In this episode, Trent shares highlights from his recent abortion dialogue with prominent YouTuber Destiny on the Whatever podcast.

 

Transcript:

Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Trent Horn: Hey, everyone. So at the time I’m recording this, I’m actually on my way from Santa Barbara, where I just finished my debate with Destiny on the Whatever Podcast on the issue of abortion, and now I’m heading to Steubenville to speak at the Defending the Faith Conference and to be on Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd. So today, I just wanted to share with you some highlights from the debate with Destiny, and I think you’ll really enjoy them. So check that out. By the way, if you could help us, if you can like this video and subscribe, that’s really helpful for us, because the more subscribers we have, that makes it easier to go and be able to appear on larger channels, like the Whatever Podcast and other venues like that, to be able to do debates on Christianity, Catholicism. If you could subscribe to the channel, that would really help us grow and reach more people, so without further ado, here are the highlights of my debate with Destiny on abortion.

So I believe that we should treat unborn human beings, human fetuses, human embryos like we would treat born human beings. There can be cases where if a born human being, even an innocent born human being, threatens the life of another innocent born human being, like if somebody, their drink gets spiked at a party, they go crazy, they grab a gun, and they’re going to shoot people, you might have to use lethal force to protect other people. But I believe that most abortions, they’re not meant to protect someone’s life. They, instead, are meant to protect elements of one’s lifestyle. I don’t mean to put it crudely, but social reasons, economic reasons. I think, just as we don’t kill toddlers just because they might be in a difficult situation, like the dad’s left, mom lost her job, we don’t kill toddlers in a really bad situation to try to make it better, we shouldn’t do the same to unborn human beings if they have the same value as a toddler does.

Destiny:
So to go back, when you asked me, is something like objectively right or wrong, I don’t believe that there is an objective right or wrong, just like I don’t think there’s an objective beautiful, an objective best song, or an objective, anything like that, no.

Trent Horn:
I would say it’s evil to rape someone. It is wrong to do that, and it is a fact that no one should ever do that, full stop. Would you just say rape makes you feel bad, you don’t like it, you’d prefer people don’t do that?

Destiny:
Yeah. That’s essentially the non-cognitive position, right? Because I don’t believe there’s a fact to be observed. My challenge would be is, how do I observe a moral fact?

Trent Horn:
Well, I just think that we have a sense of observing morality, just like we have a sense of observing the natural world, and it’s not the matrix. We have an intuitive ability to do that, and I have no reason to deny that that ability exists. Just as I know the world around us is real, even if I can’t prove that, I know that it’s an objective fact that it’s wrong to rape children, for example. Here’s what I think honestly happens. It doesn’t have to just be abortion. Give me any moral dispute.

Destiny:
Sure.

Trent Horn:
What we’ll say is, all right, here’s moral issue X. You have your view, I have my view, and we critique. And a lot of the ways we critique each other’s views is, “Your view leads to these crazy consequences.”

“But your view leads to crazy consequences.”

So then we kind of say, “Okay. Whose view leads to less crazy consequences?” and that may be the more reasonable view, we are told.

I think that happens a lot in moral discourse. So your view, then, would be this, and then I’ll talk about the consequences, and I’ll talk about just the overall, what I think is wrong with the view. That a person exists, when you lose the immediate ability to be conscious, I guess when you permanently lose it, like if you’re in a persistent vegetative state permanently, you’re no longer a person. When you lose consciousness, you’re not a person. You are when you lose it permanently, so you start to be a person when you gain it. Prior to 20 weeks, there is no person. There’s no one there with a right to life in the fetus, correct? Your view. So I have a few questions then. Would it be wrong to cause a healthy fetus to become permanently unconscious?

Destiny:
No.

Trent Horn:
Okay. So would it be wrong to cause this permanent unconsciousness to use, let’s say you could keep growing the fetus into an older body to use it for organ harvesting, maybe as a kind of sex doll, even?

Destiny:
As long as it never became conscious or didn’t have a [inaudible 00:04:27].

Trent Horn:
Never became conscious.

Destiny:
Correct.

Trent Horn:
Okay. Related question, but we’ll circle back soon. What are your thoughts on fake child pornography, using AI or virtual images?

Destiny:
Fake child pornography. I’m not going to have a strong opinion on the action itself. It’s going to be consequential in nature in terms of what are the impacts of doing it. So say you create a bunch and people stop actually abusing children, I’d probably be in favor of it. Say you create a bunch and it leads to an increased harm of children, I’d probably be opposed to it.

Trent Horn:
You have a practical objection, not an in principle objection.

Destiny:
No, it wouldn’t be like, no. Yeah.

