In this episode Trent answers five questions Destiny asked in a post-debate de-brief that he says Trent refused to answer in their original debate. Trent shows how he did answer the questions and adds some additional thoughts to his original answers on issues related to miscarriage, persistent vegetative states, and prosecuting women who choose abortion.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn: Hey everyone. In today’s episode, I’ll be responding to comments that Destiny made in his follow-up thoughts on our abortion debate. I won’t be making any further replies after this video, but I’d be happy to have another dialogue with Destiny on an important ethical or a theological issue. Also, I discussed some of these issues on Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd last week, but I’m hoping in this episode to go more in depth on the issues and address Destiny’s reply to the debate that I only became aware of after the Pints interview.
But before I share those thoughts, please be sure to like this video, subscribe to our channel and definitely support us at trenthornpodcast.com. Subscribing is really helpful because having more subscribers helps us to get on larger podcasts, like the Whatever Podcast, it helps them to notice our work. So that would be great if you could subscribe to help us to reach more people. All right, so Destiny and his followers have claimed that in our debate I refuse to engage questions of hypotheticals Destiny made that are apparently good arguments against the pro-life position, although Destiny engaged all of my hypotheticals. Here’s how Destiny put it.
Destiny:
And I managed to think of five or six that I thought were absolutely catastrophic. I can’t believe he wouldn’t answer any of my hypotheticals. With him not answering my… He wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Then he was like, “Well, you didn’t answer my question.” He’s like, “I’m watching you check mark the questions.” And then I asked him after that because I was really upset that he said that. He was like, “You didn’t answer my hypotheticals.” Which of these hypotheticals on the piece of paper did I not answer because I answered every single question you gave me, and he didn’t answer any of mine. He didn’t answer a single one of mine.
Trent Horn:
I will admit that in a live back and forth dialogue for three hours, you’re not going to give the best answers you could in every situation. So I hope in today’s episode I can show where I clearly did engage the hypotheticals Destiny accused me of not engaging and then offer some more thoughts to flesh out the answers I gave to him on the podcast. So let’s jump into those examples now. Here’s the first one.
Destiny:
I remember the other one. Oh, hold on, hold on. Would you mandate keeping 64 cell organisms alive for as long as possible in a Petri dish? That was one.
Trent Horn:
It can be wrong to kill someone but not be obligatory that you do everything to save the person’s life. I gave the example of a two-year-old being put in cryogenic suspension so that a doctor in the future could cure him. It is wrong to kill the two-year-old, but you don’t have to do everything possible to keep him alive.
Destiny:
So we had the technology to deliver that, and the care was quite simple, you just water the dish and maybe put a couple of nutrients in the dish and you could keep that alive for five to 10 years. You’d be just as morally obligated to keep that alive in a Petri dish than you would for a child that might be born a little bit unhealthy keeping that alive.
Trent Horn:
I don’t know if we’re morally obligated to sustain the life of a human being by putting them essentially in a freezer.
Destiny:
Not a freezer, it would be a Petri dish. You could play music for it if you want.
Trent Horn:
Probably wouldn’t do very much good at that stage, the music, I would say.
Destiny:
Sure, but your position, because you are relying on human intuition a lot. You’re trying to say that it’s so obvious that there’s a life. But now when I’ve challenged you to putting that thing in a Petri dish and watering it, if I were to ask you the same question about, let’s say, a child is born and it’s only going to live to be six months to one year old, I’m a parent. You’re a parent, both of us would probably say, “Yeah, do everything you can for it. You can’t just kill it, even if it’s going to died an early age.” Now I’m asking you for the 64 cell organism, we have the same obligation for that in a Petri dish.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, but you could have all these examples where we don’t know what to do. What if they said, “Hey, Destiny for your child, we don’t know if we can save them, but if you put them in this cryo tank, in 200 years, we think they’ll come up with a cure.”
Destiny:
I agree. It would be hard, but that’s why to quote you earlier, it’s just a hypothetical. So earlier you asked if you had a child born with missing parts of its brain that we could inject a drug to give it more of a brain in the future, that’s a pretty crazy hypothetical. So I’m asking you an equally crazy hypothetical, a 64 cell organism is born, do we have an obligation to keep it alive in a Petri dish infinitely?
Trent Horn:
Because some hypotheticals are going to be closer to reality than others. Brain transplants and swaps are pretty far away. Cryogenetics is closer, but still not quite there. Like the example I gave, it’s just is it wrong to take a healthy fetus and cause them to be permanently unconscious? We lobotomize born people. It’s not that far out of the realm-
Destiny:
Lobotomies do not mean a loss of consciousness. And when you say healthy fetus, it implies healthy functioning brain function, so again, we’re using a lot of words-
Trent Horn:
But if it’s before 20 weeks, there’s no person there. You could destroy the brain, the developing brain.
