It’s here! The new Equal Rights Argument module is ready for you to watch!

There’s a cool thing that’s been going on behind the scenes at the ERI office this year. We decided that we wanted to find a better way to train students in the most persuasive pro-life argument, the Equal Rights Argument. It’s been a significant part of our training content since we launched, and while the argument itself doesn’t need to change, we want a more helpful way to teach the argument. We had lots of brainstorm sessions, including multiple great calls with our friends at Justice For All, who also recently revised their method of teaching this argument. We’re excited to announce that we have finally landed on a new four-step process that our Philosophy Team created for teaching the Equal Rights Argument. 

Josh has taught this process virtually to three groups now (including one in Ireland!), as well as to a small focus group that he ran in Charlotte. We feel confident that the new process makes it significantly easier for students to master this argument now, so we just finished publishing this module for the Equipped for Life Course.

Here’s a preview of what you will find in each lesson:

Lesson 1 – Acknowledgments

• Many people have worked to create and refine the Equal Rights Argument, which we believe to be the most effective pro-life argument in use today.

Lesson 2 – The Equal Rights Argument

• We use the Equal Rights Argument to resolve the first major disagreement between pro-life and pro-choice people, which is whether or not unborn humans are persons with rights. Our question is, what is it that makes us persons, and how can it account for all humans equally?

Lesson 3 – How to Make the Equal Rights Argument

• There are four basic steps to making the Equal Rights Argument. These steps help us lower the pro-choice person’s defenses to considering the pro-life argument and help us work with them, not against them, to find the truth about personhood.

Lesson 4 – Example Dialogues – NOT FILMED YET

• We’re planning on filming example dialogues with a special guest but we haven’t been able to schedule that yet. We didn’t want that to delay the publishing of the rest of the module, so for now, this is just a placeholder for those example dialogues. We’ll email you when these are up.

Lesson 5 – Why I Bring Up Dogs

• It might seem odd to talk about dogs during our sorting process because people are so attached to dogs, but we can actually use that emotional attachment to our benefit.

Lesson 6 – Dealing with Squirrel Biters

• Sometimes people are unduly concerned about animals, and sometimes they just want to be difficult. This video explains what to do when people bite the most common bullet in the Equal Rights Argument.

Lesson 7 – Responding To “Being Human Plus X”

• One mistake people can make in an argument is choosing their conclusion and working backwards to find evidence and premises. This is often what happens when people try to add another quality to “something like human nature” in order to exclude unborn humans.

Lesson 8 – 3 Mistakes to Avoid in the Equal Rights Argument

• Don’t fall into these traps when talking about abortion. As long as you watch out for them, you can keep your conversations from getting derailed by avoidable mistakes.

Lesson 9 – Review and the Zoo Shooting

• We’ve retired the Zoo Shooting argument because we think the revised Equal Rights Argument accomplishes the same goals more simply. We explain it here because it’s mentioned in our advanced module.

If you’re already a member of the course, you can login and watch it right now! 

If you aren’t yet a member of the course, we want to give you a chance to watch the main lesson for free! But you’ll only be able to do that by registering for this exclusive live event we ran last month that includes it! You can watch the entire module by purchasing the Equipped for Life Course at EquippedCourse.com.