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Sniffles' Jail-Time Question: One Last Time Around It's just the wrong question to ask. [Warning: What was intended as a brief comment kind of got away from me. It's late. I'm sitting in a hospital room, not quite ready for sleep. Here's the result. Rough waters ahead.] Suppose you encounter a pro-life apologist--call him Goober--who argues as follows: 1. Everything that has property P has a right to life. Now, this was all Goober wanted to argue. To challenge Goober's argument, you've got basically two options: (A)argue that one or both premises are false. (Maybe some things with P do not have rights after all. Or maybe unborn babies do not have P.) Or (B) you can challenge the validity of the argument, claiming that (3) does not follow from (1) and (2). (Except, as I hope you see, it does.) Let's just suppose that you don't have a good answer to Goober's argument. Gosh, it looks as though it's just TRUE that everything with P has a right to life! And it also seems to be an empirical fact that even the unborn have P! And the argument takes a valid form. So we're stuck with (3): Unborn babies have a right to life. As I noted before, the stuff about the legality of abortion is entailed by claims about fetal rights. (Because society ought to defend any and all rights, and such defense requires laws.) Like it or not, it comes as a part of the package. And, as you observe, laws are enforced by threat of punishment. So wherever there are rights there are potential threats of punishment. I'll say it differently: Rights entail potential threats of punishment. Or... Potential threats of punishment are a necessary condition for the existence of rights. Do you now have a new inroad into critiquing Goober's argument if you simply keep going by adding some plausible premsies? 4. If unborn babies have a right to life, then there must be laws to protect that right. But then you appeal to wide sentiment (including MY sentiment): 8. It is not the case that women seeking or having abortions should be subject to punishment. Clearly, 7 and 8 together entail 9. It is not the case that unborn babies have a right to life. Ah! I've just handed you an argument! But hold on. 9 can be true only if either 1 or 2 is false. And now we've got this result--YOUR result--of the argument that you've been trying to push with your question. 10. If it is not the case that women seeking or having abortions should be punished, then either it is false that everything that has P has a right to life, or it is false that unborn babies have P. But, clearly, our sentiments about how women ought to be treated has absolutely NOTHING to do with the truth of premises 1 and 2. It would be the height of confusion to suppose that you could assess the original argument in this way. SO (10) is false. But (10) follows from all of the premises that we've accepted, beginning with the argument of (1-3) along with some premises about connections between rights, laws and punishment, along with premise 8 (women should be subject to punishment) is what gave us the results. Sumpin's got to go. Your choices are these: a. SHow where the problem lies in Goober's argument of 1-3. Argue directly for the falseness of one of the first two premises. My point is just that, FOR YOU, there is no substitute for (a). And anyone who thinks that the argument of 1-3 holds good, and who also thinks that there is a rights-laws-punishment connection, has the option of rejecting either 6 or 9. I think the pro-lifer's best bet is to challenge 6, which, if you'll notice, is the fairly common pro-life reply to such a question. muddle's blog | login to post comments
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