Trent Horn vs. Destiny on Abortion | Pastor Reacts

Trent Horn’s Framework for the Abortion Debate

Well, well, well, it is Friday. It is six o 'clock in Nashville. That means it's time to party. I'm your excellent host, Nate Sala, and this is Wise Disciple, where we're helping you become the effective Christian that you were meant to be.

Let's also react to Trent Horn versus Destiny on the issue of abortion. Did you see that one? Let's get into that. Let's put a pin in it, because I want to.

Talk about your view about abortion, though, because I think when it comes, I think, here's what I think honestly happens. It doesn't have.

To just be abortion. Okay, so I'm gonna do what I always do. I highly encourage you all to go back and watch the full thing. I'm trying to see, is it two hours and 50 minutes or something? It's very long, right?

Maybe you already have, so that's excellent, right? I saw this a while back. I think I was wrapping up with my time in Georgia with the Summit students, but I saw that Trent Horn was on the Whatever podcast with Destiny debating him on abortion, and I thought to myself, self, we have to react to this.

Now, again, very long discussion. It's not a debate, okay? At least not in the more formal type of debates that we are accustomed to at this channel, but I think what I queued up right here, this aspect of the debate that we're about to watch, is I think it's one of the most watched moments in the debate, and I want to find out why.

So let's get into this discussion between Trent Horn and Destiny on abortion.

Sure. We'll say is, all right, here's moral issue X. You have your view, I have my view, and a lot of the ways we critique each other's views is, your view leads to these crazy consequences. Yeah, but your view leads to crazy consequences.

So then we kind of say, okay, whose view leads to kind of less crazy consequences, and that may be the more reasonable view. Okay, so what Trent.

Is doing right now, and I love this, I love it, because it sets him up well. Trent is setting the stage for the series of leading questions that he's about to ask Destiny, okay? I've talked about this at length in previous videos.

Whoever lays the better framework, okay, more often than not wins the debate. I literally just said that, all right? Now, who is laying a framework right now? It's Trent, okay? But when you lay a framework and the audience adopts it, it does so much to help you as a debater on the debate stage, right?

Normally, these kinds of things, like laying a framework, this is usually something that happens like in opening statements, and there really wasn't like, again, a formal opening statement for either gentleman.

It was more like a conversation starter, in my opinion. But debaters know this. You lay a framework, right? Again, framework, that's the story that you tell the audience about the debate itself. These are the arguments I'm putting forward.

Here are my contentions. My opponent needs to put forward these kinds of arguments if he's going to win this debate. Trent does this extremely well. William Lane Craig does this extremely well. And notice, Trent is setting up the ball so he can spike it, okay?

I'm mixing metaphors and illustrations, but I love this. Trent is saying, hey, very often these kinds of conversations end with pro-lifers being critiqued for their crazy stances, you know, the crazy consequences because of their stance, based on their view.

So, Trent says, okay, fair enough. Let's take a look at crazy consequences on the side of pro-abortion, and let's see who has the crazier set of consequences, because maybe the one who has less crazy consequences should win this entire thing.

Now, he didn't say that exactly, but it's certainly implied. So, now he just framed the discussion in a very interesting way. So, let's watch and see.

What happens. I think that happens a lot in moral discourse. Yeah. So, I want it—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 are not a person anymore, 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? So, I have a few questions, then. Would it be wrong to cause a healthy fetus to become.

Permanently unconscious? No. Okay. Did you see that? Did you catch that? Would it be wrong to cause a healthy fetus to become permanently unconscious? Something that is not out of the realm of impossible in today's day and age, right?

And Destiny is at least consistent with his own view, right? He says no. Now, if you're new to the debate stuff, Trent is likely doing something called setting the garden path, right? Setting the garden path just means that these questions that he's asking, they seem more simple and benign up front, right?

Although, I mean, my goodness, there's nothing benign about what Destiny just affirmed. But the questions should be leading to some kind of knockout punch in just a moment, right? So, you ask a series of simple yes or no questions, but this is all setting up your opponent to be pinned against the wall, intellectually.

