String of Thoughts - Over-Philosophizing About Abortion

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Strange thoughts come to my head when I lack sleep and lay awake at night pondering stupid things, or important things. Either way I find my take on the subject matter to no one else but me, and to be honest I don't even care about them that much. I'm a man who holds up specific beliefs close to mind but often I ponder the source of those beliefs. Are they self-concluded beliefs? Are they religion or society based? Or are they just a kind of cryptomnesia?

As time goes by abortion has been a very controversial subject as people are never in the middle of the issue. Think about it, by default you either think it's wrong and shouldn't be legal plus it's some kind of murder or you think it's completely okay, it's just a tissue and it's woman's right to decide what to do to the baby growing inside their body "My body, my choice". I'm not here to discuss the actual issue of course for many reasons, all of them relating to the fact that I am a coward.

Let me start by saying, you're either pro-abortion or anti-abortion, pro-life or anti-life with the phrasing depending on what side you're on. There's just no way you don't have an opinion about it and not being bias toward the issue means in a way that you're actually on one side, you either think abortion is murder or not. Here to help me illustrate my point is the now unfortunate name in stand up comedy Louis C.K in his 2017 stand up comedy special, one I'd assume is his last.

Starting at 0:55 and ending around 4:20, Louis jumps up right away into his special with his "opinion" on abortion. Louis says that you shouldn't "get an abortion..... unless you really one" he then puts emphasis on that by saying that need an abortion then "you better get one" and then he closes that part of the argument by saying that abortion is "like taking a shit" which covers one side of the issue. Louis then goes to demonstrate both sides of the argument by saying "or it's killing a baby" and then goes on to show the fact that it's "only one of those two things; it's either a normal thing or it's murder and if you don't think it's like "taking a shit" then you think it's killing a baby. It's a very beautiful piece covered in comedy in a way that only Louis C.K can do showing that people protesting aren't "shrill" and "awful" but they think that babies are getting murdered. Finally Louis C.K goes to criticize the point that states abortion should be legal, safe, and rare by saying that if it should be legal then why put the rarity lid on it. With that I think it should be obvious that you have to be on either sides and being in the middle isn't valid as there's no place in the middle.

The abortion argument offers a spectrum with no middle, it's A or B. People against abortion see it as murder and pro-abortion people see it as a normal thing . What baffles me about this is the over-philosophized take on the issue most if not all of which are demonstrated by pro-abortion people.

Let's start by the take of "pro-life is anti-women" which is a point that was brought up to my attention first by my favorite comedian of all time George Carlin, while I believe the gods of comedy would be angered with me for disagreeing with Carlin I have to ask, is it? The argument of being anti-abortion is built around one belief; you're killing a baby and not over who should be able to do it or whose choice it should be, obviously in the absent of that argument it should be up for the woman to make that decision however that's not the case here if a person believes that abortion is a murder then the issue isn't who does it and offering that point doesn't provide a proper answer and the diversion toward that argument serves no one as it will go to other places that aren't really needed in the argument itself. Of course a woman owns her body but the existence of a living human in your properties justify killing it then doesn't that say that murdering slaves was alright? Yes you can argue logistics but it doesn't change much of the argument.

The reason I'm bringing this up and thought about it in the first place is this article of a thread of tweets done by a man named Patrick S. Tomlinson who proposed a sort of thought experiments to demonstrate how abortion should be legal. Here's a direct quote from the article

“Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I've been asking for ten years now of the 'Life begins at Conception' crowd. In ten years, no one has EVER answered it honestly,” Tomlinson tweeted.

He goes on to explain a scenario whereby you are in a fertility clinic when the fire alarm goes off. Before you escape, you have the option to save either a five-year-old child who is pleading for help, or a container of 1000 viable human embryos.

“Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos?“ he asks.

“There is no 'C.' 'C' means you all die.”

While I do suggest you do check out the article it does in the end come down to those choices. Now I'm a sucker for thought experiments, after all I built an entire post about self-driven cars around the trolley experiment so no wonder I found myself attracted to this thread of tweets and while I do love them I don't acknowledge them necessarily important in real life situation but I often do come back to them in order to better understand a situation. Which is I'll do here so be ready for more long paragraphs.

