 Let's jump in to the heart of this question and the whole issue of abortion and that is the question of individual rights. So let's just do a primer on, a quick primer on where do rights come from? And then we can kind of delve into somebody says here that they believe in the individual rights of the unborn child. Why is that impossible? Why can an unborn fetus not have, why can he not have rights? So first thing to say, I think, and this is an example of how this is a position that comes right out of the heart of Objectivism's basic principles, rights don't come from God. There is no God. I don't think there's a God. Iren didn't think that there was a God. So they're not mystical, magical entities that are endowed by some kind of supernatural being just by the grace of its whim. That's a starting point. We're assuming instead a secular scientific rational outlook, but of course it also doesn't follow from that that rights are just arbitrary decisions by society. You get whatever rights Congress decides that you get. There are facts about human life and facts about human nature that are immutable that have nothing to do with the whims of Congress, which are the basis of morality generally, but then also rights as a moral concept. And so then you have to talk about, well, what role does the concept of rights play in morality? As I assume most of your audience knows, Iren's view is that morality is a code of values for guiding your life, for pursuing a flourishing and happy life, a set of virtues that allows you to plan in the long range how to make something of yourself. And so then the concept of rights fits into this equation because it helps us, it's a concept we need to guide our interactions with other people. And importantly for Iren Rand, the concept of individual rights is a concept related to our coexistence with each other in a social context. And so if you read, for example, her essay Man's Rights or her essay, The Nature of Government, where both of which are really essential texts for understanding her view of rights, what you see her talking about is, what are the conditions needed for a rational being to live in a society with other people? We need to be able to plan our projects, we need to be able to plan our lives, to pursue values, to produce, to trade with other rational beings. The whole context here is, we are an individual who's acting, who's planning, who's making choices, and we're trying to negotiate boundaries around our lives such that we can do so in a way that's consistent with other people's doing the same thing. Because that way we can benefit from each other, we can benefit from the trade, the knowledge, the friendship that we get by living in society when there aren't a bunch of people running around trying to use force on us. We want some kind of boundaries against force being used where one person tries to manipulate exploit the other. But this whole context is a context where we're talking primarily, not only, but paradigmatically about adult human beings who are trying to make something of their lives, they're making choices, they're pursuing projects, and they're trying to do that in a way that's consistent with everybody's being able to do that so they can benefit from the trade. We're not talking about any kind of special moral status that attaches, say for example, just to our genetics. There's no mention in these essays made about the fact that we've got 46 chromosomes of a certain type and that those, that that magically conveys some kind of special status on us that's then worthy of protection. You have to think about, for Ayn Rand, individual rights, they guide our decisions, but just like any other moral concept, they guide our decisions from the perspective of what's the best way to profit from living in a social context. And our idea is if you respect other people's rights, it's good for your life, it's good for your self-interest. And that's pretty clear when you're talking about why you should respect the rights of another adult human being who's also engaging in projects and you wanna benefit from that, it's absolutely unclear why it's in your interest to protect a piece of protoplasm with the same genetic code as yours, but where it's not doing anything, it's not living in a human sense. And of course, if you're a parent or you're a prospective parent who wants to have a child, who's made, who's done some thinking about how a child's going to play in your life, well, then you have a reason to have a child, but that's only if you choose it. And if you don't choose it, there's not, the life of a fetus or an embryo is not of value to you. And it's not of value to anyone. It's not a value to itself because it's not yet a living human being who can value. It's not a value to a God who doesn't exist. So there's just no basis in Ayn Rand's theory of rights for thinking that an embryo or a fetus could have rights. It's why she thinks rights begin only at birth. And it's, as you can see, that helps explain why birth is important because birth is when a being becomes individuated and individual rights are about protecting the boundaries around the lives of individual entities, individual human beings in a social context. So just to push on this in the kind of questions that I typically get, but the fetus has a unique DNA. So you said it's irrelevant, but it makes it individual in a sense that it's different than the mother. And the don't rights ultimately attach to life isn't, aren't they related to human life? And of course, a fetus is alive. So why can't we, why shouldn't we expand the concept of individual rights? Why shouldn't we be applying this concept