Speaking. So, let's see what happens. 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?

As long as it never became conscious or didn't have the fibrinium. Never became.

Conscious. Correct. Okay. So, I think the moment already came. I think the moment already happened, okay? Given your view and your stance, do you think that it's morally acceptable to keep a human being in a state of permanent unconsciousness in order to harvest its body for organs or to violate it sexually?

If you are anyone on either side of this discussion and you are intellectually honest, you should be having a visceral reaction right now. That is the most horrif like disgusting, horrific thing to do to another human being, conscious or unconscious.

And given Destiny's view, that's totally acceptable, guys. Why? Because according to Destiny, a human being is not a person until they are capable of having a conscious experience. Okay, this is what he said in his opener at the outset of the debate.

You should check it out, okay? I'm gonna after the livestream is over, I'll put the link in the notes, okay? If that's your stance, then these are the consequences of your view. Keeping a human being in a state of permanent unconsciousness in order to like, in order to medically roofie and violate it or use it as har like, a harvester for organs.

Does not a human being have rights? I feel I feel like Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, you know, like, maybe he has something to say about this, right? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you if you dose us and drug us into unconsciousness, are we not a person?

Amazing. Let's keep going.

Consequences of Denying Personhood to the Unborn

Related question, but we'll circle back soon. What are your thoughts on fake child pornography using AI or virtual images? Oh, fake child pornography. I'm not gonna have a strong opinion on the on the action itself.

It's gonna be consequential in nature in terms of, like, 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.

You have a practical objection? Well, yeah, so well, hold on. Not an in-principle.

Objection? No, that wouldn't be like a no. Yeah. Okay.

Consequentialism isn't gonna help matters in this area because it it really only considers the outcome as a means of making decisions in the first place, you know? So, in other words, consequentialism doesn't factor into the equation a human being's inherent value and worth.

That's why consequentialism where are my philosophy, you know, students in the in the chat here? Consequentialism and utilitarianism, they're this is why there are two ripples in the same pond, right?

And the critique is essentially the same, in my opinion. Unless you just front-load inherent human value into your calculations, you're not even going to think about inherent human value in your decision-making as a consequentialist, okay?

As a consequentialist, you you have to make a decision based on its consequences alone, and that's it. And see, look what happens. Destiny begins by front-loading his view of persons as being those who have only human conscious experience.

Those who don't have human conscious experience are not persons. And I'm not sure if he's seeing what's coming up next, but Trent is setting him up again for an upper-covered question. Do you see this coming?

Right? If you are accepting a fake child pornography because somehow you think that that's more beneficial in some utilitarian sense for pedophiles to view, as opposed to real children, what happens when you throw in human beings that you don't think are real people?

Right? What happened what happens to the treatment of these folks? You see, ladies and gentlemen, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities. As a matter of fact, how do you think Southerners argued to justify slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War?

I have to say that quietly because I'm in Nashville now. How do you think they argued, right? You guessed it, they argued from a utilitarian point of view, right? Slavery provided cheap labor and it helped more people than it hurt.

But my goodness, how much damage was done in the name of it? We're still dealing with the damage of slavery and racism in this country. What do you think is going to happen with the consequences of destiny's view on human beings?

That 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, you know, 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 children. Correct. Yeah, because I would say there's no person is being harmed there.

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

Yes, so then I would say a human body lacking a brain, I would say you can do whatever you want with it. A biological human organism that proceeds through the child stages, that is never conscious. Sure, there we go.

All right.

Well, what's, you know, what's wrong with using the phrase human being? You know? Last I checked, the word being simply refers to existence, right? I mean, not that you have some kind of human conscious experience.

I don't, maybe I'm missing something here. But notice now, Destiny challenges the framing of language, right? He calls this intuition pumping. I'm not sure what that means, not familiar with that phrase.

But of course, there's, you know, maybe you can make the argument there's problems with Trent's characterizations. Because the problem is Destiny's view, right? Come on now. That was a horrible joke. It's not Trent's characterization that is the problem, okay?

