 Hi everybody, I apologize, I'm already losing my voice and I have two of these to do today, so, fun day. For me, early on when I was trying to sort out a justification for abortion, which by the way I would already say is the wrong way to start, because you either begin with all freedoms and then start denying freedoms for really good reasons, or you begin with no freedoms and you only grant specific freedoms. That's basically the two opposite ways that you can go about determining rights. And I prefer granting freedoms and then only restricting when we have a really good reason. And the principle of bodily autonomy is that essentially it's one that I like to term consent, because I am sovereign over my body with some limitations because I share space with others. But by and large, nobody gets to do things to my body without my consent. Nobody gets to use my body without my consent. And the same is true for everybody else, including people who can become pregnant. And it doesn't matter to me then whether or not the fetus is considered a person or not. And so these arguments about personhood ultimately become irrelevant, because even if it were a person, it doesn't have the right to use your body. And when we start to say that a fetus does have the right to use someone's body, we're granting them special rights that we grant to no other human beings. Your two-year-old doesn't ever write to use your body. Your grandmother doesn't ever write to use your body. The government doesn't ever write to use your body. Nobody gets to come in and say, hey, we're gonna tell you this has to happen to your body. That to me was probably one of the easiest conclusions I came to with regard to abortion. The problem is what's the goal? Because some people start with a goal of abortion, I become convinced is healthcare or it's a right or it's essential. And so now I need to come up with an argument structured in such a way that will protect this right. I didn't do that. I came up with a, well, I didn't come up with a principle. I fell upon this principle of Bollyaton. I mean, I fell upon this principle of consent in many aspects of life and just recognized that it also applied in the case of pregnancy as well. And so I remember it's funny to be here today because a number of people would come into my Twitch stream and I had like 25 viewers or whatever and they'd be like, you need to go debate destiny. And I was like, sorry, first time I was like, who's that? Because I didn't watch. But then eventually somebody was like, no, no, no. He doesn't debate, you should go debate destiny. I was like, okay, what do we disagree on? I guess debates aren't sporting events for me. I tend to debate issues that I care about and they're not WWE events. And every time I went over and watched, it's like, oh, we largely agree. What was the point? And now it's interesting to be here because before we started, he told me just how absolutely wrong I am. So I'm excited because I might be wrong. But when you're coming up with principles on how we're going to grant rights and what the limitations are, I don't want a model that says, hey, let's find a way to justify abortion. I want a model that says, here's who we are and here's the rights we're gonna establish. And as a following from that principle, that protects the pregnant individual's right to control their own body and not have it used by somebody else. And so I'm unwilling to grant special rights to fetuses. Now Dawkins and I had an argument about this one time because Richard really thinks that personhood is the main issue and that he's gonna define it as when brain activity begins. And so his view is largely that up until brain activity occurs and is detectable, you can just go ahead and abort because it's not a person. And I found this ultimately unsatisfying for the reason I already mentioned, one of which is I don't care if it is a person, it doesn't get to use your body. That's just a simple principle in my head. But the other thing is, all it leads to is an argument about where personhood begins and what is personhood? And I can tell you that when we live in a world where a huge chunk of people are convinced that life absolutely begins at conception and that this is a human being and a person for all intents and purposes, it's gonna be very difficult to convince them that because there's not a heartbeat or not a brain or whatever the reason. And by the way, I don't know what this argument is. Just talking about why the personhood argument ultimately failed for me and why Dawkins and I had this disagreement. It's like, if you wanna make that case, now everything becomes about defining a person and can a person live outside the womb and can it not live outside the womb? And none of that matters to me because at the end of the day, each individual should be sovereign over their own body. And nobody should get the right to use it in any way without consent. And consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. Consent to sex is consent to a risk of pregnancy which has a number of different ways to alleviate it. Consent to pregnancy is not consent to remaining pregnancy or to remaining pregnant because different things can happen and you can change your mind and all of those things are viable. So when you get into these discussions and people are saying, oh well, we wanna make exceptions in the case of rape or incest. Why? Did something fundamentally change about the person in there? Not my eye. Did something fundamentally change about the non-person in there? Not my eye for that either. So when I debated this previously, and I'm not keen on debating it for the optics, which is why at least we have two pro-choice-ish individuals up here with different justifications, I think. It was very frustrating to watch people say, ah, but what about this scenario? What about this scenario? What about this scenario? And that's the way all the abortion discussions went. And when I realized, what is the justification for allowing, granting special rights to anyone to allow them to use someone else's body without their consent in any way? You can't take blood tissue from me, you can't draw blood from me, you can't take an organ from me. You really can't pull hair off my head. Well, there's two reasons for that, but you shouldn't be able to do that without my consent. You shouldn't be able to have sex with somebody without their consent. It's all about consent. And people, I think, largely grasped that. They may all ultimately disagree about the nature of the situation where there's a pregnant person. But as far as I can tell, bodily autonomy knocks down all of the objections and I can't wait to hear why it's wrong. That was a long two minutes, James. Was it 10 minutes? Oh, I thought he said two minutes. Oh, I didn't hear time. No, no, you're okay, you're good. You're good, you're good. I'll shut up for a minute. No, you're fine. So I'm a staunchly pro-choice person, but I would say that for this issue, I would definitely side with Dawkins and that you have to recognize that the question is fundamentally, I believe, about when the fetus becomes a person that's granted some level of rights. I know that there is this, we're gonna walk through a bunch of different analogies or whatever, I guess we can test each other's ideas. But I think when you talk to people and you try to figure out how they feel just in a broad sense about abortion, you'll find that a lot of people, I think it's 65% of people pull favorably in the first trimester and as soon as it hits second and third, it drops out substantially. So the very least, you can feel that intuitively as it looks more like a baby, people seem to have this sort of revulsion of, is this a thing that we can just toss in the trash or is it something that's like a little bit worth kind of protections? Something that we'll get into later, I guess, and I'm not sure how far you go on the abortion thing, but if it's the idea of only consenting to use your body, I feel like these types of arguments got us into areas where you have almost nobody on your side. So for instance, the ability to abort a child in the third trimester or past six months of pregnancy is a position that almost nobody will defend. I feel like most of the bodily autonomy arguments are built off of what I would consider a very flawed argument, oftentimes called the violin argument, given by Thompson, I think I don't remember when she wrote that paper, but even she concedes at the end of that paper that, yeah, you know, like, well there are two big concessions she makes that nobody seems to recognize. One is she says that, just because you have the right to an abortion doesn't mean you have the right to actually kill the fetus, because part of her paper was recognizing that a fetus could be a person but still be aborted. So that's one area that people don't deal with as much. And the second thing is even she recognizes, I think she gives the example of having an abortion of a seven month pregnancy, because you're worried you're gonna miss a vacation, is probably not good justification for it. So it seems like even she recognizes that there's like a little bit of moral revulsion or something bad happening there when you're having an abortion for no justifiable reason. But like I said, there's a whole bunch of different, oh, there's a whole bunch of different arguments we can get back into relating to the violin argument and different analogies kind of test where we're at there, then I kind of figure out how you truly feel when it comes to the abortion thing. Oh, I have no problem telling people how I truly feel. Oh, I'm sorry, when I say that, I mean to say you're concealing it, but like. No, no, it's making fun. Okay, sure, can I ask one question? Sure. Okay, I'm just gonna have like a bunch of analogies because I do agree, this is a really hard area. Well, not for you because it's bodily autonomy, but for me it's very challenging. So let me ask some questions, try to navigate. So I'll give, for people that aren't aware of it, the classical violin apprenticeship, musicianship society has kidnapped a poor lady, stuck