Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today, we are continuing our discussion on abortion. In the last episode, we talked about the what is it question. When we when we discuss abortion, it's important to first ask the question, what is it that we're talking about killing? We looked at the sled argument and how people oftentimes try to disqualify fetuses from being human beings because of their size, their level of development, their environment, or their degree of dependency.

We talked about how that's really problematic to do so and causes you to undermine a basis for human rights and is a very slippery slope for issues like infanticide or euthanasia of individuals who we define as not as intelligent or whatnot. So in this episode, we want to dig deeper into that idea of value. So if the undermining of value in the first episode is problematic, we need to kind of assess how how is value conferred and what are the implications of of how you view value conferral. Now some of you might have noticed, but might not have known what exactly to call this, but the the pro abortion advocates, and I'm going to try to use pro abortion less than pro choice because I feel like pro choice is a kind of pointed term as if, know, pro life and pro choice. I know that the pro choicers are very pro life in a lot of ways and of course pro lifers are very pro choice in a lot of things.

So I'm going to say pro abortion and anti abortion as much as I remember to do it, but I'm sure I'll slip up. So anyway, the main problem with pro abortion advocates and their argument is that we run into this issue of degreed properties. And what exactly are degreed properties? Well, they're properties which are held in varying degrees. We see this in words, a lot of words that end in er, e r, are going to to be degree properties, like faster, smarter, etcetera.

Or words can which can be characterized as more or less. So like, he is more intelligent or she is more intelligent. That's going to indicate degree properties many times. And what you'll notice about the the sled argument in the the previous episode is that the SLED argument to disqualify fetuses and embryos from value are going to be, most of them are degreed properties. So a fetus is less developed, or a fetus is smaller.

Those sorts of things are often used to disqualify fetuses from their right to to human dignity and human life, human rights. On the opposite side of degreed properties, you are going to have static properties or essential properties, and these can't be held in greater or lesser degrees. They are all or nothing. So for example, a triangle is a triangle or it's not a triangle. Right?

It it is or it isn't, and that's easy to tell. Likewise, a human is either human or not human. If two humans get together and create child, that child is human. 100% human. Now we can talk about similarities between other animals genetically or physiologically, but humans beget humans.

So when when new life is created from two human beings, we have 100% a human. That is an essential property. That is not a degreed property. You cannot have a child who is more or less human than another child. At at no point in their development are they more or less human, what you have is human.

And when we understand these these two types of properties, it becomes much harder to justify abortion on these degree to on these degree properties, because it's going to really undermine human rights. Because if if rights are gained by degrees, then value is in degrees and can be lost. Think of it like a baseball card. Baseball cards have their value is not intrinsic. You know, if you have the card, it doesn't mean that the card is valuable.

It's dependent on a lot of things. Are there scratches on it? Like, what's its physical appearance like? How old is it? Is it crumpled, is it worn down.

The baseball card's value is not intrinsic to the card. If I had a card that is very valuable, but I crumpled it up into a ball and rolled it around my hand for a bit and then unrolled it, it might become valueless. The value is is tied largely to other characteristics that are not inherent to the card. Even though the inherent aspect of the card like who's pictured on it might give it its initial value, that value is still dependent on extrinsic things. Now, we are not going to want to say this about humanity.

Are we going to want to say that, well, you are born valuable, provided that you don't have some birth defect, provided that you are intelligent enough, provided that, you know, you don't get an arm amputated, provided that you know, all these things. Are we going to say that of these things that life deals you or that happen to you, are we going to say that those things devalue you, make you less valuable? And we can say those, I mean you have the right to say that and to think that human value is extrinsic and not intrinsic, but if you do, then you have a very hard time claiming human rights for a lot of different groups of people. And a lot of the the pro abortion camp is going to be very social social justice minded, and so they're going to want rights for lots of different groups, for the the mentally disabled, for the and I'm sorry if I'm using the wrong terms here, the not politically correct terms, I am not up to date on everything. But if you a lot of the pro abortion camp is very for rights, for the mentally handicapped or for groups that have been oppressed or the physically handicapped.

