Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today, we are continuing our discussion on consequentialism by beginning to look at purported moral conundrums. I'm I'm really excited to get into this discussion because, I have always loved conundrums and always trying to, you know, ask people, about what would you do in this situation and and seeing, how they thought through these things. And I love to do it in in lots of things, not just theology, but, you know, sports. I like to ask, well, what would happen if this?

Well, what about how these two rules seem to conflict? And, I just love these what if scenarios. And but, definitely, in morality and theology, conundrums have been something that that has always excited me. And now, unfortunately, some people think that it's it's just because I like to be they think I like conundrums because I like to be, combative, I guess. They think that I just want to kind of be annoying.

And I do like being annoying and and kind of poking and playing devil's advocate. I I do like that. But the reason that I I like it isn't just because of the responses that it it gets from people and and, you know, making them think. But it's because I I genuinely want to know, like, how do you resolve these things? And I I do want to acknowledge, first of all, that I do know that not everything can be resolved.

I recognize that in this life, there are going to be great issues, and, we need to be okay with that. There is mystery. Nevertheless, I think a lot of times we we stop at mystery when it's convenient and easy. And oftentimes, we we leave conundrums conundrums which shouldn't be such. They they should be resolvable.

And that's what I think I'm going to look at today. I'm I'm going to look at conundrums which I think can be resolvable, but I didn't used to think that. I I thought that most or all of these conundrums were just going going to remain conundrums. And it was only when I when I understood what a consequentialist ethic was and when I identified identified that in my own life. It's only at that point that I was like, okay.

This is the key to resolving these issues. And it shouldn't be surprising that that there's one key to resolve a lot of these issues, because you'd expect that where there are issues, there'd likely be a common blind spot, and that could be, the result of a couple things. It could be that, humanity just has the same blind spot. I mean, we are we all have this tendency towards the same overarching sin, and that's consequentialism. This, this idea that I have to have control and immediacy and, make make things work out now.

I I think we see that in in the bible, and that was Christ's overarching, temptation that we see over and over again. And it makes sense that that would be common to humanity, a common blind spot. But also, it could be cultural too. In the United States and and I guess probably in the west in general, this idea of efficiency probably, undergirds a lot of a lot of our ethics, and so that's that's a big component of consequentialism. And but it makes sense that a lot of of the conundrums would have the same overarching or undergirding, blind spot.

The issues that we are going to get into, many Christians will view most or perhaps even all of these issues that I present as conundrums. But it is important to know that there might be an episode where we talk about something and you say, no. That's not a conundrum. I I recognize that, what the moral answer is is there. And that's fine.

You can skip those episodes if you want. But I I will say it might be worthwhile to listen to each one even if you think you're going to agree, both to see kind of how how it unravels, how we discuss it, as well as to see, how I identify that I think there's a common thread in all of these. And if you can agree with me on one and you can see how I unravel it, then you might be able to apply that to some of these other conundrums and see where I'm coming from. Let's jump right in then to our first moral conundrum. And, I've chosen to start with ectopic pregnancies.

And I I do that not because I think it's the easiest one to talk about in terms of, people agreeing with me, but I think it's probably the easiest one to talk about in terms of holding, especially conservative Christians, those at least who who would think that abortion's wrong. I think this one's the easiest to hold, Christian's feet to the fire in terms of asking them to be consistent. Essentially, if you are a pro life Christian, then I think you're going to have a very, very difficult time holding to that rash, holding to that position while trying to excuse away, and justify abortion in ectopic pregnancies. Before we get into the discussion proper, I do want to, make something very clear. I do not at all intend for this to be a judgmental condemnation.

We know people who have had ectopic pregnancies and and chosen to, to abort the child. We have been put into a position where we thought that we actually had an ectopic pregnancy. And from personal experience and from knowing other people and just from being able to empathize as a human, I I understand that this is a a very difficult decision. So my goal here isn't to to point fingers and say, look, if you've done this, you're evil. We are we are all sinners.

We all have pitfalls. We've we've all made mistakes, whether ignorant mistakes or willful mistakes. And so the you know, we serve a god of grace, and this is not about condemnation. This is about saying, hey. Let's evaluate this.

