[ronigafni]

Hi, I was recently having a discussion about abortion with a friend of mine and some points were made that I wanted clarity on in terms of whether or not they were logically sound. I hope this is not controvertible or offensive to anyone, I don’t want to debate the merits of the arguments (or even say which side I fall on). I just want to know whether they contain any logical fallacies.

1) Progressives who believe that nobody has the right to make choices for a woman over her own body are being inconsistent when they support the redistribution of wealth for the “common good” because (assuming we ignore the possible rights of the baby) both cases are essentially about protecting the rights of property (the mothers body and the fruits of ones labor) and liberty (the right to do what you want with your property).

2) If one believes in late term abortion on the grounds that the child is living off of the mother and is a part of her body, then he/she should also be ok with abortion after the baby has been fully extracted from the mother but is still attached to the umbilical chord.

3) If one believes in late term abortion on the grounds that the child is living off of the mother and is a part of her body, then he/she should also be ok a dominant Siamese twin killing his/her parasitic twin

4) A quote from Ron Paul: “The fact is that a fetus has legal rights not to be injured or aborted by unwise medical treatment, violence, or accidents. Ignoring these rights is arbitrary and places relative rights on a small, living human being.
The only issue that should be debated is the moral one: whether or not a fetus has any right to life. Scientifically, there’s no debate over whether the fetus is alive and human—if not killed, it matures into an adult human being. It is that simple. So the time line of when we consider a fetus “human” is arbitrary after conception in my mind.”
Q: Is their anything illogical about his statement? Particularly the part about any determination of life after conception being “arbitrary” when everyone agrees that on some level a fetus is alive on some level at conception

5) If one believes that “viability” of the fetus is the litmus test for life, there is no qualitative difference between a baby being able to survive off of a respirator or from the mother herself. Therefor, it is inconsistent to believe that a child is “fully human” and given all of it’s inalienable rights only when it can live with assistance outside of the mother but not from the mother herself

[gerard.casey]

Mises007 (I like the name!)

You write: “1. Progressives who believe that nobody has the right to make choices for a woman over her own body are being inconsistent when they support the redistribution of wealth for the “common good” because (assuming we ignore the possible rights of the baby) both cases are essentially about protecting the rights of property (the mothers body and the fruits of ones labor) and liberty (the right to do what you want with your property).”

Let’s see if we can express your arguments in the foregoing paragraph formally:

Argument 1
Premise 1: If I own x, then I may do as I wish with x
Premise 2: I own whatever is in my body
Conclusion: Therefore, I may do as I wish with whatever is in my body

This argument is valid a form of the hypothetical syllogism—i.e. if its premises are true, its conclusion must be true as well

Argument 2
Premise I: If I own x, then I may do as I wish with x
Premise 2: I own the fruits of my labour
Conclusion: Therefore, I may do as I wish with the fruits of my labour

This second argument has the same form as the first and is similarly valid.

Your hypothetical ‘progressive’, while accepting the validity of both arguments, is very likely going to reject the truth of 2-2 (“I own the fruits of my labour”) so the soundness of the argument will turn on the defence of this premise. That defence will itself be either a matter of logic (based on yet another argument) or its truth will be a metter of some other kind of evidence, not excluding self-evidence.

The first argument, while valid, isn’t immune from critique on grounds of soundness (i.e. evaluating the truth/falsity of the premises). I’m not sure a libertarian would be willing to stand over the self-evident truth of premise 1:1 “If I own x, then I may do as I wish with x” without adding the rider “provided that in so doing, I don’t infringe upon the non-aggression principle”. The revised argument would now read:

Argument 1a
Premise 1: If I own x, then I may do as I wish with x, provided that in so doing, I don’t fringe upon the non-aggression principle
Premise 2: I own whatever is in my body
Conclusion: Therefore, I may do as I wish with whatever is in my body provided that in so doing, I don’t infringe upon the non-aggression principle

Now I think it become clear where the lines of the different positions are drawn. The question becomes one of whether or not in the case of abortion, one is or isn’t aggressing against another.

You write: “2. If one believes in late term abortion on the grounds that the child is living off of the mother and is a part of her body, then he/she should also be ok with abortion after the baby has been fully extracted from the mother but is still attached to the umbilical chord.)”

The elements of the argument here rest on (1) what it is to live off the mother, and (2) what it is to be part of the mother’s body.

Somebody supporting abortion but unwilling to countenance the killing of the child born alive but still connected via the umbilical cord to the mother might want to argue that such a child while living off the mother is no longer part of the woman’s body and that that fact makes a moral/legal difference.

Some people argue that the movement of an entity from one location to another doesn’t normally change an entity’s ontological or moral status, so that if abortion in utero is legal, there is no principled reason why infanticide should not also be legal. Of course, one can run this argument in the other direction and argue on the same grounds that if infanticide is (or should be) illegal, then so too should abortion!

