The change we’ve made to the way we argue for equal treatment for the unborn, and why we made it.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.
It’s been almost a year since I started this blog and by far my most popular post is my explanation of the basic Equal Rights Argument that I and my colleagues at Justice For All have been using in conversations with pro-choice people. It became so effective that I called it the “most undervalued argument in the pro-life movement.”
We’re arguing that if adult humans deserve equal treatment, that must be because they all have something in common, and it must be a property that they all have equally. We try to figure out what that property is that seems to be grounding equal treatment, and then ask whether the unborn also has that property equally. If they do, then the unborn deserve equal treatment.
What is the property that human adults have equally? Originally, we were saying that it seems like we all have “humanness” in common. If someone asks why “humanness” matters, I would say something like, “I believe there’s this guy who walked out of his own tomb 2,000 years ago. He believed in the Torah, which says that God made humans in His own image, that He did something special with humans that He didn’t do with other animals, giving me a reason to believe that ‘humanness’ might morally matter.”
But as I’ve used this argument lately, I’ve noticed there’s a pragmatic problem: it’s not terribly convincing to pro-choice atheists who immediately brush off the argument as inherently religious. That’s a practical problem, but I think there’s an even greater problem philosophically: the “humanness” argument can’t account for the right to life of fictional aliens.
Remember that scene in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones is hilariously interrogating Frank?
