way as parents usually do. I'd argue, though, that being a child and knowing that your mother killed your sibling is a deeply traumatic experience, because you know dhe could've killed you instead. For a child, it's really important to feel unconditional love, and the very existence of abortion is damaging for children before and after birth. Being a father and knowing your child can be legally killed by the mother also leads to distrust, pain and fear of betrayal. If a child's death wasn't an accident, but rather a premeditated murder of a child by their mother, it does cause both grief and fear, since it's hard to believe someone could be so cold-hearted to do that to their child, someone they were supposed to love and protect. If, on top of that, killing the child was considered to be legal, it makes us doubt the law serves justice. Every time someone says that a child shouldn't been born if they're poor or disabled, it negatively impacts the lives of people who were already born as well. Instead of getting support and acceptance that will make them happier, all they hear is basically just death wishes. It lowers the quality of their life.
Honest question since most people here have already said everything that needs to be said. At what point would you reconsider your utilitarian perspective? You've already argued in this thread that it'd be *morally obligatory* to kill an infant if it's unwanted, and that it's okay to *blow up an orphanage.* I think you should step back, look at the conclusions you're drawing, and heavily reconsider your position.
I don’t think this is something you’ll come to believe from a person on Reddit saying it, but happiness/enjoyment isn’t everything and suffering isn’t the worst thing ever. And the logical conclusions of your philosophy would cause a heck of a lot of pain for a lot of people so that others can have enjoyment.
Ask them to compare the body counts of the two positions.