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Why should you first put on your own oxygen mask on a plane in the event of decompressing, before helping others?

Because the damage is much greater otherwise. A child brought into this world under duress, to an unprepared mother and/or unprepared parents will have all the odds against him/her. There's a greater risk of dying. Of poverty. Of sickness. Of crime.

It's not that the unborn has no rights. It's rather that these rights cannot be realized partially. It's either the full package or none.

So just like the US electoral system, some people are in favor of abortion even if they are 49% in favor of the embryo.

Right, but in living/walking humans, we tend to prioritise right to live over many other rights. We don't euthanise children in adverse material conditions, for example. These get, or most people agree should get, state help, foster parenting and so on. "Let's euthanise the child" is not on any menu of interventions.

That's true, there are sudden changes in our collective evaluation of what rights a human has.

There are some really plausible reasons for birth, for example, as an important turning point:

- Before (and in particular during) birth, a child's life and physical well-being is immediately tied to the mother's. There is a real risk of one's sickness killing the other.

- Before birth, there is no mandatory, conscious care-taking. The embryo is automatically taken care for. Afterwards, it requires a (excuse my wording as a parent) shit-ton of work to keep a kid alive, happy and successful (however you define that)

- The risk of death is vastly higher for an embryo than for a child (with about 1/3 of pregnancies being unsuccessful) and decreases strongly after birth. I suspect this is one of the reasons why abortion is often intuitively seen as different from euthanasia.

That said, I completely agree with your argument that it's wrong to argue as if there was a sudden point at which humans are suddenly and naturally protected but aren't before. But I think that not many advocates would argue for such a radical position.

> I'd argue that where welfare of two beings is affected, you need to consider the rights of both.

About 5,000 people die in the US annually while waitlisted for a kidney transplant; they are deemed medically eligible and a donation would give them more quality adjusted life years, but there is not a willing donor available.

Consider, pairwise, the rights of two particular people: a person on the waitlist who will die unless they receive a kidney but who is below the cutoff line; and a healthy adult who lives next door to the sick person, who has two kidneys, and who could relatively safely donate one of them.

The law currently forbids the sick person from paying the healthy person money in exchange for their kidney. This prevents coercion[1] which could endanger the health of the healthy person.

In other words, the law prioritizes the healthy person infinitely and does not prioritize the welfare of the sick person.

Do you think this setup is correct? Or should we make legal changes that would balance the rights of sick people against those of healthy people? Under your proposed framework, should we sometimes allow sick people who have money to pay healthy people for their organs, buying a chance to live?

[1] Some discussion here: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/698563807

I heard this argument a couple of years ago via Youtube video and I liked its novelty (instead of having sides talk past each other it's gladdening to see some thought put into things).

That being said, for me, it fails on the responsibility front. The healthy person did not cause the sickness, is not the sick one's parent and did not in any way "give" life, so to speak. If we reimagine the sick neighbour's predicament so that her husband and child both need a new kidney and the healthy neighbour convinces her to give them up because the he has a special room in his house where she can convalesce and regrow her kidneys. Should the healthy neighbour now be allowed to withdraw the offer after the sick neighbour had donated both kidneys?

That kind of situation seems to align with some of the factors at play a bit better.

Yeah ... I'm fortunate that neither I nor my immediate family are immediately affected by this decision, which affords me the luxury of thinking about the ethics in the abstract.

> If we reimagine the sick neighbour's predicament so that her husband and child both need a new kidney and the healthy neighbour convinces her to give them up because the he has a special room in his house where she can convalesce and regrow her kidneys. Should the healthy neighbour now be allowed to withdraw the offer after the sick neighbour had donated both kidneys?

While I'm totally willing to engage in this kind of Talmudic thought experiment, is there a way you could recast your question to be more biologically plausible?

For example, suppose you offer to donate a kidney to your child, who is suffering from a fatal, heritable condition for which you carry a recessive gene. You thought that you were incurring a 0.007% risk of mortality (the average). During the surgery, the surgeon performing the extraction discovers that you have unexpected extra risk factors and their process will not work; they stop. They tell you that they can try again, but the new procedure they need to use will incur a 10% chance of your death. There is no other donor, and your child will die.

1 - Should you be allowed to withdraw your consent for the surgery?

2 - Should your child's wealthy spouse be allowed to pay you money to continue with the surgery?

