The Magically-Appearing 'Duplicate-Person' Case: The Ethics of Killing and Abortion

Note: after writing this I came to believe that this case or thought experiment, as originally presented, just doesn't make sense: see the final comments about that and a simplified statement of what the case really amounts to. 

Many arguments in defense of at least early abortions (abortions before the fetus is conscious or sentient) and embryo research appeal the fact that fetuses are not conscious and have not been conscious. Arguments in defense of abortion from early fetuses lacking personhood, arguments that early fetuses cannot be literally harmed (since there is no someone who is made worse off), and an important objection to Don Marquis's argument depend on these claims. 

(The "and have not been conscious" part is important but often overlooked. People ask "Whatabout sleeping people? Whatabout people in comas that they will awake from?" These questions overlook that while these individuals are not conscious now, they have been conscious and will be conscious again and those moments of consciousness will be connected as parts of the same individual over time. So sleepers and coma patients are very different from, say, embryos in that way.) 

The arguments depend on a principle like this: 

• If a being is not conscious and has not been conscious, then it is permissible to kill that being.

Tomas Bogardus has recently proposed a counterexample to a principle like this, to try to show that the princple is false. This discussion has been on Twitter, and so the "texts" are short and it's easy to get lost in the Tweets. But here I will attempt to reconstruct the counterexample and explain why I think it's not a good one, fortunately not via Tweets. 

Sounds like we agree having no prior or present consciousness is not sufficient to license killing. So, that can't be why abortion is OK. So, we'll have to look elsewhere. 🤝

— Tomas Bogardus (@TomasBogardus) September 5, 2021

The case, as far as I can remember and understand it (since reviewing Twitter threads can be very tedious), is told as something like this:

Tom is a normal person, with a normal life. He goes to sleep and—by cosmic fluke (electrical storm, radiation, who knows)—an exact physical and mental duplicate of him comes to exist. This duplicate, like Tom, is still asleep.

The claim about this case is that it would be wrong to kill this duplicate. 

The argument is that this case is a counterexample to the "If a being is not conscious and has not been conscious, then it is permissible to kill that being." If the duplicate is not conscious and has not been conscious yet is wrong to kill, then the principle is false.

Is it wrong to kill the duplicate though? And is it true that the duplicate is a being that is not conscious and has not been conscious? Some of this depends on how "exact" of a duplicate he (or it) is, so we'll have to discuss that too. 

1. Letting the Duplicate Die

First, before we consider the ethics of killing the duplicate, let's consider a related case: 

To awaken the duplicate, we have to hit a button. If we don't hit the button, the duplicate won't awaken and eventually will die, never having been conscious in any way. 

Is anyone obligated to hit the button to awaken the duplicate? Would it be wrong to not hit the button?

This is a contrived case all around, and people might not be imagining the case accurately and so I suspect intuitions here are often murky. But my initial sense is that no, we are not obligated to hit the button to awaken the duplicate: it's OK to let the duplicate die. The duplicate is not conscious and, it seems, has not been conscious: there is nothing going on in the mind of the sleeping duplicate: indeed, he has no mind, yet. So if you don't hit the button, it might seem like nothing really happened here, so to speak: there was a potential person right offstage, but that person was never actualized onto the stage of the present and future. (This happens all the time?!). 

2. Killing the Duplicate

If we aren't obligated to hit the button to wake the duplicate up, and so we can let him die, it seems to me, at least initially, that we can also actively kill the duplicate and that wouldn't be wrong. Again, as the story goes, the duplicate is not conscious and has not been: there is nothing going on in the mind of the sleeping duplicate: indeed, he has no mind, yet. If he's killed, no individual is worse off, even the duplicate. 

Some might respond that the duplicate does have a mind: he has a mind just like Tom's, so it Tom's mind while he is sleeping makes killing him wrong, the same is true of the duplicate. I don't see it like that: if the duplicate comes to have a mind, it will (magically!) be just like Tom's mind, but the duplicate doesn't have a mind now: there's the potential for a mind, not a mind with various potentials.  