her in bed, and when she wakes up, she realizes that her kidneys are attached to the world's greatest violin player. And they tell her, listen ma'am, you have to remain in bed for nine weeks, otherwise the world's best violin player is gonna die. And then the question is, does this lady have a right to unplug herself, or does she have a moral obligation to sit there and basically use her kidneys to clean the blood of this world's greatest violin player, even though she didn't consent to being stuck in that situation. That's like the classic violin argument from Thompson's paper, right? And, oh, you had a question, I didn't wanna jump on it. No, well, I was gonna ask, yeah, well first let's see if we agree that that's like, as a premise that I've laid out, you've agreed that this is like an okay summary of the situation. Yeah, basically that's Judith Jarvis Thompson's version of the violinist argument. And the issue actually goes beyond that, it's if you wake up and find yourself attached to that violinist, do you have some moral due to your obligation to stay there? Yeah. And the secondary question of does society have a right to force you to stay there? And even if you consented, do you have a right to disconnect? And so my view is that consent can be withdrawn, although as soon as we start talking about consent being withdrawn, there may be complications with contract law and things like that, but that doesn't exist in this analogy. And so not only does the person who finds himself attached to the violinist have every right to withdraw, nobody has a right to force him to stay there, but they can voluntarily say, I'm going to go ahead and, I hate that you guys did this to me, but I'm gonna suck it up because I'm gonna value this situation. But when it comes to moral duty, like that would be moral virtue, I would say, to stay attached. But it's not a moral duty to stay attached, in my view. Okay, so I feel like there's a lot of intuition pumping with this analogy and I'm gonna ask a couple of questions around it to see if you still feel the same way. You might, but I'm just curious. Cool. Let's say that instead of the violinist argument, let's say that you wake up and what you actually find is your two-year-old child is attached to you and your kidneys are filtering his blood. Do you think in that sense, when it's your child, if they need your kidneys to survive for, say, six weeks, does the parent still have a right to disconnect themselves and say, well, I don't consent to that, yeah? Yeah, the fact that it's morally virtuous and that you might, and it doesn't make it a moral duty, the fact that you have a certain feeling towards one person as opposed to another, that is a different aspect of the person that's connected there, not of the moral situation. And so it's like a minute ago when you were doing your summary, sorry, that sat on my coat, you talked about how there, I wrote it down because I wanna make sure I didn't misrepresent it, my position pulls unpopularly and almost nobody agrees with my side. And yet, and so that is about a strategy about which model, personhood or bodily autonomy, sells better. But I don't give a shit about what sells better. I care about what's right. Once upon a time, none of them sold good. And I think that the value is in teaching people the right thing, convincing them that nobody has a right to use your body without your consent and that, you can convince them any number of reasons and I'm glad we're largely on the same side of this. But at the end of the day, that most people don't currently find it convincing is an argument for everything that failed up till now. Sure, I agree. In kind of looking at public polling, I'm just curious where the moral intuitions of people lie. That's kind of what I'm trying to gauge. And I think abortion is- With the moral intuitions of people currently? Currently, yeah. Do you think they're representative of, well, a good chunk of the people, like my parents are single issue voters and it's abortion. Mine are as well. And they're moral- Wait, are yours pro-life? Oh, yes. Okay, so mine, yeah. Yeah. No, my mom thinks I'm working for Satan. Yeah. No, he's not. Yeah, I haven't got a paycheck from him either. But their view on this is one where they're not gonna agree with either of us on any issue. Sure. There's nothing at all. It's a baby from the second that sperm hits the egg and that's what God wants and, okay. So there's no argument that I can come up with that either of us are gonna use to sway them. When you talk about the polling of how many people disagree, that's a huge chunk of them are in that boat. If there are people who are accepting of personhood arguments, I'm fine for strategically as long as it's honest because I agree with you. Prior to brain activity and everything else, I don't think there's a good argument to be made that it's a person and that you shouldn't grant it rights. All I'm saying is that if it were a person and we did grant it rights, it still wouldn't have this right. Sure, I guess so. Okay, we'll get to that. Just the only reason why I'm looking at that abortion moral intuition thing is because I've noticed something that I think Thomas actually brought this up when he was writing his Supreme Court opinion. It's interesting, or no, I think Alito brought this up. It's interesting that we've done things with gay marriage, we've done things with civil rights, we've done a lot of stuff where the people's opinions have kind of moved over time on it, but abortions seem like they're like stuck. Like even from Ro, even from Casey, like the abortion opinion has been still hotly divided in the United States and I don't see much movement there. So I'm just kind of curious, or rather I would say that's a curiosity to me. I agree, like at one point in time we could have polled and found the majority of Americans in favor of slavery. It's not a good argument to maintain the institution of slavery, but it's an interesting thing to see like how unwavering a lot of people's opinions are related to abortion. And then I kind of like to look at that. Like what is the moral intuition that's like kind of feeling this idea of what's right or wrong related to abortion? I agree, and on a side note, sorry to... I'm incredibly frustrating watching a lot of things, but in particular elections where almost everyone is 51, 49, 51, 49, 51, how can this nation be so equally divided on things? And maybe it's the case that we've run up against the wall on where there can be nuanced positions and now it's just boom, abortion yes or no. Boom, pick your issue, yes or no, gay marriage yes or no. And we're just stuck that we've hit this kind of 50-50. Well, that's another reason why I kind of like the personhood argument. I hate, okay, we're gonna go back to the ethics but getting into the pragmatic side because I wanted to be the ethics of it. But like on the pragmatic side, I think the majority of Americans I think could come together on a federal protection for first trimester abortions. I think that could be a push. Third trimester and second trimester is insane though. You lose so many people. Most Democrats won't back you up on like a second or third trimester abortion. So from a pragmatic like political side, I feel like first trimester federal protection, maybe that's something you can push for, but anything past that, people are just gonna look at you like you're crazy. Maybe we could educate them that that's not even really a real thing, that when we're talking about abortion rights, abortion isn't a right to kill anything. It's in a right to terminate the pregnancy and late term terminations of pregnancy are often delivered as in C-sections. And anytime where there's an abortion that results in the final trimester in the death of a fetus, it is normally for extraordinary medical circumstances. And so they wanna keep pushing it back further and further and further until it's gone. And what I'm saying is we should push it all the way out because you can deliver two days before. There is no such thing as a, let's kill the baby two days before. That just does not happen. And so it's a fiction to portray late term abortions in that sense. And so while I agree- You have like the vacuations and everything, like there are like for second trimester, like where you just abort and destroy the fetus, right? Like I don't think they attempt to deliver those and have those like adopted or something if you go in at five months for an abortion. Well specifically it applies to non-viable fetuses, which means that they couldn't survive on their own. Well by the time it's viable, all of a sudden determination of pregnancy takes on a different form that isn't abortion. Sure. Okay, so returning back to the, so the violent argument. So you would say that if it was a two-year-old, your two-year-old child connected to you, you would still have the right to just sever that connection and say, you know, peace out. Yeah, it doesn't mean that, so I look at abortion from a legal standpoint about rights. Well we're getting illegal, but I'm just, right now I'm on the moral part because I guess when I'm kind of teasing others, I feel like we do have a form of like Stephen Wagner wrote about this under 2013 paper called this de facto guardianship. That there are situations that we can be in in life where the situations have essentially appointed you as a sort of de facto guardian where you call these special rights, but I would argue that people would say like, yeah, there are cases where there are special rights, where these things do exist, where people do have some right to your resources, your body, your whatever. For instance, like I think most people would say, if I went to the pool and I was just sitting there hanging out, having a smoke, whatever, and a kid walks next to me and he just falls in and he's drowning and all I have to do is reach over and kind of like pick him up and put him aside and I just sit there and I watch him die. I may not be a murderer, but I think ubiquitously people would condemn me as not taking action. They wouldn't say, well, it would have been