> is there a way you could recast your question to be more biologically plausible?

It's a thought experiment, isn't the point that it is unencumbered by what is plausible? The reason for setting it up that way is to put responsibility for the sick person's life onto the healthy person through an action they took. I have no current alternative.

> 1 - Should you be allowed to withdraw your consent for the surgery?

Yes, the circumstances have changed.

> 2 - Should your child's wealthy spouse be allowed to pay you money to continue with the surgery?

I'm not against it but I can see why there could be rules against it.

> It's a thought experiment, isn't the point that it is unencumbered by what is plausible? The reason for setting it up that way is to put responsibility for the sick person's life onto the healthy person through an action they took. I have no current alternative.

> … > If we reimagine the sick neighbour's predicament so that her husband and child both need a new kidney and the healthy neighbour convinces her to give them up because the he has a special room in his house where she can convalesce and regrow her kidneys. Should the healthy neighbour now be allowed to withdraw the offer after the sick neighbour had donated both kidneys?

> That kind of situation seems to align with some of the factors at play a bit better.

I'll admit that my preference for ethical questions to be realistic is an irrational preference. I don't know why I feel this way but I think we get answers which are more likely to be meaningful if we start with scenarios that could plausibly happen.

Let me try revisiting the one you propose:

Suppose there is a healthy person whose husband and child both need kidneys. Donating her kidneys to them both would ordinarily kill her -- people need at least one kidney to live, and she only has two. But her neighbor says "if you donate your kidneys to your family, I'll let you live in a special room in my house where you can regrow your kidneys".

Let's say this process takes 40 weeks, and at about week 10 the neighbor says "I don't want you in my house any more -- please leave". Should the neighbor be allowed to say this, even if this means the formerly healthy person will require daily dialysis, and may indeed die?

I wonder whether the answer changes on why the neighbor is saying "get out":

* What if the neighbor themself has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room?

* Does the answer to the above change if the room's special-ness is tied to the neighbor being alive (if they die, no one else can ever use it to regrow organs)?

* What if the neighbor's own infant child has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room; should they be allowed to evict the recovering kidney donor? Does the answer change if the kidney donor has a 1% chance of surviving on dialysis until the room is available again? 10%? 99%?

* If the neighbor is just being selfish and wants their room to be empty because they've decided think it looks better when it's tidy, should that be forbidden?

* One way or another, if the room is empty at the end of the 40 weeks, should the state use eminent domain to seize the room and force the neighbor to take in gravely ill people from local hospitals, housing them until they are well, for as long as the room is working?

When I have interrogated these views personally I have found that some things may be wrong to do, but society should still be structured in such a way that people may sometimes do wrong things.

And, btw, in this thought experiment my gut feeling is:

> What if the neighbor themself has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room?

The neighbor should be allowed to evict the donor, even if this causes terrible outcomes for the donor.

> Does the answer to the above change if the room's special-ness is tied to the neighbor being alive (if they die, no one else can ever use it to regrow organs)?

My answer doesn't change.

> What if the neighbor's own infant child has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room; should they be allowed to evict the recovering kidney donor? Does the answer change if the kidney donor has a 1% chance of surviving on dialysis until the room is available again? 10%? 99%?

My answer doesn't change; the neighbor should be allowed to evict the donor.

> If the neighbor is just being selfish and wants their room to be empty because they've decided think it looks better when it's tidy, should that be forbidden?

The donor should be allowed to stay under EMTALA.

> One way or another, if the room is empty at the end of the 40 weeks, should the state use eminent domain to seize the room and force the neighbor to take in gravely ill people from local hospitals, housing them until they are well, for as long as the room is working?

Yes. If there exists a special room which can heal people and if it is idle, the government should seize control of it and distribute its healing ability to help as many people as possible. Ideally we should raise taxes to investigate how this healing room works and replicate it until we can end all death in the world and heal all disease. But in the short term we should immediately maximize its use, and compensate its owner accordingly.

You gave me a lot to think about. Tackling the main one that I think maps best to the situation at hand:

> Let's say this process takes 40 weeks, and at about week 10 the neighbor says "I don't want you in my house any more -- please leave". Should the neighbor be allowed to say this, even if this means the formerly healthy person will require daily dialysis, and may indeed die?

I would say no, there is at least an implied contract with such severe consequences for backing out that it cannot be backed out of without it becoming murder (it would meet mens rea).

