Rant/peeve of the day: Moral Equivalence

How many times have you heard someone oppose abortion or stem cell research because they claim that embryos are the equivalent of people and that they are morally the same thing? Now, if someone says that they oppose abortion or stem cell research because they think that it is unethical and that any benefit that is gained for the two does not outweigh the moral cost, then that's fine, and I respect their conviction. It is when people say make the claim of moral equivalence that I start to wag my finger.

A popular thought experiment is this: imagine that you are in a burning building. There is a container full of embryos that you could save, and there is a little kid in the room that you could save. You could save only one, not both. Which would you save? If someone truly believe that they are morally equivalent, then they would save the container containing multiple embryos (and potentially many kids) instead of saving just one child. I would venture a guess that almost everyone would opt to save the kid. The tradition of women and children coming first before men when evacuating a ship is another example, and the murder of a mother and a child typically carries a stronger sentence and attracts much greater moral outrage than killing a pregnant woman.

Of course, these are not choices that people would like to make, and these are choices that most people would not face. And if people want to say that the destruction of an embryo is so terrible that we should not do it, that's fine. Just don't say that it is so terrible to the point of it being the moral equivalent of killing a living person. One can argue that embryos carry enough moral value that they should not be destroyed without having to go as far as to establishing this false equivalence.

Unfortunately, this is a practice that is not going to go away anytime soon. This false equivalence is more effective as a rhetorical tool because it plucks people's emotional strings. Also, I suspect that people actually believe in this false equivalence because it allows them to deal with absolutes, even though reality is clearly relative (and you know how conservative moralists just hate relativism). That most people never have to make these sorts of choices makes it easy to avoid the reality that this equivalence is false and untenable. This equivalence keeps them off the slippery slope of trying to relatively quantify the moral value of something. But reality is reality, and people should not resort to the delusion of absolutism simply because they want to stay off an unpleasant slippery slope. Unless you have someone who would rather save a box containing multiple embryos instead of a single living, breathing child from a burning building, then the cold hard reality is that this is indeed relative and that there does need to be an open debate on the relative moral values to be assigned.

Edit: Perhaps a better illustration would be this: An apple and an orange are both classified as fruit. However, that they have the same classification does not necessitate that an apple and an orange are thus equivalent and the same thing. Similarly, if people want to claim that embryonic destruction is in the same "morally incorrect" category as killing a living human, they can do that, but such a classification does not necessitate that the two are also morally equivalent (and as the thought experiment above shows, they are quite far from it). In short, people should not mistake similarity for equivalence. While this point may seem like a mere quibble, it does have implications in the nature of the rhetoric because people should defend and explain the reasons for assigning a certain amount of moral value to embryonic life instead of just conveniently invoking a sleight of hand by calling them morally equivalent.

This entry was edited on 2006/11/15 at 11:19:25 GMT -0500.

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World estimations of the number of terminations carried out each year is somewhere between 20 and 88 million.

3,500 per day / 1.3 million per year in America alone.

50% of that 1.3 million claimed failed birth control was to blame.

A further 48% had failed to use any birth control at all.

And 2% had medical reasons.

That means a stagering 98% may have been avoided had an effective birth control been used.

I am a 98% pro-lifer, 2% Pro-choicer, who has no religious convictions at all . I didn't need the fear of god or anything else to come to my decision, just a good sense of what is right and wrong.
You see we were all once a fetus. Is it beyond the realm of possibilities that when your mother first learned she was carrying you, she may have considered her options? What if she had decided to terminate? Would that have been OK?
You would not exist, if you have children they would not exist, and your (husband or wife) would be married to someone else. You would have been deprived of all your experiences and memories. In this day and age with terminations being so readily available and so many being carried out, if you make it to full term you can consider yourself lucky.
Lucky you had a mother that made the choice of life for you.

Don't you think they all deserve the same basic human right, LIFE?