to the fetus? Well, let me- It's alive and it's individual supposedly, right? Let me actually answer that question first a bit indirectly to anticipate a question that often comes up because what I said earlier was that the concept of rights applies paradigmatically and primarily to the lives of individuals who are pursuing plans in society. That doesn't mean that it doesn't apply, for example, to children or to infants. They're not the paradigm case of rights bearers, but I think children and infants still have rights. And it's important and interesting to note that they still don't have them in the full way that adults do. You take adults as the kind of center of the page example and you can extend it, mutate as mutandus to younger and younger cases. And that, but notice that it changes as you move further away from the paradigm case. Children do not have the rights to all the same rights that adults do. They don't have the right to assign contracts. They don't have the right to vote, et cetera. It's only when they reach the age of majority that they have that full set of rights. And so there's a transitional period between being born and growing up to an adult where you get all the rights. And that's a sign of something that the further away you go, the less obvious it applies. And then what's important is that in a case where before birth, where the fetus or the embryo is a necessary burden on the mother, you definitely can't extend it past that point because that's the point where there's no way to resolve the conflict just by the nature of the biology. Rights are conflict resolving principles. And so you can only apply them where it's possible for people to avoid conflicts and the rights show how that's possible. It's not possible before that point when the fetus is necessarily a burden on the life of the mother. It's only when she's given birth that it's possible for her to give it up to somebody else who if she doesn't want it anymore and there's no conflict anymore, that's possible. So as to the question about genetics and it's true in some sense that the embryo or the fetus has an individual genetic code it's true in most cases. It's not true when they're identical twins which is interesting to think about because if you think having an individual code is what's so important then does that mean it's okay for one individual twin to kill the other because they've got the same code? But I mean, there's lots of ways to think of respects in which a thing can be individual or individuated. Lots of different respects in which it can be unique. I mean, I am, you can take any entity you want you can describe what's unique about it but the question is what's the relevant respect in which a thing is individual or unique? And it's not even really about the uniqueness it's about the individuation which means a separation. And for Ayn Rand, the view is that individuation is important because there are separate individuals who can go their separate way in society and they need to be able to go their separate way in order for them to live because the mind requires freedom and that is just not the kind of individuation we're talking about when we're talking about this being has a separate genetic code there's nothing special about that and I've never been able to get anybody to explain to me what's so special about it. I mean, they can say, well, that shows that it's human and that's true. It's a human embryo, it's not a dog embryo it's not a lizard embryo, all that is true but the question is what is it about being a human embryo as opposed to these other kinds of embryos that would warrant some kind of the protection of rights I'd never get an answer to that question. And honestly, I think that the real reason why people think that there's one of two possible reasons. One is that they're religious and they think that God has given the embryo rights and they're looking for a way to rationalize that view using some kind of scientific language. And so genetics provides a nice proxy for what they think is God's will. And there's more to say about that. The other view is I think more common when we're talking about people who are fans of Iran who don't think of themselves as religious. And it's that they've got a rationalistic understanding of what rights are and where they come from. They think, well, rights have something to do with being human, this is human in some sense therefore this has rights. And so there's a nice little rationalistic deduction that you can give there but it's one that doesn't pay any attention to what the actual inductive basis of the concept of rights is. And that's what you typically get when you have rationalism. And rationalism is also often, since you don't understand the concept, if you don't have a firsthand understanding of the abstract concept for yourself you then tend to absorb the views of other people around you. And if you happen to be living in a culture that's highly religious where all the religious people are using rights in this particular way you'll maybe unintentionally end up absorbing that usage. I think that's the way rationalism often functions. So I see people in the chat kind of saying, okay, well, this isn't, okay. So put rights aside, I just care about the fetus and I think it's wrong to kill a fetus, right? So why are rights here important? Why is it important to define whether an MBO has a right rights or not that the mother has right? What function do rights play in this context really in all contexts? But what is the kind of the function that rights play here? Well, of course, there's a category of people who have every right, every reason in the