I am only doing “debating society philosophy” to the extent that there are philosophical underpinnings to everything. I suppose, for instance, that every time I stop at a stop sign, I am applying the principle that one has a moral obligation to obey laws that reflect social conventions. But I really don’t need to examine philosophical premises with any depth at all to determine whether I should run a stop sign in heavy traffic; the fact that I might harm someone is self-evident.

Similarly, banning abortion causes obvious and self-evident tangible harms to women. (Indeed, we haven’t gotten into this, but many pro-lifers actually FAVOR causing these tangible harms, because they want to return to an earlier standard of gender roles and sexual morality and to create disincentives to women who engage in what they consider to be immoral behavior.) While there is certainly a moral philosophy underlying this point, it need not be consulted, any more than one needs to consult philosophy to determine that one shouldn’t run the stop sign in heavy traffic.

In contrast, to determine fetuses to be organisms with the full rights of persons, one must go through a series of mental gymnastics. And where one ends up is that perhaps, in a state of great theoretical abstraction, these organisms are persons. Then, to preserve the rights of these theoretical persons, we are going to go ahead and knowingly and grievously harm women.

There is a clear distinction here. And to me– and I bet to most pro-choicers– the idea that it’s OK to maim and kill and destroy the lives of women, and to set them back to an age where they couldn’t have a sex life without risking their career and their place in the world, not because of an obvious countervailing interest but because of a THEORY that holds that a non-thinking, non-feeling organism nonetheless has the status of a person, is ridiculous. The pro-life worldview overvalues a philosophical abstraction and undervalues the fundamental interests of living, breathing, women.

Fine; of course, I agree that’s the difference. But you’re already doing “debating society philosophy,” as you dismissively call it, to come to that conclusion. What’s at issue are “the attributes taht could potentially deliniate the difference between persons…and non-persons.” Just like everyone else in the debate, you have a “debating society philosophy” position about what those are. Maybe you think it’s so obvious that it’s a waste of time to devote any thought to the subject. But it’s not any less philosophical or abstract for being obvious to you. Your real beef with the other side isn’t that they’re any more philosophical or abstract–they aren’t; you just don’t think you need to talk about that part of your position much–it’s that they’ve got the wrong view. And they do, so you might as well just attack them for that.

The reason you can’t substitute “Jew” for “fetus” in my argument is precisely because Jews have ALL of the attributes that could potentially deliniate the difference between persons with a right to life and non-persons. Indeed, this was the point of Shylock’s famous lines in “The Merchant of Venice”.

In contrast, fetuses– and especially embryos and zygotes– only count as persons if we adopt a highly abstract, theoretical view of personhood that allows one to have the rights of a person even if one shares few attributes with those that everyone agrees to be persons. At most, a pro-lifer can establish that the unborn has a theoretical claim to personhood, and in contrast, the prohibition of abortion will do grievous tangible harm to those whose claim to personhood requires no theoretical construct. Thus, the pro-life position deliberately and grievously harms living, breathing women to uphold a form of debating society philosophy.

As I said on Ross’s site, suppose a race of intelligent mer-people deposited a bunch of eggs on my tideland, on which I had already received approval to build an oceanfront casino. Even suppose they did so while fully aware of my property rights, and that because of their funky structure, only 1 in 10 of the 1000 eggs on my land will turn out to have the genetic potential to develop “Quality M”, and that they are non-endangered under federal law. Do you seriously think I would get my casino built?

I don’t think many people would question the moral intuition that those eggs had a value from the moment they were laid, and that the value exceeded the value of my property rights. Now, you might say that the right to bodily integrity is more important than the right to use property, but that’s a question about the competing right, not about the moral right of those potentially Quality M eggs and how that right is of a fundamentally different character than the right to exist of a similar, non-quality M, non-endangered species’ eggs.

The problem is, whether “personhood” begins at conception is a question that has no right answer. All you can get is a clash of different philosophies, arguments over the importance of various attributes and concepts, etc. The debate is completely unresolvable.

But meanwhile, banning abortions has huge societal consequences that affect those whom everyone agrees to be persons, who have wills to live, life plans, interests in liberty and equal treatment, etc.

I would add one other thing, and I realize I am begging the question here. Even if the philosphical debate is resolved in the pro-lifers’ favor, at most they have established that the fetus, embryo, blastocyst, or zygote is a THEORETICAL person. And then so much concern is shown for theoretical people that the lives of actual people are grievously harmed. (I would suggest, by the way, that this is something that Ramesh actually has in COMMON with the hated Peter Singer– both of them are so attached to pursuing their theoretical constructs to their logical conclusions that they have lost their capacity to empathize with the actual situations that humans find themselves in.)

The fact is, the WORST thing to do is to conduct a debate about a policy with so many real-world impacts as the right to an abortion by kicking around epistomological and existential arguments about what the essence of one’s self is. There’s too much at stake– too great a chance that the progress of the last 50 years might be reversed– to treat this like a debating-society issue.

But the real problem is that Ramesh is more concerned with coming up with a purportedly LOGICAL theory of personhood that draws the appropriate bright lines than he is with the actual impacts of banning abortion. (Or to put it another way, he ignores all slippery slopes / reductios ad adbsurdae that lead in the opposite direction from the ones he mentions, such as the fact that his argument would justify all sorts of other regulations of female sexuality.)

I don’t think most pro-choicers think that the ACTUAL lives of so many women should be destroyed based on the result of a “how many angels dance on the head of a pin” debate. While philosphical worldviews get hashed out in wood-paneled salons filled with cigar smoke, in the real world, banning abortion will force women into celibacy, into back alley abortions that may maim or kill them, into staying with abusive husbands, into leaving their careers, or into committing suicide.

I don’t usually have a lot of patience for the hippie “drugs will save the world” line, but I sort of think that those who have used certain recreational drugs have cause to question this “either-or” nature of consciousness. To take one example (which I do not hereby recommend): “consciousness” after a heavy dose of DXM seems to me qualitatively different (not quantitatively, as if it could be placed somewhere on the scale from fishes to humans) from regular old Saturday afternoon consciousness. I think the implications for a consciousness-based theory of moral personhood are trickier than they first appear.