And whatever your past is, god can handle that. But let's let's figure out how we move forward consistently as Christians who are to set a an example for the world around us so that, we make Christ a sweet smelling aroma to them and so that they want to become a follower as well. So please know that. If if you or anybody you know has faced the issue of ectopic pregnancy, regardless of your decision, please know that this is this is helped to meant, this is meant to help us move forward. This is not meant to, reflect backwards and and condemn.

So here's the conundrum. The narrative is that if an individual, a a woman, of course, guys can't have this, but if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy and that pregnancy is allowed to continue, then the mother will almost certainly die. And if the mother dies, the child will die too. And, an ectopic pregnancy, for those of you who don't know, is, generally when an egg is fertilized and becomes an embryo, usually in the mother's fallopian tube, but it can be at other places. I believe it can also happen in the ovary, but not where it's supposed to be.

And, of course, if an embryo grows in a place like the fallopian tube or ovary, as it grows, that's gonna be hugely problematic. It can be problematic for the embryo who will not likely get enough sustenance, but it can also be problematic or definitely also problematic for the mother if that continues to grow. The mother will, experience rupturing of the fallopian tube hemorrhaging, and a good chance that she could die. And we're just gonna assume for the the sake of this conundrum that this narrative is true, that, the mother has essentially no chance of survival, and the embryo definitely doesn't have a chance of survival. We'll assume that that's true, though, when we get into the abortion season, abortion series, we'll we'll talk about that and try to assess whether that is true or not.

But for the sake of the conundrum and the argument, let's assume that it's true. The general Christian approach is is espoused, I think, very well by Greg Cocal, and he's one of my favorite apologists. I think he he thinks very clearly. He's he's awesome. This just happens to be one area where I think he's he's wrong.

And here's what Kockel would argue. He invokes the, the principle of double effect. And double effect is is the way that it's put forward is it's this idea that, it's okay to do something that would otherwise be bad as long as your intention is a good thing. So in this case, for instance, there are 2 lives at stake, the mother's life and the child's life. Now if you do nothing, both will die.

Right? You lose 2 lives. If you abort, yes, you kill the child, but the mother lives. So when you abort, you actually save one life. You do it by killing one life, but you you save one life.

And, of course, it is important if if you know anything about this topic right now, you're probably mad at me for using the word abort because, I feel like pro life individuals kind of have a double standard here and they redefine the word. A lot of pro life people won't use the word abort in an ectopic pregnancy, but for the sake of consistency, and intellectual honesty, I'm gonna use use the word abort. So the mother aborts, the mother lives, the child dies. And it it seems like the equation should show us that to save one life produces a better result than to allow 2 people to die. To do nothing causes 2 deaths.

To do something will, yes, will cause a death, but will also save a life. I I really respect Kockel, Greg Kockel, and I I but I believe that he misuses the double effect here. And maybe one day we'll have an episode that that really talks explicitly about what the double effect is because it's it's a lot more complex than, we're discussing here. But I'll just give you a few examples to illustrate, good examples of the double effect and bad examples of a double effect. So, here's a here's a good example.

A pregnant woman has cancer, and she has to decide whether she takes chemotherapy or not. If she takes chemotherapy, her her child has a high chance of dying. If she doesn't take chemotherapy, the child could live, you know, if she lives long enough with the cancer, but the mother will almost certainly die because the cancer will have progressed too far by the time the end of her pregnancy comes. Now I think it's a double effect. If the mother decides to take chemotherapy, she's taking chemotherapy to kill the cancer, and as a side effect, the child may or may not die, even if you say there's a 99% chance of dying.

The mother is hoping and praying that that that child doesn't die and that the the chemotherapy, doesn't take its life, because the chemotherapy isn't meant to take the child's life. Another example would be the famous, maybe not so famous, I don't know, bridge film, where there's a bridge operator and he brings his son to work, and, he raises the bridge, but then there's a train coming, but unfortunately, he realizes that his son is stuck under the the machinery of the bridge. And if the father closes the bridge, his son dies. If he doesn't close the bridge, the trolley full of people will go across, this open space and fall to their deaths, and a trolley full of people will die. So the father lowers the bridge to save the trolley, and of course I'm sure he's hoping and praying that whole time that his son is able to free himself and and get out before, before the the bridge closes and crushes him.

But, of course, the father knows that there's almost no chance that that will happen. But the bridge lowering is its function is to carry the trolley across. It is not, in functioning or intended to kill the the child. So those would be double effects. A pregnant woman is not wrong for taking chemotherapy, even if it it ends up killing her child, and the father in the bridge film is not wrong for pulling the lever to save the trolley even though he knows it's probably gonna kill his son.