Trent Horn:
Okay. So then it circles back, so let’s say we had people who took fetuses, made them permanently unconscious, and made them infant toddler or child sex dolls. So we have unconscious infants and toddlers. They were never conscious. They’re used as child sex dolls. Your only objection to that practice would be if it caused more pedophilia among other conscious [inaudible 00:05:31].

Destiny:
Correct. Yeah, because I would say there’s no person that’s being harmed there.

Trent Horn:
Okay, so child sex dolls could be on the table. Okay.

Destiny:
Kind of, although I would fight the framing of this, because child is intuition, pumping the idea that it’s a fully formed, developed human, and I would never call a brainless thing a child.

Trent Horn:
Fine. Yes, so then I would say-

Destiny:
A human body lacking a brain, I would say you can do whatever you want with it.

Trent Horn:
… A biological human organism that proceeds through the child stages-

Destiny:
Sure.

Trent Horn:
… That is never conscious. Suppose we had a drug that could, take the Anencephaly case. Normally, if your upper brain conscious doesn’t develop, it’s never going to develop. Suppose we had a drug in the future that could allow an anencephalic fetus to develop consciousness, but if we don’t give it the drug, it’ll never be conscious. Does that fetus, that human being, biological human being, would they have a right to that treatment?

Destiny:
I don’t think they would’ve any rights yet, because rights, I would say, are only afforded to persons, and fetuses are not afforded any rights. So no, it would not have a right to it, no.

Trent Horn:
So even if we had a newborn-

Destiny:
Correct.

Trent Horn:
… Who could be conscious if we gave them medicine, they don’t have any kind of right to that treatment?

Destiny:
No.

Trent Horn:
And I guess the-

Destiny:
Although again, I would fight on the optics framing, because when you say newborn, we’re intuition pumping a normal, healthy, nine-month fetus that’s now delivered. But I would fight that whatever you’re describing is a very inhuman-

Trent Horn:
Well, it is a newly born human being that has a brain injury or lack of parts of a brain. It is a newly born human being with a congenital, cerebral defect, and we could give this human being medication for them to have a normal and healthy life. But you’re saying this human being would have no right to it, and I guess their parents wouldn’t have a right to say, “This child ought to be treated any more than somebody who has a dog that’s injured would have a right to similar treatment.”

Destiny:
I mean, you’d have a right to treat your animals, right?

Trent Horn:
But the question of whether we, as a human society, will treat this infant will be similar as similar.

Destiny:
Is there some moral compulsion, like a healthcare system to provide emergency services or something?

Trent Horn:
Right. Yes.

Destiny:
Yeah, no. I would say no.

Trent Horn:
Okay, so no duty to provide medical care to newly born human beings who have a brain defect?

Destiny:
Kind of, although again, I’m going to fight because when you say “newly born human beings,” you’re intuition pumping a normal, healthy-

Trent Horn:
What do you mean by intuition pumping?

Destiny:
When I say intuition pump, what I mean is, do you think it’s okay to rape a person that doesn’t have a brain? Then, if I say, “Well, I guess. It’s not barely a person,” you’re like, “Okay, so it’s okay to rape people with brain injuries,” I would fight, and I would say, “Well, when you say people or person, the intuition is when somebody thinks of a person, they think of a normal, healthy, functioning person,” and then you’re plugging in all of the normative baggage of raping somebody, which ordinarily we would all agree is an unethical thing to do to a person.

Trent Horn:
Sure, or I could be describing it accurately, a newly born human being, because human being is a biological category. Most people have a deep intuition that newly born human beings are persons, even though they don’t-

Destiny:
Where does that intuition come from, though?

Trent Horn:
It comes from a moral sense that we have, the same sense we have that people are persons regardless of their skin color, first of all.

Destiny:
No, I disagree. I think it probably comes from us seeing human beings that are born and the vast majority of them being healthy, right? It was the case that only five percent of human beings that were born come out with fully functioning brains, that intuition could be markedly different, so that’s the only reason why I fight on the newborn child with a brain injury. We’re talking about an exceptional, kind of like when pro-choice people argue about abortion to save the life of the mother. They’re like, “Shouldn’t this be illegal?” pro-lifers will usually point out, “Well, that’s an exceptional circumstance. It’s a very rare case of abortion.” I would argue that whatever you’re talking about would be a 0.000001%. This is a very rare. I don’t even know if these types of brain injuries exist when people are born, except for the hydrocephalus.

Trent Horn:
Well, anencephaly is real condition. What I’m talking about is a hypothetical example of we develop medicine to treat it.

Destiny:
Sure.

Trent Horn:
And that’s not as farfetched as a brain transplant or a teleporter. I mean, 150 years ago, a hip replacement would be science fiction, and now we can do that.