Trent is using terms carefully here. What is a human being not having a conscious experience? I know Destiny says it's not a person, but does that mean it's also not a human being? I don't think so. So then what's the issue here, right?

The issue is, I think, Destiny realizes his view leads to absolutely horrific ethical scenarios for human beings that, again, are not impossible in today's day and age. Now I'm gonna talk, what I wanted to try to do was talk a little bit more about identifying Trent's strategy here.

But I'm just gonna, I'm gonna let this play out a little bit.

More. So let's take a look at some more. Would it be wrong to kill a newborn who has never been conscious? Assuming it lacked the ability to be conscious, sure. It's not, you can, you can kill it. There's nothing to kill.

You could end the existence of whatever that is, yes. Well suppose it didn't permanently lack the ability. If we, if we gave it drugs or something like that, or maybe it'll naturally come out of it in a few months.

When you say come out of it, we start to get into an area where you're like kind of disintegrating my concept of consciousness. So I consider conscious experience to be an emergent property of the underlying structures of the brain communicating with each other.

So if you're telling me what if you had all the underlying structures but you didn't have that conscious experience, it's a really hard one for me to conceptualize. Let's just say the structures still have to develop, I guess.

Sure, then it's an undeveloped, yeah, then I would say it's free game for whatever. Yeah, for example, I think this.

Came up a little bit in your dialogue with Lila. I mean, let me keep going. You have an.

Anencephalic child who doesn't have an upper brain. Someone like Jackson Buell. Yeah. People can look that up online. Doctors said he'll probably die. Most anencephalic children, the upper brain does not develop.

So you just, the neural tube fails to close. So you just have a lower brain. Mm-hmm. And Jackson lived to be about five. Now his parents claimed that he did exhibit signs of consciousness. Some other people might debate that, I don't know.

But you would say that if he, if a newborn didn't, you know, never develop consciousness, I mean, I guess it's like a fetus never developed it. The structures haven't.

Developed yet in the brain. Okay. Again, this is absolutely horrific. Just to say the things Destiny is saying, and with a straight face, oh yeah, it's free game. On what? Human beings that we can manipulate into permanent unconsciousness and then cut them up and take their organs?

Or even violate them? Oh gosh. Now, notice Trent is, you know, as he's sort of going through the questions, he's scratching off some things on a piece of paper. It looks like he came in with these questions in hand, ready to go.

And he's going line by line down the paper and just firing away these questions. This is what I love about Trent Horn, which, by the way, he joined me on the channel for an excellent interview on debating and what he does to prep.

And you should check out that interview if you are at all interested in debates. Trent is probably one of the most formidable debaters on the scene right now. I'm not a Catholic, but I can see a great debater.

I can see it as clear as I see the sun in the sky. And he is formidable for good reason. He does his homework. He is always well prepared. Good for him. These questions are awesome. Here's one that'd be interesting.

Suppose we had a drug. Translation, you know, here's an ethical question that I'm.

Going to use to wipe the floor with you. Take the anencephaly case. Normally, if your brain consciousness 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 human fetus, that human being, biological human being, would they have a right to that treatment? I don't think they would have any rights yet because rights, I would say, are only afforded to persons.

Fetuses are afforded any rights, so no, it would not have a right to it, no. So even if we had a newborn who could be conscious if we gave them medicine, they don't have any kind of right to that treatment?

No. And I guess.

Again, I would fight. So we won't have a clear incentive to invent medicine in the future that might reverse this horrible condition in children? If destiny is correct and human beings don't have rights, unless they have conscious experience, then maybe we shouldn't jump on, you know, figuring out a solution to this issue because these children don't have rights anyway?

Got it. Which, by the way, this cuts both ways, okay, right? I mean, we're just talking about children right now, but what about adults who also are not having a conscious experience for any number of reasons?

Are they not persons as well? There's all kind of ethical dilemmas that arise out of destiny's view. I would.

Fight on the optics for me 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—.

Well, it is a newly born human being that has a brain injury or a lack of parts of a brain, right? 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.