Those are double effects. There's an, unintended consequence of an action that you you take, in order to do a good. Let let me give you some similar examples that I don't think are legitimate double effects, and I I think you wouldn't think that they're good either. But it's really the same sort of idea at play. You are, kind of trading lives, with the the woman who has cancer.

Right? She kinda trades lives. She says, well, I'm going to put my life, I'm going to try to save my life, and I'm willing that a potential consequence might be that my child dies. And same thing with the bridge film. Right?

There's this this willingness, this understanding that in an action, some individuals might die. So here's some negative examples that I don't think are good that would not be moral. So let's say your friend needs a heart transplant, and he's but he's, like, second to last on the list. He he needs a heart and or he's last on the list. Let's say he's last on the list.

There's no way he's gonna get a heart and time to save him because his problems are too big. Well, you're at the hospital. You somehow bypass the HIPAA laws and such, and you you see this list for liver donors. And you see the name of this this person who is, at the very bottom of of the list in need of a liver. But their heart's great.

In fact, they've got, like, all that they need, like, the they're healthy. They've got the same blood type. Whatever needs to to happen for a transplant. And so you sit you get the name of this guy, and you go and you kill this guy so that, you can harvest his heart to save your friend. I know it's not a great analogy because you'd have to be, like, a heart surgeon able to do the surgery.

You couldn't get it by illegally. Whatever. Point is, for you to go out and kill somebody in order for your friend to have a heart is wrong. And that's true even though this other guy who needed the liver was at the bottom of the list. He was dead anyway.

He wasn't gonna get his liver. So instead of letting the guy at the bottom of the heart transplant list and the guy at the bottom of the liver list, instead of letting them both die, you kill one to save the other. Right? What's what's wrong with that? A lot.

You murdered somebody. That's a problem. Another example. I remember watching, Ray Comfort's film 180 about abortion with our apologetics group a while back. And it was there was this part where he's going around asking people, so if the Nazis had a gun to your head and told you to start executing Jews, to start shooting them in the back of the head, would you do that?

And people think about it, and they say, well, I know it sounds bad, but, yeah, I guess I I would kill them because if I don't, they're gonna kill me. Right? What what's the point of all of us dying? If they're gonna die anyway, somebody's gonna kill them. I might as well kill them and save my life.

The equation the equation works out better. More lives are saved if I just do what the Nazis tell me to do. And we were just appalled. We recognized that's that's horrendous. You like, that is evil, because that's not integrity.

You do the right thing. You are not willing to sacrifice to murder other lives in order to save yours or in order to save other people's. And we see an example that kind of, extends that with, in 2nd Kings 6 29. You have Jerusalem or some city being being sieged, and these 2 ladies go up to or this one lady goes up to the king and says, look. We've been besieged for so long.

Our families have been starving, and I've got this problem. I need you to judge this case. So the king cares out hears out this case, and what the mother says is, look. Yesterday, my neighbor and I agreed that we would kill my son and eat him, share him between us all, so that we didn't starve to death. Well, today, it's time to eat her son that she agreed to, but she's hiding her son and she won't bring him out for us to kill and eat.

And the king is just absolutely grieved that, the situation has come to this. But we can ask ourselves, was that moral for 2 neighbors to get together and for a mother to kill her son to feed to people, and then the next day ask her neighbor to kill her son and feed to them so that they could survive? And I think just about every Christian who would listen to this would say, no. That is not right. You starve to death before you murder somebody to eat them.

So those are our three negative examples that I think are are very clearly wrong. They are not good examples of a double effect. And what what similarities do we have in in all of these situations? Well, in both the positive and the negative examples, we see that, the action which leads towards the taking of life, which leads towards the loss of some life, it it exists in every scenario. Right?

The mother takes chemo, her child can die. If, you cannibalize or kill and cannibalize your neighbor's kid or your kid, right, somebody dies. And in each of these situations, more people, more lives are saved by, when somebody's life is put on the line. So the mother taking chemotherapy, well, instead of potentially both people dying, her and her child, right, she at least will have a chance to live. And the cannibalization of of the kids, Right?