They're not going to want to say that humans get their value extrinsically. And they don't have to say that humans have intrinsic value, but if they do, then they're going to have to change a lot of social justice issues that they're fighting for because they lose their ground for human rights. Degreed properties are also problematic because who gets to decide which degree properties create value and which ones confer rights and to what degree one has to hold these values in order to have rights and value. You know, what's the difference between stripping human rights from someone because they're more dependent, like stripping rights from a fetus versus stripping rights from them because they're more Jewish or more black? Who says one is inhuman while the other is not?

Or bring in any issue whether it's just some inherent trait, some flaw, or whether even if it is a flaw or not, whether you if the majority of people view it as a flaw, like in Hitler's Germany, being Jewish as a flaw, if that's how culture views it and defines it. Who's to say which attributes provide value and which ones don't. And if this human value is now based on a definable scale rather than on an observable one, why can't I redefine it? And why can't I define the values that make somebody cross the threshold to become valuable or don't cross the threshold and they remain disposable? We see this a lot in some of the ways that people are trying to redefine human rights.

So many in the pro abortion camp are recognizing that they can't argue that a fetus is not human. That just doesn't make any sense. They recognize that they are humans, but now they are trying to say they are not persons. And so they bring in the consciousness or personhood argument and you run into the same problems. First of all, who decided that personhood is what confers value to somebody?

Because you are telling me that this fetus is human, but now you are creating this term of personhood that you say confers value. Well who decided that this term that you came up with and these sets of things that, these sets of qualities that you like and you think should confer value? Who decided that that's what actually confers value to human beings? And if you can decide that today, that this is what confers value, then tomorrow, who's to say that somebody can't redefine that? Because you're not basing this on anything objective, you're creating your own definition of what values you would like to see to make somebody valuable.

Mean, while that's the main problem, with things like consciousness that are being argued today, Okay, sure we can measure brain waves, but again, who determined that consciousness is what confers value? And you run-in again into the problem of people who have better brain waves or more consciousness, should it then have more value? And then this idea, the problem that if if simple of presence of consciousness confers rights, then and what happens the moment that we're unconscious when we when we're asleep? You just can't maintain so many of the things that that people try to base this new value on, you just can't maintain. It causes other people to lose value.

It makes the human value arbitrary and shifting based on whoever decides to define things and has the power at the time. And most of these things can't even be maintained because at different parts of our lives we lose certain aspects that make us valuable. But nobody would say that we lose value. While that's the consciousness problem, people do the same thing with personhood, personhood is even worse because it's even more arbitrary than consciousness since you can't even measure the brain waves like you can for consciousness, with personhood you've got just these more arbitrary ideas that that are always shifting and yeah, aren't just arbitrary. And we see the results of this too, and I'm not just saying I'm not just some apocalyptic prophet saying, well this is terrible and it's going to lead to just the destruction of civilization.

It may or may not, but it certainly, as Greg Cockel says, ideas do have consequences. And we see that in a journal, I believe it was in New Zealand, we've got people starting to advocate infanticide because if you're going to define the human value in personhood, this arbitrary term, then you're going to say, well you know what, what's the difference between a 25 old and a newborn? You can abort the one and not the other. There really isn't that much of a difference in terms of of their personhood and their ability to plan for the future and and all that stuff. So maybe we should be able to kill kids until they can pass some cognitive test or until they're one year old, because that would at least be, they're clearly not a person until, at least after one, but we'll say one to be safe.

So we've got the advocacy of infanticide coming out of these arbitrary definitions of human value. It's always unsettling to me when value and rights are determined and defined not by that which is objective and inalienable, but by that which the ruling class defines. You only need to take a cursory glance at history to see how indigenous peoples, outcasts, heretics, the handicapped, and those who were deemed societal and economic hindrances have been treated in times and places where value and rights have been defined and quantified rather than observed and recognized. And that's a big problem. I will argue that humans have intrinsic value.

Wherever a human is, there that value is. It is not the other way around, it's not that wherever a human is, you then have to figure out if that human has value based on the extrinsic properties like we do with the baseball card. We run into lots of problems when we do it that way, and you lose a lot of ground for social justice. In the minds of pro abortion advocates today, that might help you out a little bit with women's rights and gaining some ground and allowing them to pursue their careers without the the fear of of having a child. But you are you are dehumanizing a whole another group of people and creating your own social injustice, and at the same time undermining your very basis for justice and human rights.

Well, that's all for now. So peace. Because I'm a pacifist. And I say it, I mean it.