An Abortion Dialogue

Yes, but the same could be said of children and the elderly (that they are currently not very valuable to society), but it is still illegal to murder them.

Babies aren't really fungible; if you have the baby that would have grown up to be Carlos Mencia (to carry on with your example) you can't grow another would-be Carlos Mencia if you change your mind. You just don't know what you're discarding when you discard a baby.

In contrast, babies are basically fungible.

This doesn't follow. Just because you don't have data about what counterfactually the baby would have turned into doesn't mean that the babies are fungible. We don't in general keep the genetic code of aborted babies or calculate how that would interact with their environment. Just because we can't easily predict what the distinctions would be doesn't mean that the babies are all identical.

The nonfungibility of adults is more visible than the nonfungibility of babies, but babies are not identical either.

After reading the entire debate this comment spawned... if the goal is to determine whether we should support abortion legalization and fewer restrictions (possibly up to infanticide? (!)), or perhaps support more heavy regulation, it seems like arguing over whether an action is reactive, proactive, etc can't possibly have any relevance, and seems like a particularly virtuist way of looking at things.

Are we not solely interested in consequences? What are our values and how do we maximize them? Clearly saying we value "human life" isn't enough, and we need to be more narrow. What do we actually value? If we say we value all potential humans, should we be spending all of our time impregnating women, being pregnant, or researching how to shorten pregnancy and/or grow humans in a test tube? If we draw the line in what we value somewhere else, do we end up with post-pregnancy abortions? Is that okay? I feel like there are real questions, and the reason those questions are interesting is because we can't just take the copout answer of "proactive actions bad, acts of omission okay" because consequentialism won't let us.

Abstinence, when used as birth control, still looks like commission to me (although the concept of 'commission' isn't the most well-defined of terms).

Suppose that you would have sex in the hypothetical case that you were sterile. Then, in the real world where you aren't sterile, renouncing sex in favour of sleeping doesn't seem any less of a 'commission' than putting a latex barrier between your genitals while you have sex.

Ah, yes indeedy true. I guess I was thinking of abstinence. So wrong distinction. More likely, then: abortion is done to a specific embryo who is thereby prevented from being, and it's done reactively; there's no question that when you have an abortion it's about deciding to kill this particular embryo. Contraceptive use on the other hand is nonspecific and proactive; it doesn't feel like "I discard these reproductive cells which would have become a person!", it feels like exerting prudent control over your life.

I think taking birth control precautions is pretty comission-y.

I must concur. We've been judging the wasting of sperm as an act of commission at least as far back as when Genesis was written.

Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother. But what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD; so He took his life also.

Apparently that sperm really was sacred.

Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?

Or a serial killer with a large family? "Sure he might have killed 3 people -- but he's a father of 5!"

I'm actually pretty sure some people who have had 12 kids are heroes or at least very altruistic when objectively analysed.

Many many people that made great contributions have come from large families of overachievers. Genetics and upbringing matter a lot. And productivity gains made by lets say 6 of the kids can easily overshadow anything that one individual could have done (even when adjusted for the fact that the kids start contributing later).

However overall if we look at the world today, the vast majority of people having 12 kids aren't heroes.

Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class "people". (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)

What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?

Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?

If you keep trying to justify values instrumentally, you'll wind up in an infinite regress.

The new material is internally consistent, but of course you're going to lose the people

One of my unstated goals is to show that both speakers are wrong about personal identity; the pro-lifer is incoherent or absurd, and the other is consistent but as you point out infanticide clashes with naive intuitions. The second is 'less wrong', but that's still not 'all right'.

Imprisonment, execution and corporal punishment follow some behaviour that we agree is wrong, unlike pregnancy.

The retributive aspect is not important to the many people who hold the deterrence view of punishment, and no one holds that, say, the draft or taxation is punishment of people for wrong behavior.

I think there's a relevant distinction between bodily autonomy and financial autonomy.

Why would you think that? Financial wealth for most people is just their labor in another form, and labor is just their bodily autonomy. A job is a way of trading time for money. The connection between money and bodily autonomy is ancient - consider the countless forms of slavery, debt slavery, and debtor prison or work houses throughout history.

More discussion of where, exactly, such a line should be drawn. I'm not saying he shouldn't have bitten it eventually, mind.

If you draw the line anywhere, you've bitten the bullet. The rest is just applied economics - as the joke about the woman goes, we've already established what Apologist is and now that'd just be setting his price.

The 4 month old will produce 80 years of utility if saved, for 18 years of investment: if this is a bad bargain, reproduction always is. The adult, if saved, will produce 50 years of utility for 0 further investment. This means a higher rate of return on the adult, but a higher total future "utility revenue" from the child. Depending on who's making the investment and whether that matters to you, the answer could be either way. But now that I've written it out like this, I can see your point: the adult does have a higher rate of return.