> What if the neighbor themself has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room?

This one maps to the mother's health, which will almost always be prioritised (though I'm sure there are exceptions/considerations depending on circumstances). I reckon this is done for two reasons, that an adult is a known quantity whereas the child may be born and still not make it, but also because the mother can probably try again. In the case of the room, if the room would continue to work its magic even though the owner died then I'm not sure society/law would prioritise them.

It might also map to a doctor treating someone in hospital then falling ill themselves.

> What if the neighbor's own infant child has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room; should they be allowed to evict the recovering kidney donor?

This one was difficult but I'd have to say no, based on the same reason as above, that the treatment had started and there was (at least) an implied contract to finish it and knowledge to not to would be reckless and akin to murder.

In the UK the House of Lords ruled[1]:

> that it was lawful to withdraw life-sustaining medical treatment from [a] man who had fallen into the condition known as permanent vegetative state. Their Lordships agreed that although, in withdrawing the life-sustaining treatment, death would be intended, his death would not be regarded at law as caused by the withdrawal of the treatment, but rather by his underlying condition.

(I've edited that for consideration to the family and length)

That decision was considered controversial among the medical community (apparently[2]). However, I doubt one could justify withdrawing treatment to someone who would probably go on to live a full life.

> If the neighbor is just being selfish

No.

> One way or another, if the room is empty at the end of the 40 weeks, should the state use eminent domain to seize the room

No. Property rights mean something (to me, anyway), and in our analogy that would be like the state making someone forcibly pregnant or available for rape. That's not the same as telling someone who became pregnant through actions of their own free will to bear the ultimate responsibility for those actions, nor forcing someone to keep to a contract they made freely.

> I have found that some things may be wrong to do, but society should still be structured in such a way that people may sometimes do wrong things.

I agree, which is one reason why I'm against abortion but pro-choice (because it would go against bodily autonomy, so I choose the lesser of two evils). I'm not against quite short term limits.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/medlaw/article-abstract/13/3/357/94...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15991403/

A fetus clearly is a collection of human cells. It is an example of living Homo sapiens.

The question abortion ethicists ask is whether a fetus or embryo is a person.

If, in fact, all embryos are persons, then the logical ethical reasoning would be that taking steps to minimize miscarriages should be one of our highest priorities. This doesn’t appear to match most people’s moral intuitions, however.

It is not obvious that a newborn baby is a person, either. But defining a being as receiving the rights of a person at birth is a schelling point that many people are more comfortable with than spots earlier or later in development.

That's it. And I'm wary of intuitions, because clearly people have very different intuitions.

What's the scientific argument for or against personhood for the unborn homo sapiens?

Generally, brain and neural system complexity is seemed to be necessary for personhood. During fetal development, the evolutionary older parts forms earlier, while cerebral cortex starts to develop at the end.

"personhood" is not a scientific term so there is no scientific argument for or against.

It is a philosophical question.

My view has always been that it does not even matter if the fetus has full rights.

People do not have the right to physically attach themselves to another person, and leach blood, oxygen, nutrients, etc off the other person. Period. Fetuses would not be an exception. This is not a rights balancing issue. A woman has the complete and absolute right to stop another person from parasitically draining her of resources.

I feel that a person who wakes up with another person surgically attached to them by some sort of mad-scientist doctor could have surgery to have the second person removed, even if this means certain death for the second person. I don't view abortion as any different.

I could support a ban on abortion methods that directly kill the fetus, but as long as the method is primarily about severing the connection to the mother and removing it from the body, I see nothing wrong with that, even if removal means certain death for the fetus.

If people feel fetuses have human rights, I could also support laws or medical ethics requiring doctors to attempt to save the fetus after it is expelled (if the condition was such that saving them might be possible) just like they would try to save any other person.

So suppose some adult decides to subvert your resources. Dun i, moves into your farm and starts collecting your crops. You have a right tk get rid of them, but only up to a point. In most countries for example you can't shoot them for trespass and theft (self defense might be different and US might be different too). You can call the police, have them removed and claim damages. But say the person cannot pay them, you cannot enslave then and force them to fix what they damaged.

So in other words, we value the right to life and freedom so much that even when someone is abusing our rights, we can't take justice into our own hands, and have to put up with the damage.

