Comments by "jeppen" (@jesan733) on "Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336" video.

The abortion debate is so interesting, especially as Shapiro, in a sense, has full understanding yet takes a very different moral stance. I consider consciousness and self-awareness as the real determinant of personhood and agree that even newly-born doesn't really reach the threshold for being a person. Here Shapiro seems to just say that since that raises very difficult questions (of the intrinsic value and self-determination of e.g. the mentally impaired), then we should abandon this line of reasoning. That's simply wrong. We need to grapple with these questions and come up with answers. Because really, consciousness and self-awareness, some kind of mental sufficiency, is the obvious answer that ties those various hard questions, such as robots, aliens, brain death, animal rights and abortion together into some kind of coherent, non-speciesist, non-arbitrary moral valuation. The typical conservative reflex that Shapiro has, that since you've engaged in unprotected s-x, something that he thinks is irresponsible, then you've suddenly forfeited your right to self-determination and you should be his slave and incubator, essentially, that's just awful. As awful is the related conservative idea that if you break some arbitrary rule that the conservative society set up, then any arbitrary punishment is warranted since you knew beforehand that you shouldn't do that and you need to follow the rules or chaos will ensue.
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@Ψυχήμίασμα Shapiro talks about potential, and it seems you're raising the same argument. However, you still need a mental threshold for being, otherwise a shrimp is also a person. So your argument for potential leaves us with two factors instead of one: mental threshold extended with any potential to reach that threshold, and I wonder what that extension really adds. It doesn't really solve anything considering there's a lot of potential out there, and it seems kindof arbitrary to define the start of potential at being "an implanted embryo that is naturally viable". So what would be the reason to hold that potential matters? Btw, let's say we build a batch of ten identical sentient, intelligent, self-aware robots, but we've yet to turn any of them on, and they have yet to develop unique personal relations with anyone and they have all yet to develop unique, independent personalities, desires, ideas and moralities. When they have done all that, they're persons and have a right to life. But am I a murderer if I dismantle and recycle them without ever turning them on? If no, why not? Not "inevitable" enough because human intervention is needed? Why isn't the life-sustaining hospitality of the mother a human intervention then? It's all, again, kindof arbitrary, so what does this proposal add? It gives personhood and the right to life and self-determination to something that isn't and has never been self aware. Why?
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@Ψυχήμίασμα being "human" is not automatically a relevant or important property. That's a speciesist take and not really philosophically sound. So the shrimp comparison stands with the context I gave. Someone in a medically induced coma is a person. He has actual thoughts, social relations, dreams and self-awareness that's just temporarily deactivated. The embryo has none of these, they're not termporarily turned off, they have never existed. It will be, yes, but the idea that this "will be" is important is quite arbitrary. There's a lot of potential out there, lots of unfertilized eggs, lots of spontaneous abortions and so on, but they're not that important, they're not persons. "Once an embryo is implanted, it lives with the aforementioned biological inevitability." It's not inevitable, it's just likely. And inevitability/likelihood being important is arbitrary. Actual personhood is important, potential personhood isn't. "If the human race is going through an event where our species may face extinction, every pregnancy would be considered priceless." Perhaps, perhaps not. You can easily make a philosophical case that the situation isn't relevant. Anyway, right now, the opposite is true and we have arguably a bit too high total fertility rate and sheer numbers. "I'm considering this on the basis of what is human." We don't disagree about what's human. Of course an embryo is human. But it's not a person. So we disagree about personhood. "I do not agree with the rationalizations for abortion that are based on de-valuing the humanness of unborn offspring." It's not devaluing, it's right-valuing. They're not persons, so the worth they have is based on the feelings of the mother (in particular) and her investment. They don't have intrinsic worth as persons. "I think that, if you want to argue for abortion, the only morally cogent arguments should simply be those related to the readiness and/or health of the mother." I disagree, I think my stance is morally cogent and yours is kindof arbitrary decisions on your part to value potential and humanness as if the fetuses were already persons, which they aren't. Why do we accept brain death? They're still human. Because they lack potential? Potential for what? Well, advanced sentience. Which embryos don't have. Well, they have potential. Yeah, sure, but again, potential isn't actual. "Newborns who are minutes, days old have not developed these things either. Similarly, they haven't "done all that." yet, we do not consider killing them to be morally acceptable, and we certainly regard them as living beings with a right to life." True, for a few reasons, the most important probably that the child starts to develop social relations with others so it's not as clearly the mother's property any longer, and it becomes complex and contentious to create a legal moral framework that sorts all that out and also sets a sentience threshold for personhood, so it's easier to just say "let's skip all that and pretend there's self-ownership from day 1". But for the unborn, we don't have these complexities. "Self awareness is not the criteria by which we determine right to life. A newborn is not self-aware, categorically, it has not developed higher brain functions." Self awareness is the criteria. If you go on an expedition to an alien world and try to make up your mind about what animals you can eat and enslave and which you must respect as persons, then self awareness and advanced cognition are the only reasonable criteria. We choose to treat newborns as if they're persons for other reasons, as I said.