virtuous for you to pick the kid up. They would say, no, you have a moral obligation there because you are the only person in that situation that could have provided lifesaving treatment to this person and it's not going to put you into the way of like fatal harm. I agree. I think these three tenants of like de facto guardianship are I think can be used to argue for a fetus that exists inside your body that you have the ability to bring the term. You are the only one that could provide such an ability and it generally won't cause you seriously bodily harm. And if it does, if it does, most people, almost everybody is in favor, even the strictest of Catholics I've spoken to will say, yeah, if the life of the mother is going to be destroyed, then the mother can of course terminate the pregnancy. I think most people agree with that. Yeah, so setting aside the legal stuff, which is the only thing I truly care about for this because all I care about is whether or not people have a right to access this. The moral question is a little more complex and I have largely shrugged it off. I tend to draw the distinction between moral duty and moral virtue and yes, if a kid falls into the pool next to you, I would argue that if there is no risk on your part at all that you have a moral duty to make some minimal effort to save that kid. That's not the case with pregnancy because pregnancy is not a minimal effort. Pregnancy fundamentally changes the person who's pregnant forever. Carrying a child to term, changes their body forever, comes with considerable risk, has hormonal changes to their body, physical changes to their body. This is not the same as reaching over and picking up a kid. This is saying I'm going to commit nine months of my health, putting it at risk for this. I don't know that you could, it would be like saying, okay, there's a kid drowning in the pool and you need to rescue him but the first thing you do to do is dive underwater and swim 100 feet, pick up the kid, hold him there and float for hours risking whether or not you can drown and then hope to be rescued. That's closer to pregnancy and it's still not there. Sure, so I agree with you but I wanted to look at this as the principle of, because I've noticed you use this argument a couple of times that when people talk about the fetus, they actually give it more rights than a normal person. You're not just giving it normal human rights, you're giving it super rights to the right to somebody else's body but I would like to point out that I feel like there actually are times where people do have those like super rights, that there does exist this social moral obligation between certain people that are appointed to these de facto guardianships where they alone could save somebody's life with relatively minimal effort and it wouldn't just be morally virtuous, it'd be like a moral obligation of them to do so. But moral obligation and right of two different categories, right is the legal aspect that I was talking about. Moral obligation and moral duty have nothing to do with rights. True, we're not at rights yet. But in order to, so in my opinion, law is downstream from morality. But we don't merely legislate morality. We don't. And so there are laws that have nothing to do with morality and there are morals that have nothing to do with law. But what you said was, I make an argument saying, oh, you're giving special rights to the fetus but there's a situation where you have a moral obligation. Special rights are rights. Moral obligation is separate from rights. Gotcha. I guess when I'm using rights, I'm only speaking in the ethical sense so far. Sorry. If I talk about like a right that you have as a person to be like not killed by another person, I would argue that's like a type of moral right that you ought to not be murdered by another person. Sorry, I'll be clear there. Yeah, this is why I've drawn a distinction, sorry, this is why I've drawn a distinction between legal rights and moral virtues and duties. Sure, which is fine. Okay, yeah. And then the only reason I say this is because when we talk about legal stuff, stuff that gets enshrined in law, there's like a kind of a group consensus on morals and ethics that eventually downstream make their way into like what is legal generally speaking. Right, yeah, hopefully. That's the dream. What is it though? What? Would you want to legislate everything that you view a moral duty? For moral duties, probably not everyone, but some of them should be. And in the case of abortion, if, I don't believe this, but if you feel like it is a person from the moment of conception, this would probably be one of the most important things to enshrine in law. Because anytime we're talking about murdering or killing somebody, we'll say killing somebody, then that's probably gonna call for some sort of like legal ramification if that exists. So what's the foundational principle that allows you and me and us to get together and say you're pregnant and you're staying that way? What is the principle that allows us to dictate to someone else how their body's gonna be used? So answering that question, in revisiting the violin argument, one of the reasons why this is disanalogous is because the violin argument in my, not in my opinion, is a form of rape. The person didn't consent to being there. But I would argue that if you are engaging in sexual activity, you are consenting to the idea that there is some percentage chance that you will become pregnant. And if you do become pregnant, to kill a fetus because of your action, that you knowingly knew that something could happen. I think that that part makes it fundamentally different than saying, oh well now you're enslaved to do this, you have to do this, when you knowingly made a choice to get there. So this is where I talked earlier about the difference between exceptions in rape and incest, which I know poll extremely well, because most people fundamentally grasped, holy crap, we wouldn't want to hold somebody responsible for something they had no say in. The problem is, what if you did consent, but you consented knowing that you lived in a system where one of the available options was to terminate a pregnancy. What if you lived in a system where you have a medical, a chemical solution, are you 486 or whatever, or a medical procedure, or not draconian laws that tried to shut it all down before you even knew you were pregnant, but all of these were options. And so you acted perfectly responsibly, you used contraception, it failed, why on earth should everybody else in society get together and say, we're not gonna dictate, all, we're gonna take away this one chance that you have. It's like saying, if you're playing baseball out in the yard, and you hit a ball into somebody's window, well first of all, the kids that probably did that aren't gonna be able to pay for it, so the parents are gonna end up being liable. But in any case, the responsibility is still there, but there's a number of different ways to alleviate it, which is maybe you could work off the window, maybe you could repair the window, maybe any number of things like that. And for us to say, no, no, no, we find this one, some of us find this one so morally objectionable, that we're gonna tell you what you can't do. Yeah, I mean we already kind of do that to some extent. Like I have an 11 year old child, when he was six months old he cried a lot. At no point in him crying could me and his mother have been like, you know what, let's just lock him in the room and leave him in there for a while because I don't consent to dealing with this anymore. Like this is done, right? You leave him in there, he starts to, that's like, okay, we're done with that. There exists an obligation where that child has a right to your resources. Now the easy counter here is like, well okay, but you could give him up for adoption or do something else, and I would agree with you, but that's why that case is a little bit special. It's not that de facto guardianship, like the child falling into the water, because in here other people could take on the burden, but for the pregnancy there's only one person that has the ability to provide for that child that's growing in the womb, if indeed you consider it to be a person. And I don't think the idea, you can't just withdraw consent when you've already engaged in an activity that more or less has you consenting to whatever the natural conclusion of that arc would be, say for it being like you ended up dying or something, right? If I agreed to take a bunch of children with me to a camping trip and I drive there and an hour driving down, I'm like, you guys are fucking annoying. And then I just like kick them all in my car and I drive back and the parents are like, what happened? You're like, well I stopped consenting halfway through the ride. I think that they'd be like, okay, hold on, you can't do that. I'm kind of there until the end. You can just drop them off midway through, I would say. So what you're saying is that once you consent to the act that precipitates the consequences, you can't then ever stop consenting. So like if I take somebody home and we start to have sex, I can't stop at some point. The difference there is that on that particular exchange, and I've noticed there's a lot of abortion analogies that kind of do this. By the way, I'm not a fan of any abortion analogy. I don't think anything is truly analogous to the situation and they're all gonna fail. It's interesting that there are some that, I see why they sound compelling. So in Judith Thompson's paper, Judith Thompson, Judith Thompson's paper, she gives the analogy of like, what if I put all these bars in front of my window to keep a burglar out and he breaks in anyway? And now he's in my house. Am I obligated? Do I have to consent to the burglar staying here, even though I use protection and try to keep him out? The problem with a lot of these analogies, like the one you gave with the consensual sex, is on the other end of that transaction, there is a moral agent that could choose otherwise. So when it comes to consenting sex with somebody, well, if I'm in