Destiny:
Correct.
Trent Horn:
There’s no problem.
Destiny:
Yeah, but in your world, if a 64 cell thing was born, it needs to be kept alive in a Petri dish until natural metabolic function cease.
Trent Horn:
No. We should provide medical care for human beings prior to birth. We might disagree about what kind of care that is. When I said no, I was rejecting Destiny’s assertion that we were obligated to keep that child alive in a Petri dish. So that would be my answer to the hypothetical. We are not obligated to provide extraordinary or disproportionate medical care to any human being, but we might disagree about what kind of medical care is ordinary or proportionate for unborn children given their unique anatomy. However, if I could go back, I would’ve pointed out that Destiny’s example is under described. I would’ve asked him, “Why does the child at 64 cells in the Petri dish not grow any larger? Why does it stay at that size?” I first assumed Destiny was talking about cryo-preservation, which uses extraordinary technology to keep embryos alive outside of the womb in a kind of frozen stasis.
But just as we don’t have an obligation to keep a two-year-old from dying by freezing him, we would not be obligated to do the same for a human embryo. This would be extraordinary care that is not owed to a human being, whereas food or water are ordinary ways to care for someone. However, it seemed that in Destiny’s example, there is no extraordinary care being offered. For some inexplicable reason, the human embryo can survive on drops of nutrient water, but it does not continue to grow. Strangely, it does all of this in an environment where it would normally die, a room temperature Petri dish. Normally, if a complex organism like a mammal stops exhibiting cellular growth, that means the organism is dead, and so there would be no obligation to care for a dead human being in such a condition.
One essential property of human beings is that they’re animals. They are beings that are naturally capable of multicellular growth and development. If a human embryo stopped having that property, then it would not be a human being anymore. It would be more like a brain-dead adult who is living tissue but has lost the ability to coordinate its parts to grow and develop as a whole being. So just as we would not be obligated to keep a brain-dead person’s tissue alive, we would not be obligated to keep the equivalent case or a developmentally dead 64 cell human being’s tissue alive either.
When I said some hypotheticals are further than others, that would certainly apply in this case. In the hypotheticals I gave Destiny, the impossibility was rooted in technology, which can in principle change, like in fetal brain manipulation. But an embryo that for some natural reason does not grow, but can be kept alive in a Petri dish with drops of water, is not a technological impossibility. It is a biological impossibility. In the example he’s given, you’re not talking about a human being anymore. It’d be like asking if we had to protect an infant who became calcified and turned into stone, but was still conscious. Just because you can imagine a scenario, it doesn’t mean it’s actually possible or worth taking seriously.
So putting all this together, I would reaffirm my answer that no, we don’t have to keep this 64 cell organism alive. In such a case, this would either be an embryo kept alive extraordinarily in cryo tanks, or it’s just a weird non-growing piece of human tissue that is the equivalent of a brain-dead adult who lacks organic unity so we don’t have to keep it alive. Now, as I said at the end of my response we might disagree about which kind of future technological advances would constitute ordinary and this obligatory care for unborn children, but our disagreement about what unknown future treatments we can or must give to unborn children, that’s based on uninvented technology, has absolutely no bearing on whether it’s wrong to kill unborn children right now. Now Destiny’s next question is a bit more grounded though because it talks about the duty to keep a particular known set of human beings alive.
Destiny:
Would you keep persistent vegetative state people alive forever? Oh, yeah. A 20-year old who will never wake up on a feeding tube for his 55 years, he said yes to that. That’s true.
Trent Horn:
Now Destiny admits right here that I did answer his hypothetical. I said, “Yes, they should be kept alive,” though I qualified that by saying we should give them the ordinary means of life, like food and water. We don’t need to keep people alive by extraordinary means in this case, like heart, lung machines, ventilators, dialysis, or even CPR. In this clip, I even say some intervention may not be helpful for someone in a persistent vegetative state, and it’s those kinds of interventions to which I’m referring. So let’s show the clip and then I’ll talk about it.
Destiny:
Do you think that people in persistent vegetative states, assuming you know they’re never going to wake up, should they be kept alive indefinitely as well?
Trent Horn:
I think that they should be given food, water. They should be given comfort care.
Destiny:
So kept alive indefinitely.
Trent Horn:
No, not necessarily kept alive indefinitely because there might be interventions that aren’t as helpful for them. I think that we should never dehydrate anyone to death.
Destiny:
Sure. So a person who was 22 years old, persistent vegetative state, they could live to 75. They’re always going to be in bed. Should that person be cared for for the remainder of their life?