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@Ψυχήμίασμα "Yes, it is. Otherwise you would marry a dog or give equal rights to cattle." Marriage is based on an emotional and romantic connection that humans typically only have for other humans. Doesn't say anything about intrinsic value and self-ownership. Cattle don't have enough of what I argue is the real determinant, which is high levels of mental processes such as self-awareness and cognition. So again, it's not about being a human per se, and if you think about aliens, elephants, dolphins and others that we possibly should recognize as inviolable persons with a right to self-ownership, you'd see the problem with your speciesist take. "But you'd have to precisely define what you mean by "speciesist" for this line of the conversation to continue cogently." Do I, or is it obvious and you are just trying to block this line of thought? "Yet you assign personhood to them owing to past personhood, while not assigning personhood to fetuses for their future personhood. This is an arbitrary temporal choice, or preference, to me." This is like claiming a computer straight out of the factory production line, with no loaded operating system or software and no user data saved on it, is the same value as a turned-off computer has great software, the almost-finished thesis for your masters degree, your business' financial files and a lot of very personal family photos and vids, none of which are backed-up. The brand-new computer does have potential to be filled with "personhood", but at it's current state it's interchangeable and next to worthless compared to the turned-off computer filled to the brim with important and irreplacible files and software. "This regard for the past as special pleading, yet not the future, for consciousness, is what seems to me to be completely arbitrary here." It's not about the past vs the future. As my computer example above illustrates, it's about actual existence of unique value vs interchangeability. "A comatose man is not currently a person by your criteria of cognitive-based personhood." He is currently a person if he can be "turned on" again while retaining what's makes him uniquely him. The turned-on/turned-off property is irrelevant, what's relevant is if you're a person. As my computer example illustrates, a fetus isn't turned off, it's simply not a person. "Something WILL be alive. That is not arbitrary. You're not making sense." Something MAY become a person, and that something is interchangeable. It's arbitrary to insist that the potential IS personhood. "But life isn't devalued based on abundance or scarcity." You just argued that scarcity would make every fetus very valuable, so you're contradicting yourself. Also, e.g. a woman who considers abortion may make a different choice based on whether she believes this is her last chance to be pregnant or not. And that's justifiable, for her. But as long as the human hasn't attained personhood, the valuation is hers, and it's not the inherent value and self ownership of a person. So we have two separate valuations here - personhood or external valuations. "You do not say, there are plenty of ethnic Chinese around already, hence a few hundred thousand of them perishing in an Earthquake really is no big deal." Exactly, because they are persons and not interchangeable tabula rasas. But I would say there are 1.3 billion Africans and they're going to be 4 billion at the end of the century, so reducing potential human life by some additional contraceptives, family planning and abortions is perfectly fine. Again, since there is no personhood valuation for the 2.7 billion unborn, I can fall back on my external valuation of potentials. "A growing fetus is a person. I have already outlined my reasons for that." Yes, your magical wand, "inevitable". But this isn't really a reason. Why is this inevitability important? "The computer will inevitably be loaded with software and used to store important stuff." So what? It's interchangeable and we can get another empty computer. "You only do not consider them persons based on the arbitrary unidirectional temporal limit." No, I consider them not persons because of an arbitrary limit on self-awareness and other cognitive abilities. "I think your stance is based on arbitrary preference for the past, and is amoral." Amoral? That's pretty strong. I have a preference for what actually exists. I think you're strawmanning my position. Are you really determined to have an honest discussion or do you want to play rhetorical games? If the latter, we can end here. "It's in the process, literally, of becoming self aware in a matter of weeks. That is the difference between a fetus and someone who is braindead." It's certainly a difference, but they share non-personhood, not having self-awareness. The brain dead isn't turned off, he has ceased to exist. If I truly had a preference for the past, rather than for existence, I'd maintain that the brain dead has personhood, but I don't. "Again, a newborn does not have any of these self-awareness qualifiers you described, it is considered a person." It's considered as a person, yes, but it really isn't, yet. "We do not allow to die or live newborns based on the criteria of whether or not a mother, or other people, care about it." True, we don't, because it would be messy and contentious to sort out what the rules should be. But within the next 100 years, we may well have done something in this area. "One isn't conferred personhood because social interaction exists around it." I disagree. This is de facto done for newborns. They are prematurely given personhood because of social relations (and to some degree our philosophical/legal laziness). "We treat newborns as persons because they quite absolutely ARE persons." You think so because you equate personhood with humanness, which I don't do, and which would leave e.g. advanced aliens and dolphins as non-persons. "If I kill your newborn, understandably you would find that unconscionable, not because it's "yours," but because it has a whole life ahead of it, and I snuffed it out." I disagree. It's because it belongs to parents who really care and would suffer from their loss. Shapiro actually alludes to that when he notes that he does recognize the huge moral difference between shooting a seven year old in the face (iirc) and having an abortion. The valuations are totally different and for different reasons because only one is a person with intrinsic value.