In addition, I'd imagine many abortions happen to women in relationships with pregnancies stemming from consentual sex. So I'm not sure if your analogy stretches that far. Other cases are, I agree, more complicated, and I'm not arguing about such circumstances.

I guess again it comes down to "fetus rights".

>I'd argue that where welfare of two beings is affected, you need to consider the rights of both.

if you consider the welfare of the whole population then, you'd be ok if we took some people without asking and "donated" all their organs and other useful body parts to those who could use them

erm, no, that's clearly not considering the rights of the "donors".

yes clearly, so it follows the right of pregnant person's to decide what happens to their body trumps anything else

You're implying the unborn human is not in fact a human and thus has no rights to consider. Or at least that the only rights to consider are those of the mother. Which may be true, but the whole point of my question is to see a proper argument in support of that.

Your phrasing begs the question. Would you run into a burning IVF clinic to save the embryos?

For me it's pretty simple: what causes the least suffering. Don't act that an unwanted child will have a great life.

Most sane countries have sane rules related to abortions. But I guess some people still hang on to an imaginary superpower that will make them live forever, if they follow certain rules.

I also find it funny that most pro-life zealots are also pro death penalty. Completely bonkers.

With retarded shit like this I'm very happy to live in Europe, where we already figured these things out generation(s) ago.

An important related question is: why don’t animals have rights?

I think something special happens to humans on the journey from embryo to child. Something like an awareness of their relationship to the world, that makes death more tragic.

As an aside, I think the same transition happens in many animals and their deaths can be just as tragic, although obviously nothing in U.S. law acknowledges that.

In fetuses, I don’t know when this “relationship to the world” begins, if it has really begun in earnest in the womb, or if it even has begun in earnest as a newborn.

But the problem with law is that such things must be codified.

I know “at conception” is too early, since we destroy similar creatures by accident every day. And even a sparrow has a richer concept of their relationship to the world than an embryo.

I’ll also add that “on their first day of kindergarten” is certainly far too late. By that time many of us have a very rich self concept.

“At first breath” is a clear middle ground, easy to interpret legally. It certainly seems that the “understanding of one’s relationship to the world” is greatly enriched at that moment of birth, and quite actively thereafter. And importantly, “at first breath” happens to be a moment where the child is no longer a danger to the mother. People have a right to self defense that clearly ends for the mother at that point.

All of that said, I think it’s possible some form of person is ”murdered” in some abortions. Just like some people are “murdered” in war. But there are simply limits to what can be fairly decided through the legal system.

At some point, other forms of justice take over. For me, not trying to push this on anyone, but that’s God’s justice. Many evils are punished not by the courts but by something greater, and that’s OK with me.

> why don’t animals have rights?

I believe it's self-evident that there is something in our brains that causes us to mentally separate things into in-group and out-group. In other words, we evolved to be social and generous, but only tribally so. Visual and behavioral differences such as skin color and culture can be the difference between in/out-group delineation. And so it is with animals. They are so similar to us and have so many of the traits that make us "human" that it's obvious they should have certain rights, if you think about it. In fact, some animals do enjoy rights to be protected against humans, as cruel treatment of animals is ostensibly taboo in Western cultures as long as you ignore current American factory farm practices, and in the case of some protected classes of animals such as dogs, enforced by law. But the differences between humans and other animals is enough to trigger the in/out group delineation, so almost no one bothers to recognize they should have rights, let alone fight for them. Those that do fight for those rights are typically relegated to the out-group themselves.

In short, it has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with the primitive parts of our brains running the show.

Pro choice frames the question differently. To put it in an overly reductionist way: it’s not a human, it’s a fetus.

This framing does create a problem of defining when exactly it becomes a human, which I haven’t heard a good answer to.

Right, so apart from semantics, I'd say it's the same question. I feel like the widely-presented pro-choice arguments simply make that assumption and then conclude, well there's no human in the womb so let's move on.

I'd like to probe into this assumption - and if with good reason the conclusion is that, indeed, it's not a human, then so be it. But it being a "naked", or poorly-supported assumption, irks me.

I'm undecided on abortion when it's not early (X weeks) and/or for medical reasons. As for the rights: Do we have the right to not carry another humanbeing even if it meant their "death"?

We don't when the human is born. If you don't feed a newborn and it dies, it's criminal neglect.

What is the root difference?

Day 1 of preg: completely different. ....... ....... 9 months: no difference.