[Moving away from the purely logical for a moment, I published a book some years ago, before I became a libertarian, on certain aspects of the law of homicide in the UK and USA pertaining to the very young. If anyone would like a PDF copy of this book, I’d be happy to send it along.]

The same considerations relevant to your second argument apply, more or less, to your third argument.

You write: “4. A quote from Ron Paul: “The fact is that a fetus has legal rights not to be injured or aborted by unwise medical treatment, violence, or accidents. Ignoring these rights is arbitrary and places relative rights on a small, living human being.
The only issue that should be debated is the moral one: whether or not a fetus has any right to life. Scientifically, there’s no debate over whether the fetus is alive and human—if not killed, it matures into an adult human being. It is that simple. So the time line of when we consider a fetus “human” is arbitrary after conception in my mind.”
Q: Is their anything illogical about his statement? Particularly the part about any determination of life after conception being “arbitrary” when everyone agrees that on some level a fetus is alive on some level at conception.”

Dr Paul’s point relates to the soundness of the various arguments on this issue. If something is what it is and has the rights that it has because of what it is, its size or its relative state of development don’t seem to be particularly relevant considerations. To take a ridiculous example: a very short person (e.g. 3’ 6”) isn’t entitled to be treated with only half the respect due to a tall person (e.g. 6’ 6”). If it’s the case that once a human being comes into existence as a foetus, it is and continues to be a human being until death, then it would seem to be arbitrary to deal with its right not to be aggressed against in different ways simply because of its state of development (or its location). Of course, those who do not accept Dr Paul’s position will argue that a more or less fundamental change of moral/legal status takes place at some more or less specific developmental stage (implantation, viability, 2nd trimester, etc.) and so the argument/s will proceed on these issues.

It would be a useful exercise to attempt to formulate your arguments in categorical or hypothetical logical form or, if that’s not possible, to construct an informal argument as clearly as possible.

[derosa8]

Dr. Casey, I would love to see a PDF copy of your book [my email is derosa8@tcnj.edu if we should continue this outside the forums]. Your insight is always spot on. Are any of your others books available in PDF?

[gerard.casey]

JohnD: I’ll send you an electronic copy of my book on Monday when I return to the university. If I can find a copy on my home computer, I’ll send it earlier. Whenever I find it, I’ll send it to your personal email as I think it would be more appropriate to keep this forum focussed on logical matters to the extent that one can draw a line between form and content.

[ronigafni]

Thank you so much for your response. It was so helpful and illustrated to me why I need to review the classes I have already seen and finish the course itself. Just seeing the formulations make it so much clearer and remind me of the necessity (whenever possible) to do so. My email address is rgafni7@gmail.com and I would be thrilled to get a copy.
I constructed a new argument of some of the issues, I think it is valid:
Premise 1: If I own x, I can defend my ownership of x against all aggressors
Premise 2: Trespassers are aggressors
Premise 3: Those using my property without my explicit permission are aggressors
Premise 4: My body is my property
Premise 5: A fetus is trespassing my body and using it to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Premise 6: A newborn child still attached to the umbilical chord is using my body to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Premise 7: A parasitic twin is using my body to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Conclusion: It is morally acceptable to abort parasitic twins, fetuses and newborns still attached to the umbilical chord on the grounds that they are trespassing on and/or living off my body

[gerard.casey]

Hello Mises007: I’m working on a substantive reply to your new argument. In the meantime, I tried to send a copy of my book to you at rgafni7@gmail.com but for some reason, my email bounced back. If you would care to send a contact email to me directly at gerard.casey@ucd.ie I’ll send the material by return.

[gerard.casey]

Mises007: I reproduce your new argument here for the sake of anyone else who might be following the discussion:

You wrote:
“Premise 1: If I own x, I can defend my ownership of x against all aggressors
Premise 2: Trespassers are aggressors
Premise 3: Those using my property without my explicit permission are aggressors
Premise 4: My body is my property
Premise 5: A fetus is trespassing my body and using it to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Premise 6: A newborn child still attached to the umbilical chord is using my body to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Premise 7: A parasitic twin is using my body to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Conclusion: It is morally acceptable to abort parasitic twins, fetuses and newborns still attached to the umbilical chord on the grounds that they are trespassing on and/or living off my body.” [end of citation of your argument]

In our logic, every argument capable of evaluation is either a categorical syllogism or a hypothetical syllogism. In each case, an argument will have two premises and a conclusion. Our rules for validity operate only on arguments in such forms. Your new argument, as it stands, isn’t either a categorical or a hypothetical syllogism [it’s got 7 premises and a conclusion!] so it’s not capable of being evaluated (as it stands) by our rules. Of course, it may well be possible to turn your argument into a form that is capable of being evaluated by our system. This will most likely transform it into a set of interconnected arguments, each of which can be evaluated separately. Before going on to see what I’ve made of your material, you might like to try your hand at reconstructing it in categorical or hypothetical form yourself.

