There rarely are ever “magic
bullet” arguments for any sort of complex issue. However, I have found through
the “joys” of debating people on the internet that there are a handful of
arguments related to topics I’m interested in that are extremely effective. These
arguments are quick, easy to understand, and in my experience, devastating to
the person arguing against them. Out of all the times I have discussed, debated
and argued these topics, I have never once heard a reasonable response to any
of the arguments that I will outline.
Of course, it’s possible that I’m
just so deeply biased, that no one could possibly give me a response that I would
consider reasonable. While that is possible, I refer to a “reasonable response”
as one that actually deals with the premises of the argument—instead of
ignoring them, changing the subject, insulting me, or dismissing them by
asserting some sort of conspiracy theory. However, the only way to know for
sure if these arguments are unanswerable, is to try them out on people who
disagree!
You might agree with me on some
(or all) of the following three issues… if that's the case, I hope I can provide a simple
argument that you might use if you are ever discussing the topic. If you don’t
agree with me, that’s okay too, as now you know what I think are some of the
best arguments for my views are. Heck, maybe someone will even have a good
response to one of them!
As not to start with too controversial
of a topic, let’s just go alphabetically…
Abortion
A standard pro-life argument is
that since it would be wrong to kill a newborn baby, it would be wrong to kill
a baby one day before it was born. And since that’s wrong, killing the baby two
days before it is born is also wrong, and so on. It’s sort of a reverse
slippery-slope, and you can follow this logic all the way back until the moment
of conception, when, we are told, a new human life appears. “Life begins at
conception.” The implication is that if you interrupt the development of a
fertilized egg, it’s the moral equivalent to murdering a two-day old baby, a 36-year-old
adult, etc.
The arguments have changed a bit in the past decade or so—it used to
be a more religious argument, with people claiming that conception is when the
soul is implanted in the body, which marked the moment that the embryo became a
person, holding the same moral weight that you and I have. Over time, the
religious aspect of this has been dropped, as no one is swayed by soul talk. The
secularized argument is that conception is when personhood is formed, or when
the embryo is ontologically different than moments before when it was just a
sperm and egg.
However, the moment of conception
is not actually a moment at all. The conception process takes between 24-48 hours—and
a lot is happening during that time. To begin with, there are often multiple
sperm cells that have penetrated the outer membrane of the egg, and it takes time for the
egg to reject all but one of these sperm. Once this has happened, genes from the
sperm and egg combine, creating a zygote with a new, unique genome. However, this
doesn’t mean much yet, since the new genome doesn’t yet have control of the
cell it is sitting in. Once the new genome takes over, the cell can start to divide, and a
blastocyst is formed, which will eventually become a fetus and then baby. So what
part of the process did the “new person” emerge? Was it when the first sperm
reached the egg? Or when the egg rejected all but one sperm? Was it when the
new genome zipped together? Or was it when that new genome took control of the
cell and started to divide?
I have asked this exact question
multiple times, and never been given an answer. It is usually dismissed, and I
am told “okay, well however long it takes—at the end of that process, a new
person exists, and it’s immoral to kill them.” Though, I doubt anyone will
start to take the position that “life begins approximately two days after
conception.”
Of course, things are still
complicated. At this point, the embryo can split, making identical twins, triplets,
etc. If the twin is now also a new person, where did this ontologically
different person emerge from? Personhood (the self) can't be divided, so
either one of the twins is not a person (which is absurd), or the idea that "a
blastocyst is a person—no different from you and I" is wrong.
But the complexity continues. In
some cases, two eggs can be fertilized, resulting in fraternal twins. In rare
cases, these two fertilized eggs can combine, creating a single embryo called a
genetic chimera. When this happens, the baby will have one genome in some
cells, and another genome in other cells. According to the logic of “life
begins at conception”, we had two unique people who combined into a single
person. The second person didn’t die, so what happened to them? As is
tradition, I have never been given an answer to this.
Of course, we haven’t yet touched
on implantation—the process of a newly fertilized egg adhering to the uterine
wall. This occurs around a week after conception, and often fails, as the woman’s
body rejects the blastocyst. The reasons for the rejection are not entirely
known, but regardless of the reasons, it is estimated that around 50% of all blastocysts
fail to implant and are “spontaneously aborted” by the woman’s body. If we
accept the pro-life position that a fertilized egg has the same moral weight as
a one-year-old baby, 36-year-old man, etc., this means every year,
approximately 4 million Americans die as a result of spontaneous abortion. The
next biggest killer of Americans is heart disease, which pales in comparison, *only*
killing 610,000 Americans each year.