a consensual sexual relationship and I'm like, hold on, stop. For that person to continue going, requires an immoral decision made by another person. But for the same reason why I can't shoot a child that stumbles into my house, the same way that I might be able to shoot a burglar that stumbles into my house, I would say the child doesn't have the agency to understand the choice of what he's doing, whereas the burglar does. A fetus inside the womb doesn't have the agency to say like, okay, well, I'm sorry, I'll stop aggressing on you. It's doing the only thing that it possibly can. Well, in Texas, in some places, you can shoot a child if they break into your house, but we'll set that aside for whether that should be the case some other day, which I would say no. But this issue of, sorry, I got mildly distracted there for a second. Think about shooting kids. No. I hate them too, okay, so now it's all good. No, it's, if I have, so I started off at one point saying the consensus. You can't withdraw consent when the fetus can't choose otherwise. I don't understand if we have a system where there are ways in which for an individual to withdraw consent, why we say ah, or why you're basically arguing for oh, you can withdraw consent to here, and then you have to stop, because you said you'd agree. I'm not suggesting this is a realistic thing. You could give your child up for adoption. You could, and we have systems in place for that. They're awful systems, and in most cases, kids are probably gonna be better even in, I hate to say it, moderately terrible homes than they are in the systems, but that means we need to fix the systems, and we should probably fix the parents, but that's a different discussion. On this, at the end of the day, I don't know how personhood solves a problem with the bodily autonomy argument if what we're going to say is once you've had sex, no matter how you had it, as long as it was consensual at all, you can't then remove consent to remaining pregnant. So there's a risk to becoming pregnant, and that comes with some ways to alleviate that risk or eliminate that risk, that's one of them. That's a little begging the question, because we're arguing whether abortion should be okay. We're not saying like, well, it's okay to do it because you're gonna get an abortion, because that's like the subject of the. No, we're talking about the moral responsibility of someone engaging in an act with certain consequences. You don't get to eliminate the fact that there are options for those consequences. We're arguing whether those options are murder, essentially, which I believe if it's a person, I think it is a murder, basically. If you grant that it's a person, you're essentially murdering the person to save the mother from whatever inconvenience pregnancy would grant. Well, it's not a person. It's not a person, and it's not murder. Well, if it's not a person, then I'm totally on board with you. I agree. Murder is a legal construct, and. Uh-oh. Awesome. Murder is a specific legal construct that is not simply anything that results in the death of a person. Sure, I'm sorry. When I say murder, I'm so sorry. I'll clarify any time I say it, because I understand what we're gonna have to do. I have to push back on that, though, because that's the buzzword from the. That is true. When I say murder, I'm always in, we're so far, we're still in the realm of ethics. When I say murder, I'm speaking about the unjustified killing of another person. Yeah. Essentially, yeah. Sorry. And my view of this is that it is an unfortunate consequence of biology that the justified act, and perhaps necessary act, of terminating pregnancy can result in the death of a fetus. That doesn't make it an unjustified act against another person. Why, yeah. The only reason why I would view it as an unjustified act is because if you are engaging in an act where you're consenting to the possibility of a life appearing, you have, I believe, de facto guardianship, an obligation to that life to see it through at the very least until somebody else can take over that guardianship. Wow. So, unless, of course, you were a rape victim. I would say if you grant person what you do. Then we don't care about the person. Even for rape victims, you would have to say yes. Rape victims, incest, all of those. Unless there's a threat to the life of the mother, because now we're fundamentally weighing medical options and not just like, can I kill something because it's very inconvenient. Can I kill something? This is about terminating a pregnancy. And in the future, there may be ways to terminate a pregnancy that don't necessarily result in the death of a fetus at that particular time. Potentially. But that's the biological fact right now. And so what we seem to be saying is if you view it as a person, anybody who gets pregnant is just screwed. You no longer have control over your body. Everybody else in society who disagrees with you about whether or not you should have control of your body is gonna take control of your body. And every man that pays child support knows this for 18 years. That's unfortunately, well, not unfortunately. There are obligations that you have. We have as like humans, I think to other people sometimes, especially to children. And there is an obligation that exists though. You can't just abort the obligation. You know, from other sets of a child and you're a father and you have, you pay child support and it's not a child turns of age. Like I think that that is an obligation that one, we already have legal precedent for it, but aside from that, we already have moral precedent for it. And then I don't think you can just erase that while acknowledging that the fetus is a human. It's just that precedent is huge. And yet, you can. Because even if it's a human, if it's in there writing poetry and curing cancer, it shouldn't have a right to use your body without your consent. Okay, so I'm gonna reference. Okay, so here's a question I have. Okay, so going back to this 2013 paper by the Steve Wagner guy. He posits Mary's cabin. So a woman wakes up and she finds out that she is in a blizzard. She's locked in a cabin for six weeks and she just given birth to a baby. She wakes up, she looks over for everything, finds a note and it says, listen, your child is another place in its eighth. There's another child in another room. You have all the food and supplies that you need, but for six weeks, you're gonna be locked in this cabin and that baby's with you. You're there, we'll let you out in six weeks. Everything will be okay. In six weeks, the police show up to the house. They plow all the snow, they open the door. Mary comes out and they say, oh my goodness, we've got you, the Association of Behavioral Psychologists kidnapped you for an experiment. We're so sorry, we're gonna bring you out. How are you guys doing? And she says, I'm doing fine. And they're like, well, how's the baby? And she says, they're not here anymore. And the question is, what happened to the baby? And she says, oh, well, I let the baby start. I didn't wanna feed it. And like, well, you had all the means and opportunity to, you were the only one that could have. The question is, did she have an obligation to provide nourishment for the child while she was there and the only one that could? And I feel like this is a closer analogy to pregnancy than the violin argument because you were the only one that could provide nourishment to that child for those six weeks. Couldn't be any random person's kidney there. You have the ability to do it. It would have to breastfeed, right? So it's some obligation to your body to use it. In a way, that's like kind of natural. Breastfeeding is more natural than hooking people's kidneys up to each other. And I feel like when most people look at this, and I am relying a bit of moral intuition here, I do admit, but I'm looking at this de facto guardianship idea, I don't think most people would be comfortable saying like, well, it's not her kid and yeah, you know, if she really wanted to just kind of chill there and let the kid starve, it's okay because that kid doesn't have a right to her body. I think people would say, well, in that case, she's the only one that can provide it. She does have not just a moral virtuous action, but like an actual moral duty and moral obligation there to provide for the safety and the nourishment of that child. And you can take that apart if you want to go. Sure, you know, this is one I've heard before that it's been a little while. To me, this is exactly the same as the swimming pool thing where provided there is no undue burden on that person that puts them at risk, then yes, I think they have a moral duty to do that. And to shirk that moral duty, we can hold them morally responsible. Whether or not we can hold them legally responsible is another issue. Sure. And as I said, probably five times, I care more about the legal thing than the moral. Sure. Well, this is why, by and large, when somebody says, hey, you want to debate abortion, my two answers are A, I don't care to debate the morality of it ever. Sure. And B, I'd rather it wasn't two dudes just for the optics. It doesn't matter how good either of us arguments. And by the way, it's an everybody issue. It's not a woman's issue. There's not a person with a uterus issue. This is everybody's issue. But from an optics standpoint, let's be clear. I mean, we're one step removed from debating, you know, whether or not black people and women get to vote at this point with the two of us kind of sitting out there. That's my two o'clock. Yeah. I'm just kind of sorry. You can have that one. I'll debate Islam later today. So while I would agree that there is definitely moral duty, it's not always easy to figure out where the limits of that moral duty are. I agree. And it's not relevant to whether or not, or not especially relevant to whether or not we should hold people legally responsible and grant people the right to seek that remedy. And so yeah, the analogies of, hey, there's a baby drowning, you should probably save it. I used to use, I'm a kid standing in front of a bus and there's a bus