If the claim is this the duplicate is just like sleeping Tom (who is wrong to kill), so since sleeping Tom is wrong to kill, it is also wrong to kill the duplicate, here's a suggestion: 

It'd be wrong to kill sleeping Tom's body because of the earlier person Tom: if we kill the body, then the earlier person Tom won't get psychologically connected back up to the later person Tom. This is why it's wrong to kill Tom's body, and this past-and-future-based explanation doesn't apply to duplicate. 

On this explanation, sleeping Tom's current mind, or lack thereof, seems to have little to do with why it's wrong to kill sleeping Tom: it's wrong to kill Tom's body because of those, Tom's, past mental states and their relations to various possible futures. 

As our story is told, the duplicate is said to not have a past person associated with him (or it? The duplicate is a male body, but has no actual psychological characteristics yet: is this a "he" yet?). The duplicate is unlike Tom and, again, it initially seems to me like killing the duplicate wouldn't be wrong.

(An aside: is it [logically or metaphysically or conceptually] essential to killing or being dead that it's permanent? Seems like no, given Jesus. What if instead of sleeping, we were temporarily dead? Being temporarily dead could be OK, if we could come back to life and our our living, conscious moments still be connected: indeed, our experience of "sleeping" would be the same if we were dead while sleeping , so to speak, and then awaking was coming tback to life.)

Again, this is a weird and contrived case, so I suspect we'd often have a hard time thinking about it without assuming that the duplicate is more like a normal person, so to speak. We'd have a hard time with the reality that, as the story goes, this individual has no past and have a hard time remembering that this individual is quite different from Tom, or anyone else we encounter. 

3. Does the Duplicate Have a Past?

If we are morally obligated to awaken the duplicate or let the duplicate wake up on his own—and so we are obligated to not kill the duplicate—I think this is so the duplicate can get back "online" with his past plans and goals, which, if he awakes, he will now share with Tom, who he is a duplicate of. 

So it seems to me that Tom and the duplicate are a case of "branching" personal identity, which appears to be possible on psychological theories of personal identity. These branches are often thought about with "teletransporters" where one individual is "beamed" two different locations, resulting in two individuals (made of new physical matter!) off to new futures but with shared memories, personality, knowledge, and so on: their pasts overlap. Here's an illustration of this sort of view:

To return to the duplicate (who, again, is supposed to be a duplicate of Tom), let's try to see things from his point of view. Here's some reasoning:

1. If the duplicate awakens, he will either remember things or not: it will either seem to him that he remembers things or not. 
2. If he neither remembers things nor it seems to him that he remembers things, then he isn't much of a duplicate of Tom, much less an "exact" duplicate: Tom without any of his memories or sense of the past isn't Tom.
3. If he will either remember things or it seems to him that he remembers things, then—despite being made of new matter (recall that doesn't preclude psychological continuity in teletransporter cases) he either has a past or he is psychologically connected to the past (and so he has a past in a way that matters: again, see things from the duplicate's point of view!) and so this case is not a counterexample to the principle that this discussion is about: he's wrong to kill and he's conscious and with past consciousness. 

These are my initial thoughts about these matters. I am sure genuine experts on the metaphysics of personal identity, especially psychological theories, would have useful insights and perhaps corrections here. 

Nevertheless, I do not think the duplicate case refutes the basic idea, common to many arguments in defense of early abortions, that these abortions are permissible because these fetuses are not conscious and have not been conscious. 

9/8/2021 Update: whether this "duplicate" here is actually a duplicate of anyone is not relevant to the case: Tomas Bogardus agreed. So the case can be simplified so that part isn't part of the case: this body, that a person could spring from, could be just a totally new person and not a duplicate of anyone. The "trick" is that this body is said to have the same mind as a sleeping person: what that mind is, however, is not obvious. So the case is really just something like this:

There's a never-been-conscious body that's going to immediately become a full-on person soon enough (or a person will emerge from the body in zero-to-sixty fasion). You can kill the body and prevent that. This never conscious body has the same mind (or whatever that would be) as a sleeping person though.