I mean, you have a right to treat your animals, right? But, well, the question of whether we as a human society will treat this infant will be similar—. As in, like, is there some moral compulsion on, like, a health care system to provide emergency services or something?

Yes, yeah. Yeah, no, I would say no. Okay, so not provide— no duty to provide medical care to newly born human beings who have a brain defect. Kind of, although, again, I'm gonna fight because when you say newly born human beings, you're intuition pumping a normal, healthy—.

What do you mean— what do you mean by intuition? When I say intuition pump—. Okay, here we go. Yeah, what do you mean by that, right? I mean, it's like, would you— do you think it's okay to rape a person that doesn't have a brain, and then if I say, well, I guess it's a— it's not barely a person, you're like, okay, so you're— 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, like, a normal, healthy, functioning person, and then you're plugging in, like, all of the normative baggage of raping somebody, which is ordinarily, we would all agree, is an unethical thing to do to a person.

All right. So it sounds like Destiny's.

Issue is he doesn't like the loaded language that Trent is using. Except, is it loaded? If these are accurate terms, you know? No, it's not. Sure. Or I could be, in.

Describing it accurately, a newly born human being, because human being is a biological category. Yeah. Most people have a deep intuition that newly born human beings are persons, even though they don't—.

Where does that intuition come from, though? It comes from the— Irrelevant. —moral sense that we have, the same sense we have that people are persons regardless of their skin color. 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?

If it was the case that only 5 of human beings that were born, you know, come out with fully functioning brains, that intuition could be markedly different. Okay. 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, like, abortions to save the life of the mother, and they're like, shouldn't this be legal? Pro-lifers will usually point out, well, that's an exceptional circumstance, a very rare case of abortion.

Right. I would argue that whatever you're talking about would be a .0000001%. That's a very rare— I don't even know if these types of brain injuries exist when people are born, except for, like, the hydrocephalus.

Yeah, but so what? You know? I mean, first of all, I would challenge the notion that if only 5 of people were born with fully functioning brains, that our intuitions about their being persons would change.

I would need to hear some kind of more fully formed argument, then. Well, it could go another way if things were different, you know? Okay. Maybe is not an argument. The other thing is, so what? I mean, like, the fact that we do have intuitions about human beings as persons is a separate issue from the question of whether or not Trent's characterizations of human beings is accurate or not.

And guess what? It's accurate. It's spot-on. Trent did not call human beings persons, okay? And the word born—I mean, how do you—like, what word do you use, you know? The word born describes the process of a human being emerging from the womb into the world.

I mean, these are—like, what are the alternatives? These are not problematic terms at all. As a matter of fact, it seems like Destiny wants Trent to use dehumanizing terminology in order to describe human beings, which seems an awful lot like he's doing the very thing he says Trent is doing, which is manipulating language to advance his position.

...real condition. What I'm talking about is a hypothetical example of we develop medicine to treat it. And that's not as far-fetched 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.

That is true, but I don't know if we've made any progress in terms of, like, brain regrowth or transplants or—but I mean, who's to say it could happen in the future? Right. I do have a concern, like, 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. Okay, so notice—so, Trent is reading—so, go back. There was a moment where Trent, he kind of leaned over under the table, right? While he asked Destiny for a clarification on his definition of intuition pumping, he reached down and he pulled something out from underneath the table.

That is probably a brief, okay? We call them briefs in debate. I had a whole conversation about this with William Lane Craig. You should check it out, because he talks about how he writes his own briefs in debates.

But a brief is, in a nutshell, it's basically, like, bullet-pointed pieces of information, you know, bullet-pointed arguments that will help you recall what you need to do in the moment. You write these briefs out as you prep for the debate ahead of time.

And so, when it's appropriate in the moment, because you've anticipated, we might actually go here, you pull out your brief and you use it to help you. This is exactly what Trent did. See, this shows that Trent knew this moment would happen, which means he is an exemplar when it comes to prep.

That's why he's so formidable. I love this. He anticipated this before he even went to the podcast. He planned all of this in advance. Way to go, Trent.

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.