coming, but it's coming really slowly where even my, after having a triple bypass last December, I could still reach out and pull the kid in. I would be a moral monster not to save that kid. And everybody on the planet would have a right to look at me and say, you are one of the most disgusting people ever, how could you do that? And yet it's still an issue of my bodily autonomy and whether or not I'm gonna put myself at risk. The cabin one, and let's just be as charitable as possible about it and say there's no extenuating circumstances. She just decided for no good reason, nah, I'm not gonna do that. Then I would say she's immoral. But that does not mean that when you are saddled with the duty of taking care of someone else, that that becomes a legal viability. And that's the only distinction. Bodily autonomy, by the way. And this may be one of the reasons, one of the many reasons, but one of the reasons why we're in disagreement about the bodily autonomy thing. Because bodily autonomy, I don't give a shit about morality with this argument. It's absolutely nothing but what rights and freedoms individuals have in a society. And the personhood argument is close, it's kind of, the personhood argument kind of walks the line to me where it's like it wants to tug on the heartstrings of this is a person and we should value it. Which I have no problem valuing it. I have a niece and nephew. I have family. My partner and I like to have kids, despite the fact that they're awful. And I don't know, Bill Hicks said you don't exist until you're in my phone book, I think. But all of those things are things that I like. But the other thing that I value is individuals freedoms and autonomy. And when we start saying, I'm gonna tell you what you can do with your body and what you can't. I have a big problem with that and we're doing that for abortion. The question is, is the reason good enough? Is our, and once again I'm sorry, but I'm back to the legal issue which is the only one I really cared about. If there was a moral responsibility, does that mean we should legislate it? Because I'm not convinced. Well if, so maybe we're a little nebulous still on the moral thing, but I think that we kind of agree in that maybe the only part of our disagreement is like what is like an undue burden? Or what is a sacrifice? If you were to ask me, a child is a thousand yards out at sea and they're gonna drown unless you swim out and save it, obviously I'm gonna say, well you don't have an obligation there because that would be represent a great risk to yourself. I couldn't swim a thousand yards. We're good there. Yeah, whereas if the child slips into the pool right next to you and you're just watching it kind of drown in the stair and you're kind of poking at it, it's not good, right? You obviously have an obligation there. So maybe the difference is like, well what is the burden and at what point is it like, well, if pregnancy lasted three days and then it came out happy and healthy, abortion is probably wrong. But if pregnancy lasted like 11 years, would you say that somebody who gets pregnant on day one now has to carry this 11 year childhood term? So maybe there's like room in the middle there for like what is like too much of a burden to value the life on the other side. The reason why I think it's interesting to deal with the legal aspect of it though is I've listened to a lot of you talk about abortion, but I don't know if you're like a libertarian or anything, I have no idea. I am, there are things I agree with libertarians on, but I generally find libertarians to be largely selfish assholes. Okay, gotcha. So I guess when I'm looking at this from a broader societal perspective, I'm thinking like what do I want to codify into law? It feels like for human civilization to flourish, to not just survive but to flourish, there has to be some level of integration and cooperation with ourselves. And part of that integration and cooperation is entitling people to other people's resources in a way that kind of sort of violates the autonomy of a person. I think it's Chris Rock had a joke where it's like you work Monday and Tuesday for the government basically because that's where your taxes come from. And there are ways where the libertarian will argue the government is stealing money from you when they take it out of your paycheck, but then my response would be well, as part of the agreement of living in a society that's functioning and flourishing as it is, we all kind of owe part of our autonomy to that society. That no man is truly an island and no man can truly act as an island because there are certain types of special obligations we have, not only to the people around us, but especially to our children to ensure that society continues to function as it does. And that's why I would say some of those things actually do need to be legal rights. Parents should not have the right to get lazy and let their children starve. You should not have the right to, I guess if you consider like a fetus a human to kill that fetus because you just want to, if you consider a human. I think I agree with all that except for one word and that was where you stuck in the word autonomy where I would have put the word resources because I don't think I have to ever give up any of my autonomy to anybody. Resources, yeah, that's the cooperative cost of the fact that we have to share space. What you do impacts me, what I do impacts you, even though until today we've never even met. We've impacted each other both indirectly and to some extent directly because people keep coming into my Twitch. We need to talk to destiny. But I don't think that involves me giving up any of my autonomy. What it does may involve, and this may be one of the strengths of talking about moral virtues, is that I can consensually give up aspects of my autonomy on a regular basis. I was in the Navy for eight and a half years. I gave up my autonomy for those eight and a half years. I was government property and I do not have the same rights as other citizens. To some extent you do, you can fight afterwards. My buddy here is nodding at me because he was also in, but you could say, this is why we run around saying, don't get me wrong, I'm not Ura Gangho. I did eight and a half years in the Navy, but I'm not a Jingoist and I'm not particularly fond of the military. Although I don't have, I don't have bad memories of it, but I definitely gave up my autonomy, but I did so voluntarily. And so when people come up and they say, thank you for your service, I laugh a little bit because my dad was in Vietnam and I was in the Gulf War, which meant I sat on an aircraft carrier, watched planes leave for three days and come back, bored out of my mind at no risk. And so when people say, thank you for your service, the only thing it can make sense to me is that I gave up some of my autonomy and risked something, even though realistically, I was never at risk. I was more at risk in Haiti when there wasn't a war going on than anywhere else. But I think that that's virtuous. I don't think there's a duty to give up the autonomy. Okay. I guess I'll ask like, I guess kind of one more analogy and then I'll give you the response and then we can do questions because I think we're kind of at bed right here. Let's say you open the door one day and a crying baby is put in your porch, okay? Talking at the hard strings again, okay? It can be an ugly baby if you want, okay? Crying ugly babies put it in your porch. You open the door, look around, nobody's there. I imagine you would say that in this case, the very least you have an obligation to bring the child inside is not a great cost to yourself, right? Unless the house is on fire, yeah, I'd bring it inside. So you bring the child inside and now you've got this child and then you start kind of like feeding it, providing nourishment. Let's say you call around, you can't find the parents for this child at all. Nobody seems to know where it came from. Child's maybe a year and a half old. Maybe you can roll around a little bit and eventually, you know, let's say you call your local adoption agency, your local police, nobody really has room for it. But if you want, you can stick it back out in your porch and nobody's gonna arrest you for it, I guess. Do you think there exists some kind of like more obligation here where it's like, well, you know, you showed up here, you have the ability to provide for it. You're not gonna starve or anything. Like you've got, you know, it's gonna suck. Maybe the budget will be a little bit tighter. But do you think a moral obligation exists there to take care of the child as you see it? And then I'll let you talk around that and then we can do whatever. Sure, so I'll say yes, but then I'm gonna backtrack. This is one of the problems. That's why I say I hate the analogy specifically around this. If I open my door and there's a baby on my porch before I touch it or anything else, I'm calling 911. And I'm not gonna feed it because I don't know what that baby's dietary restrictions or requirements are or what it might be allergic to. That could be irresponsible. I'm not gonna just look around for the parents or anything else, but I am gonna call the authorities. And we've established some systems like that. I'm not just doing this, I promise. I know you don't know me. I'm not just doing this to completely knock the legs out from underneath this. What I'm doing it to make a point and that is that we all, all of us, including me and Destiny, are guilty of making assumptions. And when we hear analogies, we assume things about the situation because we have a goal that we're going to, which is one of the reasons why I started this off by saying I don't have a goal of saving abortion rights. I have a goal of protecting human rights. And it is consistent with my values on bodily autonomy that it also protects abortion rights. The issue of whether or not it's moral and whether it's a person, you're gonna get as many different answers on that as you are as many different answers on when personhood starts, everywhere from conception to phone book, if we go with Bill Hicks. And