Destiny:
That is true, but I don’t know if we’ve made any progress in terms of brain regrowth or transplants, but I mean, who’s to say it couldn’t happen in the future? Sure.

Trent Horn:
Right. I do have a concern. When you say, “I am intuition pumping,” I agree with you, people can have misleading examples. I’m trying to keep the language very clear here, but I would say the way you use the term makes it sound like intuition pumps are bad. That’s not traditionally how the term is used. So for example, the term comes from the philosopher, Daniel Dennett. So he coined the term, I think back in the 80s. He wrote a book in 2013 called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

He says this, “I coined the term in the first of my public critiques of the philosopher John Searle’s famous Chinese room thought-experiment. Some thinkers concluded, “I meant the term to be disparaging or dismissive. On the contrary, I love intuition pumps. That is some intuition. Pumps are excellent. Some are dubious, and only a few are downright deceptive.” So I agree with you; someone could create a thought experiment that’s deceptive in its nature, but the fact that I’m just describing what is happening to members of the human species, I don’t think that’s deceptive in any way.

Destiny:
Sure, and I partially agree. So for instance, if somebody says, “Why would you hit your own wife? That makes about as much sense as keying your own car,” we could argue that there is a pump there that, I think, like the fact that you would compare your wife to a car maybe demonstrates that there’s another issue going over the-

Trent Horn:
Yeah. Well, I would say that the example has a mistake mistaken set of assumptions built into it.

Destiny:
Sure.

Trent Horn:
Which you can do for any thought experiment.

Destiny:
Yeah, yeah. Real quick, because I understand that you’ve set up a lot of questions for, I will say, intuition pumping that kind of make my position sound insane.

Trent Horn:
You can ask me questions too. That’s fine.

Destiny:
Well, but these are the questions that I’m more interested in, because you come from a position of moral authority, where you believe that you have a set of objective facts that you want to argue in favor of. But my argument to you would be, I don’t believe that you can ever prove an objective fact without diving into The Bible. There’s no way that we can reconcile moral fact to disagreements, because we don’t have a sensory organ to perceive it. We can argue over color, we can argue over gravity, we can argue over things we can perceive, but morality, we can’t perceive. We just have how we feel about it, and I don’t think that’s a satisfying answer for a lot of people.

Trent Horn:
And I would just say, if that were true, there’s really no point in us talking about this at all right now. You’d have to say it’s not an objective fact. Is it an objective fact that the state should allow women to have abortions?

Destiny:
Is it an objective fact that the state should? Well, that “should” is doing a lot of work there. With regards to my purported morals, I would say yes, it is, that they should be allowed to have an abortion.

Trent Horn:
But it’s not objective. You’re just saying, “I would really like if we-”

Destiny:
We can have “should” without them being objective, right or no?

Trent Horn:
Well, what you’re saying here is that you would just like if the state did what you thought was good.

Destiny:
Correct.

Trent Horn:
What you agreed with, what you-

Destiny:
Yes, correct.

Trent Horn:
Or not even what you thought was good, because that’s a factual category. What makes you feel good if the world were that way.

Destiny:
Correct.

Trent Horn:
Okay. That’s an opinion.

Destiny:
It is.

Trent Horn:
Okay, and that’s why we argue with each other, is to-

Destiny:
But I believe, at the end of the day, we’re engaged in the same game. It’s just, I think, that you feel like you’re standing on more solid ground than you actually have.

Trent Horn:
I do think so. Here’s another question. Do you think post-abortive women who think they’re murderers or women who mourn miscarriage, like it’s the death of a baby, that they’re diluted?

Destiny:
Not necessarily, no.

Trent Horn:
Do you think-

Destiny:
I think that when they’re mourning, I think that they’re mourning a missed opportunity, rather than the thing itself, I think.

Trent Horn:
But if you asked them, women who’ve had abortions, and say, “I’m a murderer,” or a woman who miscarries and says, “My baby died,” I think most of them wouldn’t phrase it, because some of those women may have also gone through periods of infertility, and I’m sure they would say their period of infertility was different than the death of the human being that was residing in their womb. So I guess, let me put it to you this way.

Destiny:
What I’m saying is, I think if a woman miscarries or if she has an abortion, and later comes to have regrets about it, I think that the feeling she has is probably not like, “Oh my God. There was that three week fetus, and I terminated it.” She’s probably thinking like, “There was a baby that could have existed. I could have delivered a baby. I would’ve had a child. There was a person there that’s now gone.”

Trent Horn:
Do you think those women ever say, “I killed my baby?” not something will be-

Destiny:
Probably, yeah.

Trent Horn:
Okay.

Destiny:
They probably say that.

