Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today, we are going to continue our discussion on abortion by taking a look at a rebuttal that is thrown out by a fiction writer. I think he's got some other profession too, but he's a fiction writer who came up with this example of how he shows the pro life or the anti abortion side is hypocritical. So I want to take a look at that today. I'll put a link down to this guy's, original post or argument and you can take a look at it.

Essentially the argument goes like this, imagine that you are at an IVF clinic, an in vitro fertilization clinic, there are lots of embryos there And you're inside and there's a fire and there are two rooms, but you realize that the way the fire is going, you can only get, you only have time to get to one of these rooms. And in the one you see that there's a toddler who's trapped and in the other you see that there's a case with a thousand fertilized eggs, a thousand embryos. Which one would you choose to save? Now this guy has asked a lot of people and he realized that the intuition of just about everybody, including Christians, pro lifers, is that they would save the toddler. And he has had a few people who say, No, they'd save the embryos.

But, you you can tell when people respond that way that they're saying it because they know they have to. Like, the few people who think through it recognize the problem here. And they they know that they have to when this atheist guy is asking them or else they're they're gonna lose. And the reason they they have to say that is because, as this guy argues, that embryos, if every human is just as valuable as every other human and you have a room with one human or a room with a thousand humans, then the room with a thousand humans is more valuable, infinitely more valuable because or nine ninety nine times more valuable than the one with the one human in it. So the fact that most pro lifers, all honest pro lifers say they would save the one human over the thousand shows that pro lifers really don't think embryos are human beings.

That's a pretty good argument, I think, where or I had to think about it for a while at least, like how would I how would I defend that? And God graciously sent me this argument from this guy at a time when I was also working through consequentialism and these two just go together so so well. So if you want to take a listen back to season two on consequentialism, that discussion is going to be extremely helpful in uncovering the problem or one of the problems of this argument here. And I'll try to reference that in a little bit. So let's uncover some of the problems in this guy's scenario.

First of all, I think we need to all recognize that intuitions can be flawed. So he's saying, look, everybody's intuition is that they'd save the one kid and not the thousand. Great. Okay. Maybe that's the wrong decision.

Maybe it is. Just because my intuition tells me to save toddler and everybody's intuition tells me to save the toddler, doesn't mean that saving the toddler is the right thing to do. So he may have recognized this differentiation, this difference between the logic and the intuition of a pro lifer, but that doesn't prove the position wrong. You know, if I if I left if I left what we should do up to my kids in terms of shots, their intuition that a shot is good for them is is very wrong but understandably so. We know that the shots are good for them and they it needs to be done.

So intuition here doesn't prove anything other than there's discrepancy between potentially a discrepancy between the logic and the action which is a problem and we do need to address it and try to be consistent if that's the case. The second problem is that the only thing that would not the only thing that would be proved here but something that we need to understand is that there is a possibility that we're differentiating between extrinsic and intrinsic value. So for example, if you are in the secret service and there is an active shooter and you have to jump in front of the president or a random citizen in the crowd to save them from from gunfire? Who do you jump in front of? Now assuming you like the president at the time and or assume that you, regardless of of who the president was, you would risk your life for them.

What's the right choice? You know, do you jump in front of the president or another person? Or do you if you have to choose between the there's a bomb near the president or a bomb near a crowd of people, who do you save? Well, the Secret Service would probably save the president over a crowd of people. Is that wrong that they're doing that?

Is the president more valuable as a human being than a crowd of people? No. Of course not. The president has the same intrinsic value as any other human being, but there is extrinsic value in the situation. The loss of a president could have larger ramifications on things and so you might protect the president instead of a crowd of people.

And I don't think that's the wrong thing to do. So we are not saying that a leader's life has more intrinsic value. We're choosing to save on some other grounds even though we wish we could save everyone. I think my wife came up with a really good analogy for this that I was like, this is a bank. She said, she basically talked about, imagine that you are a curator at the National Museum and you or or imagine you talking to a curator at a museum like, like the Smithsonian and you ask her the value of most items there, she'll declare that most of the items on display are priceless.