Near final thoughts, maybe: 

"Mulling this over, I think your case doesn't make sense. Whatever your mental states are (or whatever) when you sleep, they are caused by past events and about past events. The "duplicate" isn't like that: there's a new body with a potential mind, with potential false memories.

And by "potential false memories" I mean that if the being becomes conscious and has "memories, they will be false memories (right?) and false memories aren't real memories. So this seems like a preconscious body with the potential for many false core beliefs, unlike a sleeper.

So I guess the case is just this: "If there were a never conscious body that has the near potential for having a mind 'in it', would it'd be wrong to kill that body?" But that seems to be the issue of abortion (or early abortions) and so "why?" and "why not?" are the questions to ask."

All blog posts are here!

Especially related: 

• The Animal Rights, "Domination" and "Comatose Newborn Baby" Objections to an Argument for Abortion

What if it Really is About "The Babies"? On Anti-Abortion Motivations

"It was never about 'the babies.' It's about controlling women." 

Pro-choice advocates sometimes say things like this to try to explain what motivates anti-abortion activism, including now successful efforts to make even early abortions illegal and criminalized. 

Their suggestion is those anti-abortion advocates are not really concerned about stopping embryos and fetuses (what they often, mistakenly, call "babies") from being killed via abortion: that's not their real motive or goal. Rather, their real goal is controlling women: men controlling women.

These suggestions, however, are, unfortunately, absurd. The sooner this is all recognized as absurd, the closer anyone fixated on this theory of the motivations of anti-abortion people will be to doing something potentially more productive for defending abortion. 

6 weeks 

Why is this absurd?

Consider the suggestion that abortion bans are all about "controlling women." If you wanted to "control women," would you seek an abortion ban? Probably not. You'd probably attempt other things that would affect more women. You'd probably attempt things that are easier too. (I'm not going to make a list of examples lest I give anyone bad ideas!).

Why would you focus on an abortion ban unless you thought there was something especially important about abortion, like that abortion is a great evil and so a top priority in need of being "controlled"?

You wouldn't. So, ultimately, it is about "the babies," abortion itself, and their belief that abortion is a great evil that, like many great evils, should be "controlled." Even if it's not all about "the babies," and some is about control, still much of it is about "the babies" themselves. 

Here's what John Seago, the legislative director of Texas Right to Life says:

There is an unethical procedure at the heart of this debate. Elective abortion is the epitome of an injustice. It is a larger, stronger group using violent force to take the life of a smaller, weaker party. You don’t have to have a religious background or be motivated by faith to realize that’s not the kind of society we want to live in. I’ll look forward to the day when our laws reflect that we have moral obligations to the most vulnerable populations around us.

So he says their motivations are all about "the babies," or the ethics of abortion. And there are many women who agree with him: it's not like only men, or mostly men, agree with this ethical judgment about abortion. "Don't erase 'pro-life' women!" these women say. 

The argument sometimes is that if abortion critics really believed abortion is wrong, they would do all sorts of other things—support pregnant women, advocate for readily accessible contraception and universal health care, and more—yet they don't. "Hypocrites!" they say.

While we might wish that anti-abortion advocates were like this—more like the Good Samaritan from the Bible—it might be that they don't really "have to": their position doesn't require it: they aren't somehow inconsistent by not advocating for any of this. Their view is just that it's wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings or people, including fetuses. 

Must they also think that they must help anyone out? I think they can honestly say that that's not their focus, even a "no comment": their focus is on (in their view) these very wrong intentional killings of fetuses. They can say that their focus is on preventing harm to fetuses, not producing benefits for anyone else. (Whether this distinction ultimately makes sense is unclear though).  

Pro-choicers object: "But then they should then also be concerned about IVF, which involves at least the deaths of embryos! They should be concerned about learning how to prevent miscarriages!!" 