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 is, like, the fact that you would compare your wife to a car maybe demonstrates that there's another issue going on.

Well, yeah, I would say that the example has a mistaken set of assumptions built into it, which you can do for any thought experiment. Yeah, but the only reason why I'm fighting on this particular point is because oftentimes when we say a person or a child, there's a feature in our mind of what a feature complete person or child is, but when we say a person or child absent, things that.

Are typically essential. Yeah, but Trent has been careful to not say person at all. I've been keeping track of this, okay? He hasn't said that word not even once. He has said child, though. But then again, like, what, that's what I mean.

Like, what word should you use to describe a developing human being that is more specific to that age bracket associated with a child? Like, what, you know, without writing a dissertation in order to explain and describe that thing, you know?

What does Destiny propose we use to describe the types of human beings that he says are not actually persons? Widgets? Should we call them.

Worthless? I'm not sure. To that person or child, it feels a little iffy at the end to say, okay, so you'd be okay doing this to a person or a child. I'm okay with it. I'm only marking it for the audience because I know that the way that you're phrasing it makes it sound a certain type of way, and I want to fight the rhetorical strategy.

Here's another question, then. Now, you would agree, though, that infants have consciousness. They're aware of things. We'll talk about the level of consciousness. So it'd be wrong to kill them. What if a human being was injured, and because of their injury, they permanently were at the level of consciousness of a newborn?

Would you say that that's still a person? I believe so. My understanding is that, like, once those parts in the brain are communicating and you've got some level of conscious experience, it's there. It's not, again, like I said, I don't believe that you go from, like, lizard consciousness to dog consciousness to ape consciousness to human consciousness.

Like, once it's there, it's there. It's got to be in that bucket of human conscious experiences, even if it might be relatively subdued. Do you think a three-year-old human being is more conscious of the outside world than a newborn infant?

Whether or not it's more or less conscious, I don't know if that's as much part of the development of the brain versus the acquisition of sense data. So if you take a one-month-old, and for some reason it's, like, a little bit developmentally delayed in terms of, like, it's the brain growth, but it can still collect and accrue a whole bunch of experiences, then that level of development might be enough to gain a surprising understanding of the world.

I mean, obviously, it's going to be cognitive impairment, but I don't know if, like, the three-year-old is more conscious because they have a higher level of consciousness or if they've just been spending more time collecting data about the world.

Like, I would say a 25-year-old is probably more conscious of the world than a 10-year-old, but I don't know if that's because, like, the 25-year-old developmentally or consciously from an experience is, like, more mature because they've collected more data I agree with you.

So there's a conflation here. Maybe it's just a confusion of terms, and maybe I cut Trent off before he was about to say this himself, but consciousness, or maybe a better way of saying that is, like, conscious perception, I think, is not the same thing as a person's experience of consciousness.

Okay, so those are two different things, and it sounds like destiny is conflating them. So, you know, the fact that I have glasses on my face is one thing that is separate from my experience viewing the world through my glasses, right?

Will I notice different things about the world through my glasses as I get older? Sure. But can I still view the world with 20 -20 vision the same way I did the first day I got glasses? Yeah. You see that, right?

It just—it sounds like destiny is conflating these two things, whether he realizes it or not. If consciousness is defined merely as someone's experience of consciousness, well, wait a sec. That's almost verbatim what a person is defined as according to destiny.

Remember, the definition of a person is a human being who is capable of having a conscious experience, right? So it seems like this is parsing words too much right now. It's not, though, because if we investigate the foundation of destiny's position and realize that he's making these kinds of mistakes, then we have a good reason to reject his position.

A 25-year-old will have more conscious experiences, but I'm talking about the very act of perceiving the outside world. I would say that a 5-year-old and a 25-year-old, it's pretty similar. Time might run a little bit slower for the 5-year-old.

They haven't been around as long. That's why summer break felt forever when we were kids, and now it goes by fast when we're parents. But I have three kids. I've seen the infant stage all the time. They're basically eating machines, pooping machines.