Trent Horn:
Well, we don’t know that they’ll live to 75.
Destiny:
Let’s say we could, that’s why hypothetical.
Trent Horn:
Well, no, you shut down a lot of my hypotheticals.
Destiny:
I didn’t. I answered every single hypothetical.
Trent Horn:
No, you complained about a lot of them.
Destiny:
I did complain. No, no, I complained because they’re intuition pumps, but tell me one of those I didn’t answer.
Trent Horn:
No, you-
Destiny:
No, no, no. Tell me one of those hypotheticals I-
Trent Horn:
You complained about-
Destiny:
I watched you put a check mark next to every single one I answered. I saw you you do it, so I know I answered.
Trent Horn:
You complained about a toddler, for example.
Destiny:
I did complain, but I answered it.
Trent Horn:
He actually didn’t answer it. Here’s that exchange earlier in our dialogue. Just to recap, it’s permissible to kill infants who’ve not been conscious yet, to kill toddlers. Oh, yeah, what if toddler loses all of his memories and they’re not going to come back, he’s at the same stage as a 19-week fetus.
Destiny:
It’s impossible. That’s like asking me, “Are you killed when you teleport on Star Trek?” I don’t think I have an answer for that. It’s a very difficult hypothetical. I think it challenges the concept of identity, but I don’t know if that gets into a human life or not a human life. We’re talking about deleting somebody’s memory and resetting their brain to 19 weeks.
Trent Horn:
But why does it? Because I guess here is… I should have followed up and pressed Destiny on his refusal to answer my hypothetical, but I decided to try to get to the root of Destiny’s position instead. But notice that Destiny never said whether it was right or wrong to kill a toddler with total amnesia. He just said, “We have no idea if they were truly dead after losing their memories,” and so he couldn’t answer the hypothetical. Now, back to the question about persistent vegetative states.
Destiny:
So you can complain about mine, but you have to answer it. A 20-year-old can be kept alive until 75. Do we have a moral obligation to keep feeding them for 55 years in a hospital bed? And you can complain about it, but you should answer the question.
Trent Horn:
There’s two ways that I could respond to this. One, would be my view and two, would be another pro-life view.
Destiny:
I want to know your view because I’m talking to you.
Trent Horn:
Well, someone could defend a position might say, you know what-
Destiny:
I don’t care about someone. I want Trent’s answer.
Trent Horn:
Because I want people to be pro-life, even if they don’t agree with everything I believe.
Destiny:
Okay, but I’m asking you right now.
Trent Horn:
That’s fine.
Destiny:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
I think we should not starve somebody to death. I think that in some cases, food will not help someone because they can’t digest it anymore.
Destiny:
We’re not talking about those cases. I’m just saying if we could keep somebody alive from 25 to 75, 50 years in a bed if we feed them and water them.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I don’t think we should starve disabled people to death. That’s my answer to that. But number two, if you don’t agree with that intuition, you could just have the view that I laid out earlier, which is that you are no longer a person if it is impossible for you to be conscious in the future. So that means you are a person whenever it is possible for you to be conscious in the future, and that would apply for nearly all unborn human beings for fertilization onward. So even if someone didn’t agree with me about PVS, they could still agree with you about withholding care for PVS, but it’s different because there’s a difference between someone who will never again be conscious and someone who will be conscious at some point. There’s a difference there.
Destiny:
True.
Trent Horn:
So I answered the hypothetical and even offered an alternative position for those who don’t share my beliefs about the wrongness of dehydrating disabled people to death, but who also want to be against abortion. We also have to remember that hypotheticals only take us so far. We need to make medical judgements based on facts associated with the real world. So for example, a pro-life Muslim physician, Dr. Javad Hashmi, notes in his review of destiny on Twitter, he cites an article from the Harvard Medical School called Revisiting the Vegetative State: A Disability Rights Law Analysis. It notes that the term persistent vegetative state has now been replaced with the term chronic vegetative state to account for the many people who become conscious again while in these states.
It says the following, “The condition was thought to be irreversible. However, the American Academy of Neurology replaced the terminology of permanence with CVS to reflect the frequency of recovery of consciousness after these points in time. The features of minimal conscious states include sleep-wake cycles and minimal but definite evidence of a awareness, simple command following, answering yes/no questions and other intelligible and purposeful behaviors like smiling, crying in response to emotional stimuli. Since these disorders exist on a spectrum, a patient’s transition from a vegetative state to MCS can go undetected. Even the assumption that accurately classified vegetative state patients have no inner life has been called into question. A series of studies revealed a phenomenon called covert consciousness in the vegetative state.