Maybe, but maybe not: neither of these involves intentional killing. And they might argue that abortion is worse than these, since it can be, in rare, far-later abortions of fetuses that might feel things. They might also have no clear idea how to respond to these other issues: they might sometimes not even really know about them, and they might even be genuinely hypocritical or irrational or even dumb. 

But that doesn't seem to be a great objection to their claim that it's wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings or people, including fetuses. None of this shows that they don't really believe that and that isn't their motivation. 

Now, what's important is that they are incorrect about their various core claims and moral claims:

• calling embryos and beginning fetuses "babies" is highly controversial: there are many reasons to think they should not be called "babies" and little defense is provided to think that using that term is literally accurate: if a pregnant woman or her family wish to say or think she has a baby, however, that is harmless; if laws are made on this belief, that's problematic;
• anti-abortion advocates are fixated on "heartbeats" [update: that some pro-choice advocates falsely claim {?} aren't really even real heartbeats anyway: see here for illustrations suggesting a 2mm heart], but whether something has or doesn't have a heartbeat is morally irrelevant: most vividly, there is nothing inherently wrong with stopping a heart: what's around the heart is what matters, not the heart or heartbeat itself or lack thereof;
• anti-abortion advocates often suggest that the mere fact that embryos and fetuses are biologically alive is of great moral significance, yet it isn't: plants and microorganisms are alive, yet they aren't wrong to kill or destroy;
• anti-abortion advocates often suggest that the mere fact that embryos and fetuses are biologically human is of great moral significance, yet it isn't: human skin cells and tissues, say, are alive, yet they aren't wrong to kill.
• anti-abortion advocates mean to say something like fetuses are biologically human organisms and are the kind of beings that are rational moral agents and that's why they have rights: explaining this argument and really defending it is a complex affair, and they usually don't do that: should they?  

Beyond these simple arguments, there's a whole more sophisticated discussion about what makes human beings have rights (such as the right to life) and whether fetuses have those characteristics, what the right to life really involves (is it a right to assistance, such as a right to the type of benefits a woman or girl provides to a fetus?), what we are, in our essence—are we our minds, or our bodies, or both?—and more. Abortion is a complex moral issue, but most enthusiastic anti-abortion advocates are not much interested in this complexity. 

But addressing, first, the common and simple but demonstrably bad arguments against abortion and, next, the more complex arguments about abortion is part of the key to defending abortion: slogans, groupthink, and "virtue signaling" (saying what sounds good to people who agree with you) are not. Pro-choicers denying that anti-abortion advocates are motivated by ethical concerns and not engaging and critiquing those ethical claims and arguments certainly is decidedly not contributing to progress on this issue. Pro-choicers recognizing that, ultimately, the abortion debate is very much about the ethical status of fetuses and responding accordingly might do some good: it's definitely worth trying. 

So, to return to the quote above, here's what we should say:

There is an unethical procedure at the heart of this debate. [No, it's at least usually not unethical and here's why . . ] Elective abortion is the epitome of an injustice. [No, it's at least usually not unjust and here's why . . ] It is a larger, stronger group using violent force to take the life of a smaller, weaker party. [No, this is misleading: this type of language would fit only if beginning fetuses were much different from what they are actually like, e.g., the were conscious and sentient.] You don’t have to have a religious background or be motivated by faith to realize that’s not the kind of society we want to live in. I’ll look forward to the day when our laws reflect that we have moral obligations to the most vulnerable populations around us [No, this too is misleading: this type of language would fit only if beginning fetuses were much different from what they are actually like, e.g., the were conscious and sentient.] 

Since what is said here is false and unreasonable, more pro-choice advocates understanding and explaining why that is so, to wide and diverse audiences, might do some good. Responding "You just want to control people!" and other speculations about motives and intentions do not engage, much less refute, what is said above. We might say that motive-questioning responses like these have been proven unsuccessful, so we can and should try something new and better, like giving arguments for our views and critiquing the arguments of those whose views we think are mistaken and harmful. What have we got to lose?