They can't recognize you just by sight. Would you agree that an infant and then a 1-year-old, their brain has to get bigger and develop more neurons and synaptic connections to have more different kinds of experiences, wouldn't they?

I don't know if I would say it's I don't think I would call them an inhuman conscious.

This is a setup. This is a setup, Destiny. Watch out. Trent is setting you up again. You can tell, too. Trent has a tell. I don't know if you noticed this, but he gets this steel look in his eye at the end of setup questions because he knows he's about to pounce like a lion on an unsuspecting gazelle.

It's a setup,.

Destiny. Though prior to that, this is probably just like part of the development of a conscious experience. But my understanding is that even in the womb, I believe children, whatever you would call it, like a third trimester developed thing can identify differences in languages, for instance.

So I don't know. I think I take issue sometimes with the framing that like a one-month-old is like a lizard. The third trimester fetus hears different sounds. Can differentiate different languages. I believe that like on newborns, I think they tested it.

It was like one, three, and five days, I think. But you can test like the, I think it's, they hook something up to the head and they see the differences between the native language, a non-native language, and then gibberish.

And I believe that newborn, like within a week, can already differentiate different sounds that are not part of the native language. So I don't think like a one-day-old is like just a blob that has no concept of anything.

I think even in the womb, like fetuses are already starting to accrue data about the outside world. I agree with that. But do you think a dog could probably understand, like dogs can understand the content of words like sit and stay?

I don't know. I'm not entirely sure about that. I'm pretty agnostic on the conscious experience of animals. I feel like human conscious experience is a really sophisticated, sapient thing. I don't know if I would say that animals have anything even resembling our experience.

I'm not entirely sure. I agree. It's not like you or me. But have you ever had a dog? Lots, yeah. Did you ever train them with commands? Yeah. Okay. So it seems like like an infant, they don't recognize like verbal commands.

It'd be great if they did. Or like the example I gave with pigs. People can Google this online, pig plays video games. You know, they have pigs, they have to move the cursor. Not going to Google it. To get it onto the blue dot and they get a treat and they can do that more than just what random chance would allow.

Like pigs seem pretty smart. I think it'd be fair to say they have more of a conscious awareness of the world than like what a newborn infant has. I don't know if that's true. I think that smart is a word that we use, but I don't know if like ability to problem solve or do Pavlovian associations is the same type of thing as having a robust, sapient experience that humans have.

I do agree that dogs and pigs and dolphins especially can learn really complicated intricate patterns, but I don't know if they have the same like semantic understanding of the world or type of conscious, sapient experience that humans do, even if they can do really complicated pattern recognition essentially.

Yes, because this is what I'm trying to figure out here is that, so let's say someone's permanently at the newborn level, so they're very disabled. So in that case, do you think there's people if that person might be on a feeding tube because they might be really hard to manage?

Imagine a 35 year old who acts like a newborn, might have to restrain them, maybe can't spoon-feed them, might put them on a feeding tube. People in that situation might be very difficult and they're not gonna have rational experiences like you or me.

Do you think a lot of people would want to withhold food in that case? Possibly, but I think probably social contract and everything with the agreement that we have, we wouldn't do that to old people that need a lot of help with themselves.

We don't do that to people with extraordinary mental disabilities like low-functioning autistic people or something. So this would probably fall in the category of protected people due to the rights that we afford everybody in society.

And so you don't have a principled objection against the social contract being widened to include unborn human beings. You just personally don't agree with it. Would I have a problem with it being widened?

I mean, I would because I would disagree with the widening of it. I disagree with the moral justification for it, I guess, or the metaphysical justification for it. Because I don't think that, I don't think a one-self thing is the same thing as an adult or even a third trimester fetus.

It's not the same. I agree, it's not the same. I don't think it's the same thing in kind. Well, it is the same biological kind. You're saying that it's moral value changes, but as a moral anti-realist, you can't believe moral value exists subjectively.

It's just your opinion. Yeah, but just because you're an anti-realist doesn't mean that you can't have opinions on, you just don't believe that those opinions are rooted in a moral fact, right? Right, you're entitled to your opinions, however incorrect they may be.