I'm actually pro-choice of the "safe, legal, and rare" variety, but the violinist example is a TERRIBLE steelman, because it is akin to rape, and IIRC rape accounts for less than 1% of all abortions.
Nearly all pregnant women have willingly made a choice that they know entails a risk of pregnancy--they do not simply wake up pregnant one morning through no actions of their own.
A more accurate comparison would be "a bunch of us were drunk last night and we drew straws to see who had to get hooked up to the sick violinist. I thought it was fun at the time, but now I'm wondering if I can back out."
She actually starts with the violinist and then goes towards the example of someone who had sex, didn't mean to get pregnant, but got pregnant anyways, using an analogy of someone who leaves a screen door open for enjoyment, but didn't mean to invite someone into her house. Even though there's now a person there inside her property, that doesn't mean that she's required to take care of them or keep them around.
It's generally the top article in Philosophy, although I'll grant that I could have elaborated her points better.
Good to know. I didn't read the whole article but did see that the violinist example was taken from it.
Though even that screen door example strikes me as disingenuous. Non-violent trespassing isn't as dramatic as rape, but is still a case of the other party acting in a criminal manner, which the woman had reasonable expectation to be free from. And kicking the intruder out of the house doesn't kill them.
Like I said, I'm actually pro-choice, but these strike me as pretty weak arguments for it. The most interesting thing is that those two examples both implicitly recognize the humanity and moral standing of the "baby". The stronger argument would seem to be denying that humanity, at least for something like the first trimester.
The screen door analogy is that opening the screen door only to find someone has entered is similar to a woman enjoying sex but not wanting to get pregnant. They each engaged in a pleasant activity that has risks, but that doesn't justify being intruded upon.
It's generally seen as the best pro-life argument because it grants all of the positions of the pro-choice side and works through the logic to argue that abortion is still permissible even if the fetus is a human being with full rights. From a Humean perspective, there's always a problem with arguments from analogy, but as a Philosopher, it's always good to give your opponents what they say they want and to make a sound argument anyway.
Thanks for the video. But it spends the first half of its time on an edge case (pregnancies fatal to the mother), which isn't usually a hallmark of a strong position. And the closing point--that the "right to remove the fetus" is distinct from the "right to kill the fetus" is ridiculous sophistry, like a Nazi concentration camp worker explaining that he didn't *kill* anyone...all he did was turn on the deadly gas after the Jews were locked into the showers.
And the legal argument uses the principle protecting passive INaction of bystanders to justify the active action of abortion, which is obviously flawed. Inaction would mean carrying the baby to term.
Once again, I'm rather taken aback that these are considered the *best* arguments for the pro-choice position. I had assumed there would be better.
At the simplest level, Hume is called 'The Great Skeptic' because he came up with a pretty great argument that you can never know anything about the physical world with certainty - not even basic cause and effect.
You think objects you drop will fall downward when dropped because you only have experiences of dropped objects doing that, but you have no way of no way knowing if that's a universal law or if we're all just on some kind of hot streak. The number of experiences of dropped objects by you and the people you know, divided by the possible number experiences of dropped objects, is basically zero. Same thing with dogs barking, the sun rising in the East, being burned by hot stoves, etc. You could never know for certain that A causes B such that it will always continue to be that way, and that's the problem of induction.
Kant reads that and famously says that Hume, "awakened me from my dogmatic slumber" and is only able to rescue cause and effect by taking it out of physical reality and putting it in the mind, and by the mind being universal causality thus becomes universal. He spends a decade working on it, doing the same exact routine down to the minute, figuring this out. That's his 'Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.'
Specifically, I was thinking about Hume's argument against the teleological argument for God's existence (design implies designer) in 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.' Hume argued that the reason humans believe that God is an intelligent designer is because humans are intelligent designers, but really there are lots of forces that create complex order, so the analogy of God as human is just a fallacious analogy. And indeed for Hume, all analogies are limited because the objects being compared are always different somehow.
I'm actually pro-choice of the "safe, legal, and rare" variety, but the violinist example is a TERRIBLE steelman, because it is akin to rape, and IIRC rape accounts for less than 1% of all abortions.
Nearly all pregnant women have willingly made a choice that they know entails a risk of pregnancy--they do not simply wake up pregnant one morning through no actions of their own.