A response from DefendingFeminism.com: 

Are abortion restrictions about controlling women? A response to Nobis

All blog posts are here! 

Especially related: 

• Why "Pro-Life" is Misleading and Inaccurate and so 'Anti-Abortion' is Better: A Dialogue
• Salon, Why the case against abortion is weak, ethically speaking: Many medical procedures are ethically similar to abortion — but without the outcry. Why?
• Areo, Abortion and Soundbites: Why Pro-Choice Arguments Are Harder to Make

"Letter" Conversation on Abortion with Luke Krell

On Abortion & Ethics

BY LUKE KRELL & NATHAN NOBIS
27 Letters

"Letter" Conversation on Abortion with Lauren Enriquez

On Abortion & Ethics

BY NATHAN NOBIS & LAUREN ENRIQUEZ

6 Letters

"Pro-Choice People Are So Dumb!!" On the Vice of Misunderstanding

If you read posts on abortion critics' organizations' social media pages, it is very common to see posts and comments much like these:

• Don't pro-choice people know that fetuses are alive, or are life??! 
• Don't pro-choice people know that "life begins at conception"??!
• Don't people know what science says about what fetuses are?
• Don't people know that fetuses, and even embryos, have hearts and heartbeats?
• Don't pro-choice people know that fetuses are human? 
• Don't they know that abortion kills humans? 
• Don't they know that abortion kills human organisms? 
• Don't they know that abortion kills human beings?
• Why are pro-choice people so dumb?!?

The belief is that pro-choice people are missing out on some obvious facts and truths, and that if these errors were corrected, they would, or should, see that abortion is wrong, and obviously wrong. That this all is allegedly so obvious is why there's this attitude that pro-choice people are just stupid, ill-motivated, and worse. 

Now, I agree that many pro-choice people misunderstand many things about abortion. They sometimes, indeed often, say silly, misinformed things in defense of their views, and their objections and responses to contrary views are weak. 

This is all unfortunate since there are good arguments for their views: they could be more informed and engage the issues and the people they disagree with in more productive ways (and so the message of this post is for them too!). That is one of the most important themes of the Thinking Critically About Abortion book, which was not any kind of "tract" or cheerleading for the typical pro-choicers' understanding of the issues: just because their broad conclusion on the issue is correct, that doesn't mean their reasons are good. 

The problem though is that the abortion critic here is also seriously misinformed: they say silly things too, although often about more abstract, controversial issues than what the pro-choice person says silly things about. 

So, abortion critics often* seem to think pro-choice people are really dumb but that's because those abortion critics simply haven't sought to understand what the pro-choicers might be thinking (by asking them, "Why do you think that?" and "What do you mean by this word?") and so they misunderstand the issues. They don't understand that there's a complexity inherent to the topic that they don't know about, and so they don't know that they don't know.  

How can this be corrected? 

In short, people can learn about the issues in genuinely "fair and balanced" ways! How do you do that? Here are some quick ideas:

• Don't believe everything you are told! 
• If some objection is raised against some view, ask how people who advocate for that view would respond: is their view stated accurately? 
• Would they agree with how their view has been presented, or would think they think it's been misrepresented, created by people who are in their own "bubble" or "echo chamber"? 
• Is the objection based on misunderstandings? Is the objection a "strawman" or a "strawperson"? 
• Does the objection overlook important information or claims? 
• Do advocates of the view objected against have responses to the objection? Are the responses effective?
• Given that, is the objection really as strong as its advocates claim it is?

In short, people need to really better understand the issues and understand each other. They need to talk to people, listen, and seek to understand. Misunderstanding is a vice, but it can be overcome. 