largely, while I find it interesting and I've done a lot of moral debates, at the end of the day I'm interested in protecting the right, but I would agree just so people think I'm not dodging the question. If I walk out my door and there's a year and a half-year-old sitting there, I'm calling 911 and provided it's safer inside than it is outside, which is gonna be the case most of the time in Texas. I'm bringing the kid inside and then we're gonna say, okay, I'll start with water at some point because that's gonna be safe. And I do, in fact, have a moral duty. Just as I do to everybody in this room where something like that to happen, it doesn't matter whether it's a baby or a fetus or a person. And this is why personhood isn't a thing for me for abortion. Okay. I'm gonna grab my drink. I'm not leaving. I'm parched. He's running away. I got that. Put that on the YouTube clip. Yes. Destiny scared me away. He does. All right, we'll start with some honesty Q and A. All right, what if the baby's like going down the river and you see it and winking down the river? It's Moses. You have to pick it up. You're asking me or him? Sure, let me get back. Oh, Matt, I should say sorry. The question to Matt was you have a duty to treat people well. Where do you believe that duty or more obligation comes from? Sorry, I got it. Something along the way. Sure. Without doing my entire superior order secular morality lecture, I think you can build a secular moral system out of fairly simple beginnings that life is generally preferable to death, that health is generally preferable to sickness, that happiness is generally preferable to sadness. And then you come where those are in conflict because if your health is so bad that it's diminishing your life, maybe life doesn't outweigh death. But the obligation for me is one of almost a recognition of game theory. You and I have to share space. Is the world better when we cooperate when we treat each other decently? When we afford each other the same rights or is the world better when I try to get more rights for me and try to diminish rights for you? And I am convinced from all of the civilizations that have managed to get it wrong and do it wrong by instituting slavery and other things like that, that the world is better when we're cooperating. Not only does game theory bear this out, but the failed experiments in our past bear it out. Beyond that, if you're looking for a, there's some universal imperative, there is no universal imperative for anything that I'm aware of. The universe doesn't give a shit about us. It's up to us to care about us. And so I just look at what world would I rather live in, the one that benefits all of us, the one that protects my rights, the one that protects the rights of the people I love, or the one that favors me or some pocket group at the expense of others. That's it. Sure. Sure, so the question was, can I clarify more of my distinction between legal rights and then moral obligations and duties and how? Why one doesn't cast hate? Why one doesn't cast hate? Generally speaking, we've learned that we don't merely legislate moral views because first of all, we don't have agreement on moral views. So we legislated, like the speed limit is a legislation that may have a moral component, but it's tenuous to kind of build it out of, are you speeding, how much? What is immoral about doing 56 into 55? You have perhaps increased the risk. You could make a moral argument down there. But that's not normally what we mean when we talk about moral arguments for laws. What we talk about moral arguments for laws is, hey, I don't want you to steal my stuff. I think stealing is wrong, so we'll make a law about it. I don't want you to violate your trust with me in our marriage contract, so we make a law against it. But we found out that that was a really bad one. Adultery laws do exist, and some of them still exist on the book, but they're no longer enforceable. And while I would hope that everybody would consider adultery to be immoral, I'm not talking about polyamory or that's not adultery. That's consensual relationships. But violating your trust and cheating on someone, I would hope we would agree that that was immoral. But it shouldn't be illegal, because it doesn't benefit society in a good way to make it illegal, and it causes a bunch of harm. And so when I talk about what you should have the right to do, what you should have the right to do, and what you ought to do from a moral perspective, are often two different things. But for some things, those moral things are so egregious that we make them illegal, which is what a lot of people are trying to do with abortion because they view it as immoral evil, and so they want it outlawed. I don't view it as a moral evil, and so we're in a position of disagreement. Matter of fact, I would consider it to be moral good in many cases. Sure. Yeah. Not for that reason, but yeah, I'm generally opposed. The question was, did we give up the draft? Yeah, sorry, because the people can hear on the mics. I gave up my bodily autonomy to join the military, am I opposed to the draft for that reason? I'm opposed to the draft, but not for that reason. Just like, and boy, I shouldn't even do this, but I'm opposed to the death penalty, but not for any principled reason, but because the system doesn't warrant it. I have no problem with the notion that some people might commit an atrocity that makes them essentially deserving of death, although I think it's more of failing on our part for lack of imagination of other ways to do things, but the system isn't equipped to merit out that punishment. Not to, wow, how many topics are we gonna cover today? Now we just hit a question on veganism. Jesus. No. Does your wife have an obligation to go out and gather resources for you? Only if she's a feminist. I'm just kidding. Why would it matter whether you're capable as to whether or not she has an obligation? Don't we all have an obligation to each other? If myself and my partner are both able to gather stuff, then why wouldn't we share the responsibility? Sure. It seems like my autonomy is actually... I want you with me, because I can't find a tiger either. I'm sure. To still man real quick on, to still man a little bit what you said, because that was kind of what I was thinking at is, I don't think there's a clear, that's why I brought up the child support thing. I don't know if there's a clear distinction between autonomy and resources, because you necessarily need to sacrifice some level of autonomy to gain resources, is one point I would say, which I think is kind of you're hitting it. And then the second thing that you bring up as well, which I also think is a little bit true, is I think we have varying obligations based on our individual capabilities, right? Like if there is somebody next to me and they started like falling over and choking, and I don't know how to do CPR, I can't do anything, versus I've got like a master physician here that's like saved five million people, both of us could take the exact same action of not helping that person, but this guy's capabilities are so much greater, I think he would have had the obligation there to do something, which is I think what you were getting at with the like fighting the tigers, because apparently you do that for your wife or whatever, yeah. Yeah, which is also why we have things like, you treat the patients in the front of you, this is about medical ethics. And in some cases, I think medical practice may be the one case that is most obviously where we impose a duty to give up your autonomy. We just went through, and are still going through to some extent, but not properly a pandemic now. Oops, sorry, I got you demonetized. We went through a horrible time, you can bleep that out, and there were first responders, there's medical people out there who were putting their lives at risk, and generally the public viewed it as a duty. And I would agree that there is a moral obligation there once someone has consented to taking on that job and task. Prior to that consent, I don't think that that moral duty necessarily exists. When the example that you're talking about, you have a duty, I would say that your duty to your wife and child comes from the commitment that you've already consented to to be in a relationship with them, to be stewards for them, to be protectors of them, not in a top down, we don't have to do the, I'm the he-man, woman-hater. All of those things are things that you consented to, and that you could remove consent to. Maybe not when you're on the desert island, it's not the most practical time to do it, but you can leave your wife and kid today, and if they wind up on a desert island, you don't have to protect them. You would be awful in a moral sense to do something like that, but now we're outside the realm of the legal rights, which is always distinct. Can I, I'm gonna ask one question? You don't say as much as you want, and they keep asking me stuff. I'm gonna ask a gotcha, but I'll tell you the gotcha, so you don't, so it doesn't feel like a gotcha. So when you talk about withdrawing consent in the course of the pregnancy, assuming you get into a situation where you're now kind of like on the hook for a certain amount of time to deal with something, do you think you can withdraw consent in the middle of that ordeal because you're no longer comfortable with it, and then the gotcha that I was gonna ask afterwards, because we're in Texas is, could all of the cops in Uvaldi have just said, okay, well, this is a little bit spooky now, withdraw consent, I'm just gonna let this guy do whatever, or is that like a failing of duty there such that you actually do have the very least a moral obligation to perform what you've been hired to do and consented to do initially? The cops in Uvaldi not only had a moral duty, but they had a legal duty to some extent, and so there can be consequences for it. They can, no firefighter can be forced to go into the burning building. They can be held responsible for not doing it because what they did was they consented to be the one who does that, and that kept somebody else from that job who may have actually done it. And so that's where the kind of the legal responsibility lies. But also, I wasn't in a particularly difficult war situation, so I can't really speak to what others experienced, but when people are in a under fire like that, whether it's firefighting, police duty, military, you don't know what you can do till you've been tested, and by and large, we have evaluated those things and we're trying to get better at it, but from the standpoint of a moral duty, if you're committed to something, then you have that moral duty until such time as you can reasonably withdraw from the situation. You can't just say, I'm gonna be in the Navy during peacetime and then run away as soon as, or in an army, which is actually more running away, you're swimming away in the Navy. Yeah, so there's a responsibility. The first part of your question though, I forgot. Just the withdrawing consent basically in the middle of an ordeal, essentially. Was your kind of gut around too? Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you, I appreciate that. Wait, are you not a vegan either? No, fuck no. See, I would have never said it like that, so you guys go after him today. Well, it's funny, there are two arguments I don't do on my stream. When somebody calls in for abortion or veganism, I hang up, so. Let's do them both today. Okay, anyway, so you were saying good. Yes, so the question is about why do you why is there a binary value for humans versus a sliding scale? There probably is a sort of sliding scale, but it happens after a binary switch. So for instance, there's gonna be certain types of people who have more moral value than others, like Democrats versus Republicans. Just kidding. But within that scope of things, they're all still people, right? So there might be the worst type of person versus the best type of person in terms of maybe moral value. If you could only save one person from a burning building, and one is like a 79-year-old man on the verge of death, and the other is like a 32-year-old world-famous cardiologist that's saved, right, you're probably gonna save the heart surgeon, right? But if you could save either of those people or a dog, if it's not your dog, you should probably opt for the humans, right? So there can be like a sliding scale, but it's gonna be in that category already of like human valuation. And then from there, maybe you can rank people if that is what you so wish to do. I wanna, let me kind of. Uh-oh. I can't come up with a gotcha. Go ahead. All right. It's not that much of a gotcha. It's just genuine curiosity. Because Dawkins and I ever got to this. And that is, let's assume that we toss out the bodily autonomy argument, and we're gonna go with personhood, which we didn't spend as much time on how awful I think the personhood's argument is, but mainly because I think it's completely intractable. So whether or not there's a sliding scale, there's a switch at some point. What is that switch and how do you decide what that switch is? Is it heartbeat? Is it brain function? Yeah, so. Is it viability? Okay, we're answering one of the hardest questions of all human existence, right? But essentially I think that when we talk about hurting something, usually we're talking about hurting some, okay, I'm about to use a lot of weird words, but we're hurting something that knows what it's like to be something, right? I think that when we look at when we're doing harm, we're looking at things that are having a conscious experience that is having an experience that we've considered non-preferable, a harmed experience basically. So when we look at all of humans and how we treat humans, I think we're generally valuing the conscious experience. If I could show you a human being and I could cut off its arm, is it still a human? Cut off its other arm, cut off its leg, give it a fake heart, but as soon as we start to swap out the brain, it seems like something has fundamentally changed. Or if I've got a person in bed and it's like, oh my god, he's gonna be on bypass forever, it's like, well, okay. Oh no, we've gotta put him on a heart machine forever. Okay, oh no, he's in a coma forever and he's never gonna wake up. Oh, well, maybe we pull the plug if there's like no brain activity. So if I'm looking at the end of life and it seems like brain activity is a pretty clear indicator for once the brain stops having, being able to deploy that conscious experience, once that's gone, the thing that we really care about is gone. We don't really care about the body, we really care about that experience. So then I go to the beginning and I go, okay, well, about when does that conscious experience start? Because before that conscious experience has started, there's really nothing to speak of that's being harmed. There might be like the body of a fetus or there might be like a potential life, but if you call it a potential life, it's because it's not life yet, so it obviously doesn't have the same endowments of rights and everything. So before that conscious experience starts, which what I've read is around 20 to 24 weeks is when all the parts of the brain are formed and are communicating with each other to have that conscious experience, but before then, there's nothing really to speak of that's being harmed. If you abort something that's eight weeks old, you're like, oh my God, you killed it, killed what? What was harmed? What experienced like suffering? Because there's nothing there for it to even have that experience. A heartbeat doesn't get you that experience. Nothing but that conscious experience that the brain is capable of deploying can. Sorry, that's a weird answer. That's right, yeah, go ahead. The conscious experience that you're talking about, you specifically said it's just the way my brain goes and I'm pretty sure we both do it a little bit. When you talk about, you're not hurting anything that knows what it's like to be anything. To me, there's a distinction between can experience pain, which would be rudimentary brain function prior to that, but the actual conception of what it's like to be something, I'm not convinced that's anywhere near 24 months. It's not quite the phone book, but to have the sort of, I mean, you don't have a theory of mind when you're born. You are an automaton, pretty much, that is functioning and still wiring brains together. It's not like a baby knows what it's like to be a baby, even if it was born an hour ago. Yeah, maybe. That's why I said it's hard because that's why I said it's getting at the meat of what it, that's like the- I just wanted to clarify whether you're like- No, yeah, for sure. 24 weeks is the switch. Oh, 24 weeks, like this is like a fully fledged, but that's like the safest answer. I think 20 to 24 weeks is probably the earliest part where you could say like, at this part, now we have to start asking questions. But then like saying- And for the record- There's a lot of other things where it's like, does a baby recognize a reflection in the mirror and all this stuff? There's like different ways your conscious grows, like as you grow older, of course, but yeah, go ahead. For the record, despite the fact that I'm still going with bodily autonomy, I do agree that when we're taught that I was kind of okay with abortion laws where they were, that by and large, once we reach a certain point, I think that the responsibility the individual takes on increases at no point does that responsibility ever reach the case where you can force them to remain pregnant as well as a legal obligation. But it's like, you had time, you had time, you had time. Now we've crossed a point where our moral assessment of you is far worse than it would have been. And then if you have an abortion at three weeks, I don't even know how you knew you were pregnant most of the time, it's not like, I don't care if you did it because that's what you decided your form of birth control is. I mean, I wish it were different when I'm not advocating for that, but at the end of the day, the reason behind it doesn't matter because in the agreements with you, there wasn't anything that was harmed at that point. So we're not miles apart. Not that guy. Go ahead. So the question was, and this is for Destiny, if you have the obligation to save a human over a dog, if it's not your dog, what if it is your dog? Giving a serious answer, you should always opt for the humans, I would say, you should. But there's gonna be cases where like, this is one of those virtuous things where you should opt for the humans because it's virtuous, but no offense, but given the opportunity to save four children or one child, the one child is my child. It's about to be four childless parents, I'm sorry. I'm not sacrificing my kid. So yeah, I mean, I understand, and for the people that make those choices that truly can make the really hard decisions, like man, those heartbreaking decisions where parents pull their child off of child support to donate organs to other children and stuff, it's amazing what people do with that, but there are gonna be a lot of times where Matt is kind of talking about this, we've both talked about it. There are times where morally, this is what ought to happen and you should do it, but man, it's really hard to judge that the father that stepped out and shot and killed the dude that I think raped his daughter as he was walking over the corridor, so he shouldn't do that, very bad, and I don't support it, but am I gonna blame the guy for it? Geez, I don't know, that's a hard one. There's a reason why we appeal to these third-party structures in society and we entrust in them so much power and we really sacrifice parts of our decision-making and autonomy doing this because we trust them to hold us accountable. If somebody, I don't wanna live in a society where I have the right to seek vengeance against somebody that hurts my child, but if somebody hurt my child, I would seek vengeance against them, but I don't want a society built around being an okay thing, you know? If that makes sense, you know? So basically, fuck dogs, yeah. Yeah. All right, sorry, he's doing it. I was pointing at