world to care about the fetus. And that's the parents who want to have one. And I think, so if you're an expected mother you certainly have a right to bring your child to term. And if someone tries to stop you from doing that it's violating your rights, that's for sure. I also think that there are people who maybe aren't parents themselves or maybe they are but they're talking about other people's children and they're thinking about their own experience having children and how they would never want to abort their own child. And then simply failing to empathize with the different position that other people are in. Like, yeah, you would never make this choice because you wanted to have children but imagine someone else is in a different situation and maybe they don't have the same hierarchy of values as you, they don't have the same priorities in life and they might have a different set of reasons than you do. So that's something that's important. And that's something that follows from the nature of individual rights, right? That different individuals do have different hierarchies of value. And if you understand and respect individual rights then you need to allow the woman who has different priorities to make different decisions even when they're different from yours. So there's another, that's one important role for understanding the role of rights here. But again, it's the fact that you like babies or that you care about fetuses maybe in your own case doesn't generate any reason to think that any given fetus, any given embryo has rights. Rights are not about setting up and protecting your set of preferences and imposing them on other people especially when the entity in question isn't a person in the relevant sense. So I was thinking in this context that the importance of rights is that they define the actions of government. That is they define the categories of things that government should be concerned with versus what individuals would be concerned of. And certainly they're gonna be individuals who choose never to have an abortion and the individuals who choose yes to have and they can be moral considerations applied to them. But when can the government prohibit you from action? It's only when you're violating rights and that's why government prohibiting abortion requires the government to somehow ascertain that the fetus has rights or that the embryo has rights. Yeah, and maybe an additional spin on that is that, so the position that women should be able to get an abortion until birth doesn't imply that every single abortion that a woman might get at any particular stage in pregnancy is thereby moral. I think a lot of them are, I think many of them are and I think that needs to be emphasized but not everyone. And so one point to think about here is, I mean, part of the reason people might have sympathy for the other side is they're thinking maybe of some particular case where somebody was irresponsible and at the last minute made an irresponsible decision and maybe it was wrong. Maybe this was cowardice on her part but that's irrelevant from the perspective of how we understand rights. You can have the right to do the wrong thing as long as you're not violating someone else's rights in doing it. And since as I argue the fetus doesn't have rights that's the kind of action that a government should protect. Now I hasten to add that I really do think most of the time women get abortions, it is good for them and is rational. And that includes even a lot of cases in the late term. I mean, there's a lot of heat about late term abortions and the reason that articles like mine about how you should be able to have an abortion until birth, the reason they get this heat is imagining that these late term abortions are mostly irrational irresponsible decisions but it's just not true. Like first of all, there's a very small number of abortions. Like it's less than 2% of the abortions happen after 20 weeks. 1.2% of something like that. Yeah, and most of them happen when it's a threat to the life of the mother or when we're talking about a severe fetal abnormality where the fetus isn't gonna, where the child wouldn't survive much after birth anyway. And these are often the same kinds of cases where the people who are opposed to abortion would allow for exceptions anyway. So it's really kind of a, it's a red herring. It is a red herring. And the number of doctors who are willing to do late term abortions is very small. And I think if a woman just walked in and wanted it for irresponsible reasons, I'm not sure the doctors wouldn't do it. The doctor just wouldn't do it. So I think the immorality, the immoral cases of being controlled by the fact that doctors don't like these procedures that are pleasant and therefore avoid them. So let's talk about this all the way to birth because somebody in the chat said, or somebody always asked this question. So is the birth canal magic before you're born? You don't have rights. And then two seconds later when you pop out there, suddenly you have rights, a right something that just conveyed to you in, you know, through the, I don't know through the birth canal somehow conveyed to you. So again, I think a wrong view of rights and in terms of this view of rights, but tell us what's the mistake in conception here? Yeah, this question always comes up. And one, so there's no magic involved here. This is a view that comes out of a secular scientific worldview for sure. And it's funny that this question always comes up about this position because you have to wonder what's the alternative here? The alternative that's usually offered is conception. But I think imagining that rights are