So, to return to the initial "gotcha" questions:

• Yes, fetuses are alive, or are life, in a biological sense, but just because something is biologically alive or life doesn't mean it's wrong to kill it. (What are uncontroversial examples to make that point?)
• Yes, biological "life begins at conception" but that might not be the type of "life" that really matters. (What else could "life" mean, or be?)
• No, science does not, in itself, answer moral questions: knowing the relevant science is essential, but there are always distinctly moral concerns that need to be engaged when thinking about ethical issues. 
• While anti-abortion advocates are fixated on "heartbeats" (that some pro-choice people falsely [?] claim aren't really even real heartbeats: see here for illustrations suggesting a 2mm heart), but whether something has or doesn't have a heartbeat is morally irrelevant: most vividly, there is nothing inherently wrong with stopping a heart: what's around the heart is what matters, not the heart or heartbeat itself or lack thereof;
• Yes, fetuses are biologically human, but just because something is biologically human doesn't mean it's wrong to kill it. (What are uncontroversial examples to make that point?)
• Yes, abortion kills humans, in the sense of beings that are biologically human. But whether and why they are, or would be, typically wrong to kill is the issue: do they have what makes biologically human beings wrong to kill? That requires reviewing proposals for what makes us wrong to kill and seeing if they apply to all or any fetuses.
• Yes, abortion kills biologically human organisms? But whether and why they are, or would be, typically wrong to kill is the issue: do they have what makes biologically human organisms wrong to kill? That requires reviewing proposals for what makes us wrong to kill and seeing if they apply to all or any fetuses.
• Yes, abortion kills human beings, in the sense of beings that are biologically human. Whether fetuses are "human beings" in the ways that people often have in mind when they deny that fetuses are human beings is unclear though. (When people deny that fetuses are "human beings" what do they mean by "human being"? They should know fetuses are biologically human; they know they are "beings" in some sense; they should even agree that they are organisms. So what do they mean by "human being"?). 

All these concerns (and more) are reviewed in the book and the many blog posts here. 

While some pro-choice people may be "dumb," some of them are not: they sometimes simply have more complex views that don't readily translate to soundbites. It's these views that their critics first need to really understand, since understanding is a virtue and understanding is necessary for any effective critiques. And sometimes, understanding a view leads to understanding that it has merits too. Maybe even the pro-choice folks are right, at least about a few things, if not more.

* To be clear, I am certainly not claiming all abortion critics think or respond in ways that are described above. But it is common. The only anti-abortion organization that I know of that intentionally at least tries to avoid these problematic ways of engaging these issues and other people, and encourages others to do the same, is the Equal Rights Institute.  

All blog posts are here!

Miscarriage & Abortion: Responding with Support, Responding with Philosophy, or Both?

When people have miscarriages, it's a major understatement to say that that they are typically upset: indeed, for them, it is often a life-changing tragedy.

Why is it a tragedy for them? Why are they grieving?

Asking these questions might seem tacky since answers might seem so obvious, but if you wish to be supportive of anyone who has had a miscarriage and is grieving, here's the answer: 

any answer is a great answer: any reasons people give for grieving a miscarriage are great reasons.

That is the basis of any supportive, caring person's responses. Caring people here are understanding and supportive of anything grieving people here have to say: they recognize that all their feelings about the miscarriage are "valid" and should be validated.

In contexts like these, however, some people sometimes want to be "philosophers," and, with the grieving person, critically evaluate what is said for why they are grieving: do they have a good argument in support of their grief?

Both pro-choice and anti-abortion people do this, sometimes. 

How often this happens, I suppose nobody really knows. But it's usually bad whenever anyone does it. 

For example, a person grieving a miscarriage might say that they are grieving because they are upset, for their child, about their child losing their life. 

Apparently, it is reported that some people want to "argue" with such a grieving person, arguing that the fetus isn't a "child" or that a fetus cannot really lose their life, for some abstract reasons (e.g., for something to be your life, you have to be aware of it, or aware of something). 

So they apparently try to convince the person that their grief can entirely be explained by factors other than the fetus itself, for its own sake: e.g., the loss of that expected future with that child. 

Again, I have no idea how often this happens, but my bet is that almost always such "philosophizing" is unwelcome: it doesn't make anyone feel any better or provide any kind of emotional comfort or support in a time of acute grief. 