At the point of conception is when life began for you. This was the start of your existence. Your own personal big bang. Three weeks after conception heart started to beat. First brain waves recorded at six weeks after conception. Seen sucking thumb at seven weeks after conception.

Though it pains me to say it , there may always be a need for the 2% medical reasons and such, but that's all.

So how do we get the other 98% to be responsible...................

How do we get them to be honest with themselves, about when life begins.

Everyone knows life begins at conception, egg+sperm = human being

Sadly many prefer an occasional abortion, over using birth control, they have all kinds of reasons, each of them selfish.

Then there's the christian impossition,(all a bit talibanish), and their men in high places.(church and state should never entwine) their stance against b/c has only added to the numbers.

Sanity must provale, abortions should remain available and safe to the 2% and the rest need to have a good look at themselves and get their act together.

People have to stop using abortion as birth control.......

I'd like to see effective birth control made available to all who can't afford it.

Um. Yea. Thanks for that lovely automated copy-and-paste response that has absolutely nothing to do with what the post is about. *debates deleting your off-topic comment*

What is it with these people who just sit by Technorati and go off and pounce on every post that is made even if they are related only tangentially?!

The funny thing is, I actually never took a stand on the issue of abortion or stem cells anywhere in the post.

The topic is a mostly technical one, about the format and nature of the discourse and rhetoric.

If conception is NOT when life begins,and a clump of cells is just that and not a living human being.
Then at least concider this-

Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less. Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.
Safe inside your mother until you were born.

Once again, I invite you to read the thing carefully. At which point do I say a single thing about conception? How on Earth is conception is remotely relevant to the issue that I'm talking about? Your posts are grossly off-topic and irrelevant.

(because they claim that embryos are the equivalent of people and that they are morally the same thing?)

To determine whether an embrio is equivalent or not you would need to work out at what point your existance actually commenced. When you came to be.

I'd suggest it was soon after conception, after the sperm met the egg and once they are implanted. Is that not when life began for you.

Take care

Oh that was me

But does that mean that they are truly equivalent (the answer is yes only if your response to the thought experiment is that a box full of embryos is more valuable than a living, breathing child). Or are you one of those many people who mistake moral similarity for moral equivalence (because the difference between the two often do not become apparent for people until they start considering the differences in edge cases like the one presented in the thought experiment).

I concidered your thought experiment and found myself frozen, unable to decide , Im afraid we all would have perrished.

And yes I believe that once the sperm and the egg are one and implanted that is someone, someone just like you.

take care

Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less.
Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered.... to develope further.
Safe inside your mother's womb until you were born.

Shouldn't they all be so lucky ?

"But does that mean that they are truly equivalent (the answer is yes only if your response to the thought experiment is that a box full of embryos is more valuable than a living, breathing child). Or are you one of those many people who mistake moral similarity for moral equivalence (because the difference between the two often do not become apparent for people until they start considering the differences in edge cases like the one presented in the thought experiment)."

My take on this issue is this. To really do justice to the abortion issue, we have to imagine the embryos are living human beings as much as the child is, though just not as developed. As if they aren't, then the choice is clear (save the child).

This is wherei t needs to be analyzed from, and I'm not sure how to do it. Also, relativism and absolutism need not be taken to the exclusion of the other -- there could be things that are relative, while others are absolute, and things that contain elements of both. In addition, the type of "relativism" that I've often seen critiqued (and that I disagree with) seems more to be the type that says morals are defined and redefined via cultural/social/etc. norms (memetic definition of morality, i.e. morality is defined by primarily by the cultural meme.). This I don't like, since then we could say it's okay to rape children if the culture of the mob agrees it's so, yet that just seems _wrong_, plain and simple. Thus there seem to be some absolute standards as well by which we must judge other cultures and our own. Yet then in other cases, as mentioned here with the embryo box, there are other factors that introduce a relative element. Another teaser: what if the rescuer came from some culture that believed the embryos should be rescued instead of the child?

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