If life begins at conception, failed
implantation is the most common cause of human death, by a HUGE margin. There are
research programs looking to help improve the chances of implantation for women
wishing to get pregnant, but there isn’t a single “life begins at conception” politician,
activist or organization who supports funding such research. Why?
I actually posed
this question to the pro-life page on Reddit. The most common answer I
received was “since death by failed implantation is natural, it’s not a moral
concern.” A textbook case of the naturalistic fallacy. When I pressed the
issue, asking “would you say that death by disease, starvation or other natural
causes is also not a moral concern?”, I was never given an answer.
Of course, there is a lot more to
discuss about abortion—but in my experience, these points work very well in
showing the incompatibility of “life begins at conception” and a modern understanding
of reproductive science.
The Afterlife
Discussing religion was my jam
for many, many years. I eventually got pretty bored with it, but at the time, the
most fun I had was bringing up neuroscience and observing what creative ways
people would come up with wiggle around our modern understanding of the brain
and its implications regarding consciousness surviving death.
If you are in a car accident and
experience brain damage, there is no part of your conscious experience that can't
be destroyed. You can lose the ability to perceive motion, the ability to
perceive anything on one side of the visual field, or the ability to recognize
faces. You can lose all of your long-term memories, or just your visual
memories. You can lose the ability to create words, or the ability to put words
into a coherent sentence. The conscious mind can be divided into a seemingly
infinite amount of ways, and the more brain damage that occurs, the more aspects
of your conscious experience you will lose.
In a slightly different more extreme situation, a
degenerative brain disease such as Alzheimer’s slowly erodes the brain. As it
progresses, the patient’s ability to understand the world, as well as their own
self, slowly slips away. As the disease progresses, the patient’s consciousness
slowly eclipses until the self no longer exists.
To
recap: minor brain damage will
cause a person to lose small amounts of their conscious experience, and
more
severe brain damage will ensure that consciousness slips away even
further. If
we were to follow that trajectory, what seems more likely when the brain
is
entirely destroyed at death: that consciousness would completely slip
away and that person would cease to exist—just like before they were
born? Or, that
consciousness would re-emerge, fully intact, in another dimension,
understanding English and recognizing grandparents?
So far, I have never gotten anything
close to an argument explaining why consciousness surviving death is more
likely after the destruction of the brain.
Genetically Modified Organisms
GMOs are one of the best
technological advances humans have ever conceived. The plant geneticist Norman
Borlaug was credited with saving over a billion people from starvation by
developing strains of wheat that could thrive in areas of the world that historically
had struggled to grow such a crop.
Of course, when people think of
GMO’s they often think of syringes injecting “toxins” into tomatoes, while evil
Monsanto CEOs laugh maniacally in the background. We are told that we are
playing god, that mixing and matching genes in ways we don’t understand could
hurt us in unknown ways down the line.
In reality, GMO foods are created
in a variety of ways—sometimes that means turning on/off a gene at a certain
time. Other times it means adding a single gene from one organism into a
specific location in another organism’s genome—and this is method is what people tend to
have the biggest problem with.
When it comes to adding an
additional gene to an organism, a well understood gene is placed in the exact
location of another genome, where the exact outcome is well understood. As a
result, we are told by anti GMO activists that this is unsafe. However, when we
cross breed plants (as we have done for 160 years), hundreds of thousands (at
least) of unknown genes are combined in ways without the slightest
idea of how they will interact. This process, we are told, is safe and natural. Similarly,
anti-GMO activists don’t have any problem with mutagenesis—the process of
exposing plant DNA to radiation or certain chemicals in order to mutate the DNA
to produce plants with (hopefully) desirable traits.
If you change one single
gene, the potential unintended consequences are so large that we shouldn’t risk
it. But if we change or combine hundreds of thousands of genes, that is
considered safe. Why?
I have asked this question tons
of times, and per usual, I have never received an answer to why cross breeding
or mutagenesis is considered safe, when the insertion of a single well-understood
gene is not.