And whether their arguments are good or not is irrelevant since now is just not the time or place for this type of philosophizing. (Similarly, a religious person telling someone with a loved one who died that they are now "in a better place"—heaven—is entirely unwelcome, inappropriate, and not comforting, even if that claim happens to be true [and perhaps it is not]). 

As another example, pro-choice people sometimes also have miscarriages, or a newborn baby dies, and they grieve their loss. 

Some people take this an opportunity to "philosophize" and argue that their grief makes no sense, given their pro-choice views, or that if they are grieving now, they should also think that abortion is wrong.   

Again, I have no idea how often this happens, but my bet is that almost always such "philosophizing" is unwelcome: it doesn't make anyone feel any better or provide any kind of emotional comfort or support in a time of acute grief. And whether their arguments are good or not (they are not) is irrelevant to this.

I suspect it is more common for pro-choice people to be on the receiving end of this type of callousness. Pro-choicers readily recognize reasons to grieve miscarriages, so they aren't surprised by any anti-abortion people grieving miscarriages. Anti-abortion people, however, think the pro-choicers are inconsistent or incoherent in their grieving, which makes it more likely they'd be the aggressors here. 

For a pro-choice person to respond badly to a grieving person who is anti-abortion, you'd either need the pro-choice person to raise the issue along the lines of "Ya know, if you are mourning here because of your beliefs about fetuses, those beliefs are mistaken" (which is unlikely, since it's just uncommon to "challenge" people when they are grieving, since it's just rude and obnoxious) or you'd need the anti-abortion person to, on their own accord, offer up their fetus-centric reasons for mourning and then the pro-choicer challenge them on that, which is again unlikely. So, again, I suspect it's more common for anti-abortion people to be callous on this issue, not pro-choice people but, again, I doubt there is any great evidence either way.

So, in general, when people are grieving anything, it's best to try to understand their feelings and validate them: don't try to argue people out of their grief or argue that they shouldn't feel how they feel.

However, things aren't so simple and this isn't an exceptionless rule. 

The reason for this is just that people can have negative emotional experiences because of false beliefs. Indeed, the major approach to psychotherapy and counseling—known as cognitive-behavioral therapy—is based on this insight: people often feel negative emotions because they have false or irrational beliefs, so a goal of therapy is identifying these beliefs and correcting them, to improve emotional well-being. 

What this means is that if someone grieves a miscarriage because they believe that, say, beginning fetuses are people just like you or me, if that belief is likely false, then it might be good to address that, since that might be emotionally beneficial: improving belief should improve feeling. 

(Related, if people feel guilty for having an abortion, and they feel guilty because they think they have done something wrong—that's what guilt is a response to—then it is useful to explain to them that they didn't do anything wrong, if there are good reasons to believe that, and there are.) 

Likewise, if that belief were likely true, and there are really good reasons to believe that beginning fetuses are people just like you or me, then it could be appropriate to "confront" someone who is totally indifferent to a miscarriage (if there were such a person). While we don't often do this, it sometimes happens that we tell people, "Look, something big happened, and you seem to have no negative feelings about it, but you should!" This might not make them feel better, in the sense of having "positive" emotions, but their feelings might become more accurate to the reality of the situation, if that were the reality.

So when is it good to be a philosopher, and when is it good to be a supportive person? And when is the best emotional support to engage someone philosophically?

To answer this requires insight, wisdom, and good judgment (especially in impersonal online environments where it's unclear whether the goal is being supportive, philosophical, both, or neither!). And we all need more of that, about these issues and many others. 

All blog posts are here!

Especially related post:

• Abortion "Zingers": What About That??

Star Trek: "Human rights. Why, the very name is racist."

There's a scene from the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where one of the Klingon characters states, "Human rights. Why, the very name is racist." 

She says this in response to the suggestion that people on planets throughout the universe have "human rights." 