somehow bestowed at conception is the really magical way of thinking. For one thing, again, what's so special about a certain number of chromosomes? What's the magic special sauce there? Why is that relevant to morality? And if part of the worry is, well, there's gradations throughout and the difference between the physical structure of the fetus two minutes before birth and the newborn child shortly thereafter is just a difference in degree. Well, that's true at conception too. It takes 24 to 48 hours for a sperm to fertilize an egg. So what's the magic moment there? That's one thing I think people who raise this question should think about. But then the broader and the more important issue is how do we think about what you might call borderline cases more generally? I mean, it's true that how exactly, if the philosophic principle is that a woman should be able to have an abortion until birth, there's then a separate question that different jurisdictions of law are going to have to settle about how to define that. And there's different ways you could define it. You could talk about breaching the birth canal. You could talk about the umbilical cord. There's different ways you could draw that line. And I think part of the reason people are asking this question is they're wondering, well, how do you decide to draw that line? Where is the bright line? It doesn't seem to them to be a bright line. One thing I would say is, well, it's a lot brighter than conceptions because all of the conditions here are perceptually observable as opposed to something you could only really figure out by doing a chemical experiment, a biochemical experiment on a fertilized egg. So that's one point. But really the broader issue here is epistemological. And it's understanding that rights like any other concept in morality or any other concept in philosophy or really any other concept on any topic are concepts that are formed by humans for human purposes. And you mentioned intrinsicism your own. This is another example where I think this position on this particular issue is again coming right out of the heart of Inran's philosophy. Here it's coming out of her epistemology. And those of you who are familiar with her epistemology know she has a whole theory of concepts. And if you read introduction to epistemology you'll see she situates her view of concepts as against the two other rival dominant views. One being the intrinsicist view that says that basically concepts are out there already formed for us by God or somehow by nature. The lines are already drawn for us by nature. And it's just up to us to passively let those concepts filter into our mind. There are metaphysical essences. And then there's the subjectivist view that says we can form concepts any old way we like. And notice that those map on to the two dominant views of rights that rights are given to us by God or they're just kind of arbitrary decisions of society. It's the exact same issue. Objectivism rejects those two views of concepts in just the same reasons for just the same reasons in just the same ways as rejects these views of concept. It says, no, the lines aren't already drawn for us in nature. We have to draw them ourselves. But we can draw them on the basis of observable perceptual similarities and differences. So I mentioned the perceptual similarity and difference already. It's pretty obvious when a child is born versus when it's not. And for good reasons, there has to be a cognitive purpose that's served by a given concept. Why do we need to think about rights generally? Well, I've already talked about that. They are concepts that serve the purpose of our understanding about how we need to make decisions with regard to other people in society. And then as a consequence for government, government needs to know how to protect people's lives to protect their interactions in society. So that's why we need the concept of rights. And when it comes to what they call borderline cases, because of the fact that there aren't lines drawn in nature for us by God or by Plato's heaven or what have you. Yes, we are the ones who need to draw these lines. We human beings need to make choices. And there are facts that we can use to help draw those lines. I think the fact of birth is a pretty obvious and crisp difference. But yes, you'll still face choices about where exactly to define the line of birth for legal purposes. And I think that there's a range of options there. And given jurisdictions just going to have to make a decision. And then once it makes that decision, it will be objective for everyone to know that you can't cross this line and they can make their plans on the basis of that. It's just like in talking about the age of majority. You have to have a line somewhere where a child gets treated as an adult. And there it's really a borderline case where it's not anywhere near as crisp of a line. It's not like someone's born into adulthood by some magical process. It's there's a very gradual process of maturity. Some people do it faster than others. But we have to have some line that we draw where you get the full set of rights that adults have and different jurisdictions draw it differently. And as long as everybody knows what the line is they can plan on the basis of that. And I mean, if you don't have a problem with the fact that we need an age of majority which is a much grayer line. You shouldn't have any problem at all with the fact that we need to draw a line somewhere around birth because there it's much more obvious that it's where it's needed. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. 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