2 families can survive by cannibalizing 2 kids. So 2 whole families versus taking the lives of 2 kids. The equation works out better, even though we put people's lives on the line. So where's the distinction then between why, pushing the lever for the bridge or taking chemotherapy while pregnant, why are those intuitively okay, or moral? And good examples of a double effect, while the other examples, killing Jews for Nazis, at gunpoint, cannibalizing kids to save families, and killing somebody at the bottom of a heart transplant list or a liver transplant list.

Where's the distinction? And the distinction's actually pretty clear. The pregnant mother who takes chemotherapy, she can hope and pray that her child survives the chemotherapy. The chemotherapy she is taking is not intended is is not, put into her body to kill the child. In fact, they they do everything that they can not to kill the child.

I don't know exactly how how chemotherapy works, but I would imagine that, you know, if you have a variety of different places, injection sites, you You know, if changing up the injection site to move it further from the womb would help the child to live, which I'm sure isn't isn't something that exists, but whatever they could do to try to keep the child from dying, they would do while taking the chemotherapy. Whereas, when you look at these other examples, killing a person for their heart transplant, killing the Jews, or killing a kid to cannibalize them, in all of those, the means for survival essentially requires the death of somebody. It requires that you take somebody's life. In the other examples, it might be inevitable that your action will lead or almost inevitable, that your action will lead to the death of somebody, But the death of somebody is not the means that brings about, salvation for anybody. It's a byproduct.

The death of somebody is not a byproduct when you kill somebody to take their heart. It's not a byproduct when you kill Jews so you don't get killed, and it's not a byproduct when you kill somebody to eat them, so that your your families can live. It is not a byproduct, it's directly the means. Now let's let's begin to apply this to ectopic pregnancies. How is it moral for us to allow 2 deaths when one could be saved?

If we can save the mother, how could it be moral to allow both the mother and the child to die? Well, that's, first of all, because morality lies in the means and not the ends. And we just recognize that with 3 very clear examples of where the numbers game turns out better, where you can save more lives by killing people. We looked at at the numbers game being better, but yet being horribly wrong in in three very intuitive situations. We can't cannibalize children to save families.

We can't kill someone on the donor list who who's just gonna die anyway. And we can't execute an innocent just so that we and our families aren't executed, for refusal to obey. We just we can't do that. The morality does not, lie in the outcome. It lies in the means.

And in an ectopic pregnancy, we have to ask ourselves, what is it more like? When you take a pill that is designed to kill an embryo, are are you are you viewing the death of of the child as the means to your salvation, or is it a byproduct of something? It's not the byproduct. You might say, well, my intention isn't to kill the child. But do you think the mother's intention in 2nd Kings was to that her child would die?

I'm sure while she was murdering her child, she was thinking, I don't wanna do this. This is not my intention. It's not what I want. I'm sure, you or or there were many people who in Nazi Germany who didn't wanna kill Jews, and that wasn't their heart's intent. But to save their lives, they did it.

So it it really was their intent to save their lives. And then, I mean, you can you can just look at at ectopic pregnancy and see that the abortion of the embryo is the means to provide the mother with life. To kill the child is to, is the way that somebody's life is saved. And I I fail to see how it's different than the three negative examples of double effect that I've given when when the means is to kill the child. For whatever reason, with with ectopic pregnancies, people are are so much more, sympathetic to this situation because it's so sad to think of a mother and child dying, and it it is very sad to think of that.

But for whatever reason, in this case, we think that that justifies seeking out the embryo's life to kill it. And pro choicers see that inconsistency, and they they exploit it and call us out on it and say, you're you don't really, believe that all life is sacred because you're inconsistent about it. And they recognize something important, and this is what consequentialism gives us, and and something I highlighted in episode 1, which is that we are we are happy to have integrity and to be moral in situations that that are easy for us to avoid, whereas in situations that we can empathize with, we're we're more willing to compromise. So we would say if we were if most pro choice or pro life Christians were asked, so what would you say to a mother in a poor country who can barely feed the kids that she has now, but she's pregnant? And she knows that if another kid is brought into the world, somebody's gonna starve or her whole family might starve just because she'll be down for a while.

She won't be able to work the fields, bring in money, bring in food, and then not not to mention she has another mouth to feed. What would a pro life Christian say? Most conservative pro life Christians would say that is a terrible, terrible tragedy. But we but a mother in that situation cannot abort. That is not the moral thing to do.