They're absolutely irreplaceable. But if you give her a scenario in which there's a fire and only one item can be saved, she'll likely have an answer as to which piece she'd save first. It might not be the largest item, it might not be the oldest or the most numerous or the least numerous, but she'll probably be able to choose some item that she would save. Does her choosing of one particular item negate the pricelessness of all other items in the museum? No.

She would not want to lose any single piece in that museum, but based on certain characteristics like maybe the rarity or whatever, she would choose to save one piece. It'd be ridiculous to criticize her when she came out with that one piece from the fire to say, Well, you should have saved this other piece or that other piece. Well, no, she chose to save and that's what is good. And that's a big, big distinction in the valuation system of the pro life and the pro choice position. The pro life advocate says that all are priceless, refuses to actively destroy any, yet chooses to save in a particular fashion when forced, right, when you have to choose one to save.

Whether one chooses to save the toddler or the embryos, he chooses to save those worth equal intrinsic value. All are worth saving. The pro choice advocate, however, says that not all are priceless, we can destroy some and it is clear who should be saved and who should be left to the fire. And this is something that the museum curator would never say, that we could actively destroy some works, right? Because if they could choose to save every piece, they would because they recognize the pricelessness of every piece.

Nevertheless, choosing on some grounds, they would save one piece. So, this is a striking difference. Now, how can Tom Linson, the author of this argument here, how can Tom Linson condemn those who are pro life for choosing to save that which is priceless, yet wishing they could save all. Like, how do you condemn somebody for that? And I'll tell you how you condemn somebody for that and it's Christian's fault that he has an in with this argument.

It's because of consequentialism, right? When we're consequentialists, you know, you think back to the MASH example from season two, talking about consequentialism and when we bring in numbers to the equation, we think that right actions are based on the greatest good or the least evil. And so we can justify certain actions based on that. And one of the implications when we talked about consequentialism is in one of our later episodes, talked about how it undermines the possibility of altruism because what Tom Linson is saying here is that if you don't choose to act altruistically based on what produces the greatest good or the greatest number of lives saved, then you're not really doing altruism, you're doing something bad or you're not doing something good enough. And that comes as a result of Christian's embrace of consequentialism.

You can critique us that way because we're consequentialists and it just undermines the possibility of altruism. Refer back to that previous episode to hear more about that. But let's look at how Tomlinson's logic here condemns himself and everybody else who tries to be altruistic. Alright, so Tomlinson is saying that pro life people are wrong for choosing to save the toddler because the greatest good would be to save the thousand embryos. Yet Tomlinson is an author, he's not a doctor.

How many lives does Tomlinson save as a fiction author? He's not even non fiction, help us to learn from history and try to prevent a new Hitler, whatever. He's an author and his profession is not doing the greatest good, right, in terms of saving the most people's lives. He says he values women and life, but he writes fiction books and fights on Twitter instead of helping people. And that's his words, not mine.

He says that he fights he likes to fight on Twitter. So that's a guy who's trying to tell us how it's not altruistic or good to save the toddler over a thousand embryos on our if we think a thousand embryos are humans, because we are not doing the greatest good. You know, if you are not a consequentialist, then you can recognize that in a situation where there is a toddler and a thousand embryos, you'd love to save everyone. If you saved a thousand embryos, you'd be doing a good thing. If you saved a toddler, you're doing a good thing.

While we might have different reasons for saving one or the other, it's it's not a numbers game here. It's a value game. It's a and all are intrinsically valuable. So hopefully that helps to break down Tomlinson's argument a little bit. Definitely go back and check out the the season on consequentialism and how pervasive that is and how a lot of these types of discussions end up coming back to consequentialism in in some way or another at some point in time.

That's all for now. So peace, and since I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.