Since she is a Klingon, and so is not biologically human, she is keenly aware that claiming that she has human rights is problematic: it's like men saying that basic rights are men's rights, or the rights of men, and then acknowledging that women have them too; or a race of people defining rights in terms of their own race ("white rights"?) but then using that same terminology to describe the rights of people of other races ("black and brown people have white rights too"? No, we all have [or should have] the same rights, described in a general, non-race-specific way). 

The concept of rights is not tied to any particular biology or species. So, yes, human beings have rights, but if there were Klingons or other non-human beings like them, they too would have those rights too. Since different species could have them—that's possible, or the concept allows it—that's part of the reason why it's unhelpful to think in terms of rights as human rights. That such beings (probably) don't exist is not relevant: suppose we called rights "less than 10-foot tall person-rights": the possibility that a greater than 10-foot tall person could exist is enough to show that this wouldn't be a good description for rights: we want a description that would apply to anything that, if it existed, would have rights.  

Describing rights as "human rights" is problematic because the basis of basic rights is not tied to any particular biology or species. Why do both the human beings on Star Trek and the Klingons both have rights? What makes them have rights? It's not their species, since they are different species. The most obvious answer is that they both have rights because both these human beings and these Klingons are conscious, aware, thoughtful, feeling, communicative, and so on: they have minds of a certain type. In other words, they are persons. The human beings are human persons and the Klingons are non-human persons. (This is the basic reasoning given to think that many non-human animals have basic rights and are either persons or are person-like). 

To take this discussion back to abortion, while (human) zygotes, embryos and beginning fetuses are biologically human, they are not much like the human crew on Star Trek or the Klingon crew, and they don't have the rights these crew members have. Fetuses are of the same species as the human crew, but the basis for rights isn't biology. So even though beginning fetuses are biologically human, they don't have the rights that human beings who are persons typically have, and they wouldn't have the rights that Klingons would have, if they were to exist. The language of "human rights" suggests that anything that's human has basic rights, but if we reflect on why anyone (or anything) has rights, or what makes something (or someone) have rights, we see that's naive: it's not just being of a biological category that makes something have rights. 

People often assume (correctly) that human beings have rights. But they rarely think about why human beings have rights, or what makes them have rights. Fiction, and fictional persons who have rights, can help us understand why we have rights and help us understand why some biologically human organisms—like beginning fetuses—seem to lack what gives anyone rights. Thinking about actual persons, as well as possible persons—beings who, if they existed, would be persons—can help us understand personhood, and the basis of rights, which is essential for productive thinking about abortion. 

P.S. An alternative view on personhood, which many critics of abortion claim to accept, is that persons aren't just beings that are conscious, aware, thoughtful, feeling, communicative, and so on (and there are ways to explain why sleeping people and people in comas remain persons even though they can't currently think, feel, etc.); it's that any kind or type of being that is conscious, aware, thoughtful, feeling, communicative and so on is a person. So, advocates of this view might say that although a fertilized human egg and a fertilized fish egg (or beginning fetus, if you don't like the egg example) seem very similar, a fertilized human egg is this type or kind of being and so is a person, whereas the fish egg is not. 

Some fair questions are this: why accept this proposal for what persons are? And why reject this proposal?

One quick reason to reject this proposal is that if being the kind of being that is conscious, aware, thoughtful, feeling, communicative, and so on makes anything (like an embryo) an actual person, then—since those characteristics also make someone responsible, autonomous, praise and blame-worthy—so on that would also seem to make that embryo actually responsible, autonomous, and praise and blame-worthy. But embryos are none of that, so being a "kind" of being doesn't mean you have the actual characteristics that result from actually being that being: e.g., being the kind of being that's a person, and the kind of being that's responsible and so is different from being a person and being responsible. Here's some on that; more will be posted later. 

All blog posts are here!

Related posts:

• Section 5.1.3 of "Thinking Critically About Abortion," "Fetuses are persons"
• Is Herbie 'The Love Bug' a Person?
• Abortion, Personhood and Space Aliens