And we can say that because we know that we will never be put into a situation where we don't know where our next meal is coming from, where we'll have to face starvation. We've got family and we've got safety nets, government safety nets, and all sorts of things that protect us from ever having to face that hard, hardship. We would never be put in a position. So we can condemn, or maybe not condemn. That that's harsh.

We could say sorrowfully, I'm sorry, but that's just not the right decision. It's it's morally wrong. I can understand it, but it's morally wrong for a mother to abort because she can't feed her family. That's wrong. But when it comes to an ectopic pregnancy, where we could see by no fault of our own, you know, we live in a good country.

We've we've got stable jobs, good health insurance. We've got everything to be able to protect us from from disaster and from natural evil. But we could see something like an ectopic pregnancy come our way through no fault of our own, nothing that we can avoid, and we could see that happening to us. And so we need to be okay with with justifying that because we can put ourself in in those shoes. We can't put ourselves in the shoes of, a mother who who can't provide for her kids.

And certainly, we have a tendency to justify things that that we can't empathize with, but we do have integrity sometimes too. And we do recognize the morality of resigning ourselves to death in in other situations and and doing the moral thing and having integrity. At least 2 ways that I could think of that a lot of pro life Christians would probably situations in which they'd resign themselves to death would be, when you are at the bottom of a donor list, rather than go to the black market or or go kill somebody else or go to another country and have a harvested organ for you, you would resign yourself to death. You would say, look. I'm at the bottom of the the donor list, and I'm probably gonna die, and that's just, you know, a bullet I'm gonna have to bite.

Hopefully, something happens, but if it doesn't, that's okay. I can trust God. The, another way that we resign ourselves to death and, is in a a refusal, if we are pro life, a refusal to support stem embryonic stem cell research, the harvesting of embryos to, to do research on in order to to solve a lot of diseases that could could extend our lives and and, make our lives better, cure things like, cerebral palsy or, Parkinson's disease or whatever. We we do have integrity there in refusing to support the harvesting of the unborn to treat those sorts of things. So we're inconsistent.

We we do recognize sometimes that making the equation work out better, like having less people die or having more people live, we we sometimes recognize that, that it is more moral to resign ourselves to death and suffering than it is to to do evil. But we're really inconsistent in that, and I think ectopic pregnancies is one situation where that's the case. You know, unless somebody can show me how aborting in an ectopic pregnancy is, is more like taking chemotherapy and not like seeking out the the life as the means of, of saving the mother, you're not gonna be able to convince me that ectopic pregnancies are are good to abort. The good news is, from just a basic amount of research I've done, there are ways around this. I think that the the outcome for mothers who refuse to abort in ectopic pregnancies, I think there are a number of things that you can do that actually make the outcome look very positive for mothers.

And even sometimes, I won't say a lot, but, you know, sometimes even for the embryos. But that'll have to wait until we start our abortion series. I don't wanna steal my thunder already since we're just talking about the moral aspect of of abortion in in ectopic pregnancies. When we accept the consequentialist approach to ectopic pregnancies, it's very problematic for us. The pro choice side sees it.

They call out our hypocrisy, but then we we take to using their strategies and and we change the names of our procedures from abortion to, something else, and we kinda keep our head down and just push through it. But for our consistency and our witness, we'd really do well to reevaluate. And that's not easy, but I think that's a good thing. I think it's good that it's hard. I think it's good that it's hard for for an, for one major reason, and that's because in the United States at least, abortion is a is a hot topic for conservative Christians.

And very infrequently do I see empathy from Christians. A lot of times, I see hostility, anger, calling people baby killers, just just this terrible, terrible judgmentalism by Christians towards people who are growing up in in houses and cultures where, they can't understand why abortion would be wrong. And rather than, educating and living out a lifestyle that would, embrace the unborn and and taking on adoption and fostering, which the Christian community could easily do with the great numbers. Instead of doing those things, we end up being judgmental and harsh. And I think if if you look at ectopic pregnancies and you say, wow.

You know what? I can understand how people abort in an ectopic pregnancy. Yeah. People can be in situations that are really hard. If we could just recognize the morality of aborting in an ectopic pregnancy here, and that could give the Christian community a little bit of empathy for seeing how easy it is to use abortion as an escape hatch to hardship, that would do us really well, because there are a lot of people out there who need love and empathy rather than harsh condemnation, and we're a part of that group.

So that's all for now. So peace because I'm a pacifist. When I say it, I mean it.