somebody, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. So every year since 2015, there's been four black children aborted in New York City and having black children born. How do you think that sheer volume of human flesh and life that's destroyed should not be something that suppresses society? Just like Borgel Reed, a small and stealing of $20 is something that catches the presence of society. The question had to do with the, there are lots of black babies being aborted in New York. Yeah, the sheer volume. Yeah, the sheer volume. To a point where there's more. More aborted babies than delivered babies. That means that black aborted girls. I mean, I imagine if you really hate single-parent households, isn't that a plus for you? Like, because you're avoiding a lot of that, aren't you? Like, a lot of people would point to parts of the crime wave or parts of the decrease in crime in the United States has partially been due to people being able to exercise greater reproductive rights in their households. And I mean, that's part of it. The question, I don't think the question is meaningful unless you get into the personhood debate. Because if you think that, like you said, like if you think that... It's very mighty if he's not a person. Well, no, I'm saying that. If you think that abortion is murdering babies, then I mean, you should be outraged. But if you don't think it's killing babies, then who cares? It's destruction of human flesh. Yeah, but biting your fingers is destruction of human flesh. I'm saying it doesn't mean anything, right? You're gonna answer good. Oh, I won't talk to him. Oh, okay, sorry. They don't pay me enough to talk to him. Okay, got it. James, what am I getting paid for this? Anyone who hasn't... The ultimate trolley problem. The Gina Thompson, the lady that wrote that violent argument paper, she actually was the one that started that trolley problem. That was her original thing at hand. Do you generally hate trolley problems anywhere near as much as I do? They're okay. It's a good foundation for conversation. There's, Sinai and Happiness did, like a board game of the trolley problems. Which I wish was better. The art's good, but the game is not good enough. I have tons of board games, but yes, go ahead. Stop, no, what? Stop, no, James, find a serious person. James, go. This guy's a memer. I generally use them interchangeably, too. I don't find, I can find some really jargon-ish distinctions that might be useful, but by and large, I'll draw a distinction between legal rights and morals, but no distinction between morals and ethics. To me, they're functionally identical. Yeah, but I pretty sure even moral philosophy, I think though they use morals and ethics interchangeably, you can draw a distinction if you want, but it'd just be for the purpose of that conversation. Most people, I think, hear them and use them interchangeably. I think when I say jargon-istic, it's kind of like people want to use ethics for morals in a particular situation or in a niche. Maybe, sure, yeah. But it doesn't, I don't get any value out of it. Wow. Is one up front? Oh, yeah. Oh, one over there. Oh, yeah. I don't know what he's saying. I'm just simple term. He says, the guy who was a lever saved more people than died and never think about the secondary not the bunch of cats spread out. Those children that are possibly neglected in their relationship afterwards, does that spread to dysfunctionalism further on in the generation of that spread? So, you really want to do consequentialism. Like, when you can do it, and how does that work in your equation? Is that for me or for Matt? I actually mostly agree with you to want to use this question. So the question was about getting to consequentialism and the oversimplification of trolley problems and even the discussions about abortion where it doesn't take any other factors into account like her taking care of the rest of her children or whatever else. How do we get to that consequentialism, right? Well, hit. So, God, there's one ethics guy that emails me and he gets triggered whenever I talk about normative ethics, so I'll try not to butcher this but I always do. I feel like normative ethics and consequentialism is really hard because it feels like the more you start to bake things into things, the more nebulous everything becomes. So, for instance, in the simplest version of the trolley problem, should you pull one lever, if you can avoid like five people getting killed and instead you just kill one person, right? We could imagine that this is a sort of rule we could craft where you should always pull the lever because we're preferring to save like the greatest number of people, right? But we could arguably factor that rule in and we could say consequentially on a microscale everybody does that, but if that would apply it into society, we might create a society where nobody ever, if they've got a cold, goes to the hospital because the second they walk into the hospital, a doctor might see him with a scalpel and go, oh my God, I've got six patients that could use your organs and then they kill you. And it's like, but that's the moral thing to do because you're killing one to save six or five or whatever. So, I hate normative ethics, okay? So, that's what I'm done with that, okay? The other question you asked though was interesting that there are knock-on effects for whether you have an abortion or not have an abortion. You said something I disagree with, which is like people don't consider the knock-on effects. I think people do. I think that's one of the democratic attacks to Republicans that I think is one of the best attacks. And it's like, it seems like Republicans are very, very, very invested in the fetus right up to the moment of delivery and then they don't give a fuck anymore about it. And that's always something that I think bothers a lot of people on the left. It bothers me where it's like, okay, well if you're truly invested in happy, healthy babies and not just happy, healthy fetuses, like it seems like we should be doing things to support them after birth. Like for instance, when Republicans fail to come together and expand that child tax credit that Biden had expanded that raised the tax credit for families with children, that would have been a good way to show the like, okay, look, well we do want to take care of children outside of the womb too, but yeah. I have to put on a hat or my ex-wife would be very upset with me. I agree with you. And as long as we're talking about political distinctions and who cares and who doesn't. But there's a really bad line of argument, far worse than bodily autonomy that runs around particularly in leftist circles, which is oh well they don't care about kids after they're born and usually they're talking about the religious right who are opposed to abortion. That's a lie and it's a mistake because there is almost no one who spends more money, time and effort adopting babies and making sure babies are taken care of than the religious right. It's the broken system of teenagers that we can't find homes for that didn't come from those situations from just a mere forced pregnancy. But if you're like, oh if you love babies so much why don't you take them and adopt them and take care of them? They do, all the time. There's not even enough of them. There are no babies in the system functionally apart from really special cases. By and large there's a waiting list for babies. And so no matter what your view is on abortion, if you're going to talk about this we all have a duty to make sure we're not misrepresenting the other side. No matter how much I hate their position the fact of the matter is fundamentalist Christians are taking care of babies. I know you didn't say, you said Republicans, I go further. Yeah, I believe that, I know that the adoption, I was gonna mention that earlier in our argument that like when you talk about like the broken system there is a high demand for new babies because that's like the clean slate, right? You wanna adopt, you're gonna adopt, you wanna adopt like right after they're born. It's the new car, it's not somebody else's problem that's how they look at it. But I mean there are like single moms that don't wanna give their children up for adoption after they have them. And it seems like people are a bit reticent to support the struggling families or at least on the right it feels that way. But that's a whole other kind of political conversation, I guess, I think, yeah. One more interesting question. Okay, if you have one from online it's for both of you, actually. They had said, for both, but mainly destiny, that if a fetus has no moral work until it is sentient can a mom drink well pregnant? You say there is no reason to value potential so you can't argue for future harm to the fetus. I haven't resolved this, actually. There's an interesting, oh man, at one point in time I said that you have to avoid future harms. And somebody, I don't remember who I was, somebody emailed me a really great objection to this that like when you start factoring in future harms there's a whole bunch of like really bizarre things that could be constructed morally out of that obligation. But I don't know the correct moral answer to that. Like if I stand at the top of a building and I get ready to drop a piano and I know somebody's gonna walk there in 10 minutes but then I drop it and it takes 10 minutes to fall. Like was it immoral if they weren't there yet? I just don't have a good answer to that. That gets into weird. I mean, my intuition tells me that like if you're pregnant and you wanna carry the fetus to term obviously you should be doing things to harm that fetus. But I'm actually not, I don't know morally how you actually reason your way there. I don't actually know. I'm not sure. I don't think about that one a lot, yeah. Future harms is a weird one. Yeah, no, I don't even disagree. Other than to say, I suppose if she knew she was going the next day to get an abortion, yeah, have a drink. Otherwise, don't. But. I was gonna say thank you very much for our speakers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.