Okay so in the experiment proposed by Patrick S. Tomlinson we have a burning building and we have 2 choices A) save a five years old child, or B) save a thousand embryos with C being we all die leaving alone the fact that C is inaccurate as we could also leave and save neither but that's a mean thing to say plus it's just meaningless side argument. To understand this experiment better we have to go back to other thought intriguing theories and experiment to see where he came up with this one in order to understand A) The base of the argument and B) The structure for it. For that we'll have to go back to a classic in thought experiments; the trolley problem. The experiment puts people at first between choosing the death of five people unable to move as a train heads toward them or one person standing on a side track and put hypothetical lever in the hands of people to either chose to sacrifice one person for five or the other way around, many additions were put into the experiment including the choice to push a man over a bridge to stop the train, would sacrifice kitties for the five, with results changing but yet continuing to be in the advantage of saving five, however the result goes against them when it goes back to the start and placing 5 strangers on one side and a beloved on the other. Furthering this experiment we see a video game called "Life is strange" where the player have to pick between the main character's best friend and an entire with 47% choosing to save the friend and 53% opting to save the town.

Let me start by saying that Tomlinson is right regarding the result of what people would do in that situation as most if not all people including myself would opt to save the 5 years old child over the embryos. The problem is how that result is interpreted, the trolley problem experiment is a luxurious thought, I mean what are the odds of the example stated by Tomlinson happening? Even if the example given was to happen the decisions wouldn't be decided based on well considered thoughts which was the reason the trolley was deemed worthless as it is based on basic instincts and not morals. You're not making your decision because you have carefully calculated everything but rather because of your first instincts. Replace the thousand embryos in the example with just two that are yours and your partner's and those two are the only chance of having kids you have, what you would you save then? Replace the the embryos with a thousand people burning and the child to be yours, who'd you save then? And if we're going off with rare situations like that, why don't go one step further and make a similar situation with a zombie apocalypse happening; You and a 5 years old child are that remains of humanity along with a thousand embryos, you have just killed all the zombies and a fire happens that forces you to pick between the death of the 5 years old and the loss of the thousand embryos, what would your decision be then? So what do all of those examples I've given have in common? none of them is about the actual worth of a child compared to embryos but rather the situation and thoughts around that. You save the child because you already are more connected to the child than the embryos, if the embryos are yours then you're more connected to the embryos than the child. And in the end none of those situations have actually happened before much like the trolley problem itself and they're most likely won't happen. So why use non-existent conditions to prove a point through false binary?

In summary

I do acknowledge philosophy as a great force that pushes human further in life, but over using it in binary situations is pretty counter productive especially if we take the fact that in the near future science should have the definitive answer to whether life starts at conception or not. Philosophy much like religion offers answers only in the absent of science and in the existence of scientific facts philosophy is a way to guide us to interpret those facts into moral behaviors.

In the end those are just random thoughts I think about and put them out in an attempt to better understand the world through challenging myself by exposing to the danger of being proven wrong, so I'd like to hear what you all think. Leave a comment with your takeaway and let's have a conversation..... I don't have friends.....

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I quite agree with what you say, except with the conclusion, what Tomlinson does is not and has nothing to do with philosophy, it has to do with logical fallacies that start from preconceived and partial premises to demonstrate a point of view that refuses to change.

Science and the scientific method born of religion and philosophy, and not so different as we like to think, is so that there are already a number of people who follow dogmatically what the scientific consensus says.

I do not know if science can, in the first instance, know whether abortion is murder or not, and second, if despite a response, the groups that fight in politics will pay attention to them. Science is only used in politics when it is favorable, when it is not, it is simply ignored and hidden. Many of the groups that request legal abortion (especially those of the extreme left) do not accept biological postulates such as that the man is naturally masculine and the woman naturally feminine, and accuse them of social constructs. So really science only has weight in the field of propaganda, it is not important in the position that these groups chose.

I see what you're saying, however I would have covered that if it wasn't so demotivating to make this post much longer knowing that there would be like 3 people tops reading. I was even going to bring the raven paradox as part of this. Plus some terms I had that I couldn't translate over from Arabic to English.

I'm answering the last two paragraphs together as they're related. The point of this post (Which I guess I failed at presenting properly) is related to that. Over-philosophizing is again taken from an Arabic term which basically means you're saying too much and pulling a lot of effort just so you avoid answering a direct simple question. By saying soon science will have the definitive answer I'm not saying it would be something we'll agree on, we kinda already know that at a certain point a baby is fully formed in the womb so I'm talking around that. Basically the answer will be available to whoever seeks it however that won't matter if abortion is turned into a feminist issue or fallacies (as I agree I should have went with fallacies instead)

But overall I do agree with what you're saying and I do thank you for the feedback. Feedback and criticism is what I'm looking for through writing these anyway.

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