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@Ψυχήμίασμα have you ever tried an analogy and got the predictable response and thought to yourself: "Oh, how great it would be if people reading an analogy wouldn't be reflexively adversarial and just assume that whatever difference between the analogy and the real deal that they can think of automatically invalidates the analogy"? Haven't you wished that people would actually look at the similarities and think a bit instead? Anyway, here we go... "because if you are going to be honest, you do in fact personally show preferential treatment to humans" Yes, and probably to certain etnicities, genders, atheists and engineers. But that's nothing I'd be particularly proud of, nor do I tell myself it's sound, philosophically or morally. "In certain circumstances, you will choose to save a human embryo over a dolphin embryo, given the choice." Yes, and in others I will choose the dolphin one. "It is not obvious to me what you mean by speciesist, or what you mean to do by bringing that term up." Perhaps the above shed some light on that, then? "A human cannot be compared to a computer in the context of value judgments. The two things are not equal in that context. One is a living being. The other, an object." Shrimps are also living beings, and also objects. As are humans. "A computer's only value is in its utilitarian property. The value of a living human should not be judged on a utilitarian basis." The value of a living PERSON should not be judged on a utilitarian basis. But the value of a human organism could, if that organism is not a person. Because it's personhood that matters, not humanness. See brain death. "Where the two things intersect in this comparison, a fully genomed fetus actually has a program and operating system, (complete human DNA, the "software",) fully, and it is already running." Same goes for a shrimp, and it's not a person either. "I reiterate that computer worth is not analogous with human worth, since a human is a sentient being whose value isn't based on the idea of usefulness." Almost all sentient beings are valued based on usefulness. Only persons are not. And the fetus isn't a person. "That said, isn't the value of a computer the exact opposite of your scenario?" That's a very strange thing to say when I've already told you about the almost finished thesis, the business files and the personal photos, none of which are backup-ed. The reason ransomware works so well isn't that the criminals ask for much less than the HW value of the locked systems. "It is not interchangeable. Continuing the computer analogy, each computer model and type would have its own unique attributes, advantages, disadvantages." That's a ridiculous response to an analogy, but never mind. The fetus is interchangeable because the female can have another kid later and get just as many kids in the end, and the qualities of those kids, potential or not, are unknown. (Not that she owes you or anyone else a certain amount of kids.) "But you aren't recognizing the existence of unique value in a computer in the first place, which is there." Dude, it's not there. Computers are produced in series. "It is a process, not a static thing, just like you, and it already is continuous with its future manifestation via causality" Sure, but the fetus hasn't reached the threshold for personhood in that process. "just as an unconscious person's inherent properties are continuous with his past manifestation." It has reached the threshold for personhood. "Using your own logic, you can cut off any ongoing living being and say it has not value or less value at any given point" Yes, as I said one or two comments ago, we're choosing an arbitrary value as threshold. And if we truly err on the side of caution, we set it at birth. "and a 25 year old with a PhD in applied physics is certainly "more" in many ways than a 4 year old child. One might have more social life and personality vs the other. We do not value lives based on more or less in these areas." In some extreme medical arbitrage situations, we probably do. But we generally hope that we won't need to, we just apply infinity and in most situations that works. But that's not for fetuses, because they've not attained personhood any more than adult mice have.
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