You personally oppose abortion, believing it to be murder. You are 4 months pregnant. Through some miracle, you see into the future and learn that your fetus, if he survives gestation, grows up to be a serial killer. Do you abort him? Give reasons either way.
First, if there is no free will in your theoretical universe, the option to abort that son/daughter is no more possible than his choice not to become a serial killer.
Second, is it just to kill a person not yet found guilty by law or not yet guilty of immoral act?
My philosophical concerns with your question, you may notice, are separate from the question of abortion.
mrn
This a hypothetical ethical dilemma and you’re spouting off about due process and civil rights. Learn to think like a philosopher. This has nothing to due with free will or causation. It’s posing a choice between an absolute or a lesser of two evils. Simple to me, but some pro-lifers have a problem.
By the way, if you don’t believe that you have free will, do you believe you were determined to submit that post?
doesn’t change anything. it’s still murder.
say you have 1-year-old son. you see the future and find out that he’ll grow up to be a serial killer. do you murder him? obviously not, so if you think abortion is murder, you wouldn’t abort.
If I was actually capable of seeing into the future then it wouldn’t matter what choices I made, the kid would become a serial killer. It would already have been predetermined and even if I tried to have an abortion somehow it wouldn’t work and the little terrorist would get born.
If I believed I could change the future then there’s every reason to believe after having the serial killer vision I would change how I proceeded as a mother so as not to turn the poor kid into a viscious criminal.
People aren’t born killers, they’re made into killers.
Intentionally killing an unborn soul leads to a guilt ridden, painful and self destructive life. Personally I prefer health.
I was determined to submit this post.
c
Abort! Abort!
Using the parameters you defined, it would boil down to “what would the least amount of killing be?”. If my child was going to be responsible for the deaths of 20 people, then it’s one versus twenty.
Heck, it wouldn’t have to be a fetus, it could be a grown person (like the Minority Report).
Although you invite all kinds of sci-fi parallels such as the possibility that if you aborted Hitler, maybe someone else takes his place who actually succeeds in taking over the world. Not good.
If you know that the fetus will grow up to be a serial killer, and do nothing, you are, in a way, mudering the number of people he/she will kill. It’s one versus many, really.
What do you mean someone would “obviously not” kill their child, at age 1, if they knew the child would grow up to be a serial killer?
How can you be so sure in stating this?
How does this support your claim? If anything it just says that their emotions towards the child and/or their fear of legal punishment persuades them from thinking logically.
I’d wait about 3 more months, then abort it. That way I could rid the world of a serial killer, and make a political statement about late term abortions and a woman’s right to choose.
RicDemian,
There’s nothing specific to abortion in your dilemma. It might as well be, “you see someone walking down the street and foresee that they will be a serial killer if you do not murder them immediately. What do you do?”
I would go ahead and murder the person I guess, if you must ask. But nothing remotely resembling this hypothetical ever comes up in real life.
Finally someone gets it right. You have a fine talent for thinking. I thought it was a no brainer and people confounded it with all sorts of confused ideas from natural law to causation. It’s simply a case of minimizing harm.
As has been said, death minimisation is the answer. Easy.
The complication arises when we start assigning values to the lives in question. For example, if we discover that a great mathematician-to-be will kill ten drug dealers, should we execute him? I say no, because that one life is more valuable and beneficial than the other ten put together.
The question now becomes, how do we value people? The only acceptable answer is ultimately by means of a democratic process. If most people in the world hate a certain group (eg, paedophiles) then we can agree to give them a minimal or even negative value.
I thought it was an issue of whether it were moral to do evil if good came out of it – an aged position of casuistry.
And to clarify, I thought it was your proposal which was based on there being no free will… at least none for the subject aborted.
How about if your lover’s husband found out you were going to committ adultery with her? Would he be right to prevent the evil by castrating you beforehand? …I thought morality had to do with sympathy for others. And as the mother, I do nothing to my child’s victims by letting him live.
…Thoughts?
When we start to make judgements on others and for others on their actions that are not our own personal responsibility and haven’t even happened yet then the only result can be barbarism due to the infinite variations of perception of what is the lesser evil. History has plenty of examples.
Interesting thread.
I’m definitely pro-chocie, but what’s the difference, besides the age of the victims, between a serial killer and a serial abortionist? (You know one in thirty aborted fetuses come out alive?) But honestly, it seems like this thread wasn’t really supposed to be about abortion-- which is certainly strange, since even when we remove “abortion” from the question, the residue is still about the ethical question of human existence, that is, what is the relative value or “moral weight” of a life–which is the critical philosophical issue underlying abortion, and ultimately, why any kind of political compromise on abortion is unsatisfactory.
OK, but of course this is only true as long as we are hierarchizing people by the “value” of their existence. As you might have noticed, “power” or “money” already serves such a hierarchizing function in many societies. The real question is how do we get away from these systems where we’re forced to make such stupid choices, as though human lives COULD be compared the same way a quantity of apples is exchanged for an equal dollar amount in oranges…
Nice! This is the real point: when we can prevent catastrophe it seems like the clear moral choice is to do so. This implies of course some kind of knowledge about consequences, and whether based on probabilistic inferences or prescience, we’ve got to make the best with what we’ve got in front of us. It can’t be moral to kill people – but what about killing to prevent violence? The problematic way this argument is usually used (violence to liberate, genocide for democracy, vengeance upon humans, for the sake of humanity) generally denies a priori any sort of “moral claim” that would go along with it.
Chrystal, thanks for chiming in, but what does this mean? Help me out a little bit here…
It means who are any of us to say we have the right to end another’s life for something we perceive to be “bad” and that the other person hasn’t even done yet? The other person’s actions are their own responsibility and society has laws to deal with it.
Sure, we all know serial killers are not a good thing but when you make the proposed judgement on someone else and take their life for it for the sake of the greater good so to speak (that the serial killing in our example has not even occurred yet itself makes for a ludicrous presumption) then it would be hypocrital and a double standard not to also condone the actions of terrorists and tyrrants who believe what they do is good too. Both are effectively the same thing.
It’s just a different choice of words.
Serial abortionists are protected by the law. Serial killers are not.
Thank you Scott, for another point to demonstrate the flaws of human perception of good and bad and that there is ultimately only one judge.
The issue in this thread is harm reduction. But I can start a nuanced thread to challenge the gut level reaction on the abortion issue. I’ll try to formulate it so as to discourage reactive “votes” and encourage analysis. Let me try to word this professionally. Be back later in a new thread, same sub-forum.
Edit
But first I thought I’d ask Scott what he’d do if he found himself raped by his sister, carrying her child, crack-addicted, pennyless, and destined to give birth to an inbred serial killer.
kill the ****er
OK, I posed this question in an edit to a previous post, pal, but here it takes center stage.
What would your position be if you found yourself in the same hypothetical as amended thus: you had gotten pregnant from being raped by your sister who was your sole source of sustenance and crack, which you consumed almost 24/7. She leaves you penniless and all programs you might have depended on for assistance disappear as a result of Bush’s austerity measures. You’re carrying an inbred fetus destined to be a crack baby and a serial killer, with no prospects of support or adoption and no mother.