Trent Horn:
Do you think a woman who says, “I’m a murderer because I had my period, and I expelled an egg from my body,” she’s like, “I murdered a human being,” do you think she’s diluted?

Destiny:
If you thought you murdered a human being because you had a period?

Trent Horn:
Yeah. You passed an egg. It didn’t get fertilized, and that egg died.

Destiny:
It’s a loaded word, but I say she’s probably diluted. Yeah.

Trent Horn:
Why is she diluted?

Destiny:
I’m not even sure. I mean, periods are part of normal human menstruation. Are you crying every month because you’re murdering?

Trent Horn:
My point is that I agree.

Destiny:
But I would take the same intuitive answer, and I would say, “Does a woman cry or feel bad when she accidentally has a slightly rougher period? She doesn’t even realize that she’s miscarried, because there’s a lot of miscarriages happen early on when women don’t even know they’re pregnant yet.”

Trent Horn:
No, I agree. I am not saying that, because an unborn human being is a person, that everyone who miscarries will react properly or react with intense grief. There’s lots of born people that die. We don’t shed a tear for at all. There’s people dying right now as we’re talking, okay? But my point is that, if the unborn, if a human embryo prior to 20 weeks, would you agree that it has the same moral status as an ovum, an egg?

Destiny:
Same. I mean, they’re different things, but yeah, roughly the same, I guess, yeah. As a no moral status, yeah.

Trent Horn:
Okay, so then I would say that if a woman is, we would consider her diluted or off the reservation, or “Hey. There’s nothing to get worked up over here. It was just an ovum. You’re operating with a really mistaken sense of the world.” It seems like, under your view, we should have that same mentality towards post-abortive women prior to 20 weeks, but I think my view better aligns with most people’s intuitions that the death of a human embryo or fetus is far, far different morally than the death of an ovum.

Destiny:
But they’re not valuing that fetus. They’re valuing what it would become. And again, I agree with what you’re saying, but I think that you’re skipping over really important steps. If I steal $10,000 from somebody than I steal $100,000 from them, I didn’t, but if I stole $10,000 from somebody when they’re 20, maybe when they’re 25, they’re like, “Oh, God. If I would’ve invested this, or 27, over seven years, maybe I could have had $100,000.” So when they’re 25, they might feel really bad. They feel like, “I should be $100,000 richer, but that doesn’t change the fact that 7 years earlier, I only stole $10,000, not $100,000.” So if somebody loses a fetus, they might feel bad because now they’re missing the child that could have been, much the same that if somebody would’ve connected with the right person earlier in life, maybe they could have had a wonderful marriage, but just because they’re mourning, the fact that they didn’t meet a person at the right time, it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly divorced. The marriage never happened, the same way the child never-

Trent Horn:
So you’re saying when somebody grieves over a miscarriage at, let’s say, 12 weeks, that’s the same grief as missed connections on Craigslist like, “Oh. He could have been the one”?

Destiny:
Yeah.

Trent Horn:
Okay. I’ll leave it up to our listeners to see if that is plausible. What if I gave you this argument, hold on. Let me, I have here. Because the symmetry argument you’re making, I feel like I can make a better one that runs on the same principles. So what about this argument? I don’t endorse this for everything, but let’s just do it for this discussion. A person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual. Do you agree with that?

Destiny:
When future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual? Yeah, they lose the ability to have a conscious. Yeah, sure.

Trent Horn:
All right, so a person stops existing when future conscious experience becomes impossible for that individual. Number two, a person exists as long as future conscious experiences are probable for that individual.

Destiny:
And they had one prior. Yes, because otherwise that sentence is meaningless.

Trent Horn:
Then, why don’t I add this rider to it, then? And any conscious experiences they have must be psychologically connected to any previous experiences.

Destiny:
Maybe? It’s just the sentence that you gave, a person exists as long as future conscious experience is possible, so you’ve got the future conscious experience on there. But when you say, “A person exists,” that person, I think, begs the conscious experience. I don’t know what it means for a person to exist if there is no conscious experience yet.

Trent Horn:
I’m just trying to do the exact same symmetry argument you’re doing, that if you stop existing, if you were an individual, and you stop existing, when for this individual future conscious experiences are impossible-

Destiny:
Correct.

Trent Horn:
Then, the other one would be, “For this individual, this individual is a person as long as future conscious experiences are probable.”

Destiny:
Yeah, but when you’re making the graph and the math thing, you have to have the filled in circle and then the ray.

Trent Horn:
It’s just saying, “Look, this person’s future conscious experiences, they’re impossible. You are not a person.”

Destiny:
Correct.

Trent Horn:
So the symmetry for that, in fact I’m actually being generous, because the symmetry would not be improbable. It’d be possible.

Destiny:
Sure.

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