In a 2006 study, Owen et al. found that a woman in a vegetative state was able to respond to commands through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals. The results were published in an article titled “Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State.” When the research subject was asked to imagine playing tennis or to walk through rooms in her house, activity was observed in corresponding areas of her brain. These observations on fMRI were indistinguishable from the activity patterns of healthy individuals while performing these tasks.”
So if someone cares about consciousness, then we shouldn’t kill people in PVS states because they very well may be conscious. So under Destiny’s view, someone who is minimally conscious and can only communicate if someone can read their brain scan would have a right to life and we’d have to keep them alive for decades, even though many people may not agree with that. Now, Destiny might say that’s true unless the person in this state wants us to kill him. But Destiny can’t say that either because in our debate, Destiny said assisted suicide should only be given to people with terminal illnesses, not people with chronic disabilities. That brings us to his next question.
Destiny:
Three, would you make it illegal in all forms to commit suicide?
Trent Horn:
Destiny never directly asked me if all forms of suicide should be illegal. He asked me if people should be allowed to kill themselves, and I said, “No.” I clearly answered his question. Here’s the full clip, then I’ll offer some more thoughts. We make judgments there about you’re giving me a good reason and you’re not. I think that’s a dangerous road to go down to decide whose reason is good enough to help them out of suicide and whose reason is good enough to help them into it.
Destiny:
Okay. I would disagree. I would say it’s a really dangerous road to compel people to live for the happiness of others around them.
Trent Horn:
I don’t we should compel people… I think-
Destiny:
That’s what you’re saying is compelling somebody to live. If you’re saying that you’re not allowed to take your life, you’re depriving them of arguably one of the most fundamental negative rights we might have.
Trent Horn:
I’m saying doctors shouldn’t be killers.
Destiny:
Sure. Should a person be allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
They should be allowed to refuse disproportionate care for-
Destiny:
Should they be allowed to jump off a building or a bridge?
Trent Horn:
No.
Destiny:
So they shouldn’t be allowed to kill themselves?
Trent Horn:
No. Do you think people should be allowed to kill themselves?
Destiny:
Yeah, I think depending on the circumstances, yes.
Trent Horn:
Should they be allowed to kill themselves for any reason?
Destiny:
For any reason?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, they don’t want to live.
Destiny:
Probably not.
Trent Horn:
Why?
Destiny:
Because I think that oftentimes the desire to kill yourself without a good stated reason is probably more evidence of some sort of mental problem that should probably be alleviated before the person can make that decision. So it’d be an issue of, we would argue from an informed consent perspective that you’re not capable of making this decision because in a mentally compromised state. But if you take somebody who’s 75, they’ve got stage four lung cancer, they’ve got six to 12 months ahead of them, they know it’s going to be an excruciating experience and they don’t have any desire to live anymore, do you think that person should be deprived of the right to kill themselves, jump off a building, jump off a bridge? Because in your world, they would have to do that because the doctors-
Trent Horn:
I don’t make judgments that, oh yeah, you have a good reason to kill yourself because then what about the quadriplegic who says, “You’re a 75-year-old with cancer, what about the 20-year-old who will never move their arms and legs again and says, I can’t live like this for my whole life?” Should they just be allowed to roll themselves into the pool?
Destiny:
I think that there is plenty of research that shows that people that are even quadriplegics live healthy, happy lives.
Trent Horn:
What if they say, screw your research. I don’t want to live this way.
Destiny:
Then I think it’s more likely that there’s something unhealthy with them, so they shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
Trent Horn:
Can’t we say that for the 75-year-old?
Destiny:
Because I think that for 75 year olds, we do know the prognosis with stage four lung cancer at certain stages, and we could say it is going to be bad and you are going to die in six to 12 months.
Trent Horn:
Right, but if anything, so you’re saying that-
Destiny:
I’m saying that a person who’s 75 with that cancer-
Trent Horn:
Someone should be allowed to kill themselves so they don’t have to go through six months of agony, but a quadriplegic who might go through 60 years of agony, no go.
Destiny:
Because at the end of the day, I’m making an empirical reference. I can say if we look at the pool of people that are quadriplegic at this age, 99% of them live and have decently happy, fulfilling lives.
Trent Horn:
So you’re saying people don’t really have a right to make autonomous medical choices, they only have the right to do what you think the research says?
Destiny:
No, they have the right to make a decision, but whether or not the decision is informed or not is important, just like we would say 12-year-old doesn’t have the right to make certain decisions because we don’t think their consent is informed.
Trent Horn:
I wanted to give a longer answer because Destiny was conflating two things in his question, then interrupting ... Read more on Catholic.com