A more accurate comparison would be "a bunch of us were drunk last night and we drew straws to see who had to get hooked up to the sick violinist. I thought it was fun at the time, but now I'm wondering if I can back out."
She actually starts with the violinist and then goes towards the example of someone who had sex, didn't mean to get pregnant, but got pregnant anyways, using an analogy of someone who leaves a screen door open for enjoyment, but didn't mean to invite someone into her house. Even though there's now a person there inside her property, that doesn't mean that she's required to take care of them or keep them around.
It's generally the top article in Philosophy, although I'll grant that I could have elaborated her points better.
Good to know. I didn't read the whole article but did see that the violinist example was taken from it.
Though even that screen door example strikes me as disingenuous. Non-violent trespassing isn't as dramatic as rape, but is still a case of the other party acting in a criminal manner, which the woman had reasonable expectation to be free from. And kicking the intruder out of the house doesn't kill them.
Like I said, I'm actually pro-choice, but these strike me as pretty weak arguments for it. The most interesting thing is that those two examples both implicitly recognize the humanity and moral standing of the "baby". The stronger argument would seem to be denying that humanity, at least for something like the first trimester.
The screen door analogy is that opening the screen door only to find someone has entered is similar to a woman enjoying sex but not wanting to get pregnant. They each engaged in a pleasant activity that has risks, but that doesn't justify being intruded upon.
Here's a 6 minute video version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJmnSiu0gFk
It's generally seen as the best pro-life argument because it grants all of the positions of the pro-choice side and works through the logic to argue that abortion is still permissible even if the fetus is a human being with full rights. From a Humean perspective, there's always a problem with arguments from analogy, but as a Philosopher, it's always good to give your opponents what they say they want and to make a sound argument anyway.
Thanks for the video. But it spends the first half of its time on an edge case (pregnancies fatal to the mother), which isn't usually a hallmark of a strong position. And the closing point--that the "right to remove the fetus" is distinct from the "right to kill the fetus" is ridiculous sophistry, like a Nazi concentration camp worker explaining that he didn't *kill* anyone...all he did was turn on the deadly gas after the Jews were locked into the showers.
And the legal argument uses the principle protecting passive INaction of bystanders to justify the active action of abortion, which is obviously flawed. Inaction would mean carrying the baby to term.
Once again, I'm rather taken aback that these are considered the *best* arguments for the pro-choice position. I had assumed there would be better.
"From a Humean perspective, there's always a problem with arguments from analogy"
is this the problem of induction ? do you have any links to material explaining this , i'd be interested.
I'd be happy to.
https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/elucidations/2011/11/25/humes-views-on-induction-a-follow-up/
At the simplest level, Hume is called 'The Great Skeptic' because he came up with a pretty great argument that you can never know anything about the physical world with certainty - not even basic cause and effect.
You think objects you drop will fall downward when dropped because you only have experiences of dropped objects doing that, but you have no way of no way knowing if that's a universal law or if we're all just on some kind of hot streak. The number of experiences of dropped objects by you and the people you know, divided by the possible number experiences of dropped objects, is basically zero. Same thing with dogs barking, the sun rising in the East, being burned by hot stoves, etc. You could never know for certain that A causes B such that it will always continue to be that way, and that's the problem of induction.
Kant reads that and famously says that Hume, "awakened me from my dogmatic slumber" and is only able to rescue cause and effect by taking it out of physical reality and putting it in the mind, and by the mind being universal causality thus becomes universal. He spends a decade working on it, doing the same exact routine down to the minute, figuring this out. That's his 'Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.'
Specifically, I was thinking about Hume's argument against the teleological argument for God's existence (design implies designer) in 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.' Hume argued that the reason humans believe that God is an intelligent designer is because humans are intelligent designers, but really there are lots of forces that create complex order, so the analogy of God as human is just a fallacious analogy. And indeed for Hume, all analogies are limited because the objects being compared are always different somehow.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleological-arguments/
Thanks for reading, the likes, and the question. I really appreciate it. :)
right so he was against analogical reasoning and inductive reasoning was one kind of analogical reasoning
I always assumed fallibilism was an old philosophical tradition. seems like it was something new.
thanks for taking your time to reply! love your posts here btw