Magic Bullet Arguments

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.