Let’s start with your premise 3. This looks as if it might be a categorical proposition. Let’s take as our terms:
P: people who use my property without my explicit permission
G: aggressors
This should give us our premise 3 as: PAG [All people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
[n.b. If I was to be absolutely precise, I’d reflect the negative element in the subject (‘without’’) by means of a complement, but I’ll ignore that for the sake of simplicity]

Now let’s turn to premise 5. Here our terms might be:
F: foetuses
P: those who use my property without my explicit permission
Giving us: FAP [all foetuses are people who use my property without my explicit permission]

Now we can put the newly reformulated premises 3 and 5 together to give us the following

categorical syllogism I:
PAG [all people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
FAP [all foetuses are people who use my property without my explicit permission]
therefore
FAG [all foetuses are aggressors]

We can construct similar arguments taking the material in your premises 6 and 7 and, substituting for F in the foregoing argument N: umbilically connected newborn children and T: parasitic twins, respectively, we get categorical syllogisms II and III:

categorical syllogism II:
PAG [all people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
NAP [all umbilically connected newborn children are people who use my property without my explicit permission]
therefore
NAG [all umbilically connected newborn children are aggressors]

categorical syllogism III:
PAG [all people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
TAP [all parasitic twins are people who use my property without my explicit permission]
therefore
TAG [all twins are aggressors]

All three categorical syllogisms are valid (check for yourself, using the six rules for validity).

[Your premise 2 appears to be redundant. We can already get from lack of explicit permission to aggression without invoking trespass.]

Now we’ve dealt with premises 3, 5, 6 and 7 and eliminated 2 as seemingly redundant. That leaves 1 and 4. How can we use this material to get us towards your overall conclusion?

I suggest a slight reformulation of your premises 1 and 4 to get the constituent sub-propositions of what will be our hypothetical syllogism to connect up, as follows (using the simplified single-letter form of the constituent sub-propositions for the sake of simplicity)

Hypothetical Conditional Syllogism IV:
1a: If S is a person who owns x, then S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend x against aggressors [If P then Q]
4a: S is a person who owns x (her body) [P]
therefore,
8. S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend x (her body) against aggressors [Q]

This hypothetical conditional syllogism is valid.

Let’s now combine the conclusions of the valid categorical syllogisms I, II and III into the following composite categorical proposition, 9:

9. All foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are aggressors
Letting W stand for the composite term: foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins
this gives us the categorical proposition: WAG

Putting premises 8 and 9 together, we get (in English)

S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend x (her body) against aggressors
All foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are aggressors
Therefore, S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend her body against all foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins

Intuitively, this seems to be valid. Let’s try to put it into symbols:

We have the following terms:
S: S (anyone at all)
D: persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against aggressors
W: foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins
G: aggressors
giving us the following two propositions:
8a. SAD
9. WAG

If 8a and 9 constitute the premises of a prospective syllogism, we have a problem inasmuch as we appear to have 4 irreducible terms.

Let’s see if we can reduce the four terms to three. A bit of material eduction seems to be in order to link up the terms D and G.

Example: from the proposition ‘A horse is an animal’ we can validly conclude that ‘The head of a horse is the head of an animal’ (by complex conception—lecture 6). Similarly, from WAG [All foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are aggressors] we can materially educe “All persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against aggressors”

Let W(2) stand for “persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins” and we already have what would be G(2), namely D: “persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against aggressors”.

So, 9—WAG transforms by material eduction into
9a.W(2)AD

And now the premises of our would-be syllogism are
8a. SAD
9a W(2)AD
and we’d like to get as our conclusion
10. SAW(2)—“ All Ss are persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins”

As the result of our application of material eduction, these two premises together now have 3 and only 3 terms but, unfortunately, since the middle term is D and it isn’t distributed in either premise, any syllogism formed by adding any conclusion whatsoever will be invalid by reason of failing rule 5 (the middle term must be distributed at least once). If only we could validly convert 9a!

Even if, on another reformulation, you could validly connect up the results of the two different trains of deduction, you would have established only that your argument is valid, i.e. if its premises were true, its conclusion would have to be true. The task of establishing the truth of your premises would still confront you and it is to establishing the truth of the premises that the argument would then shift.

[derosa8]

Thanks Dr. Casey for your logical analysis. It’s definitely fun to practice on real world examples like this, but I often have trouble formulating the subjects on my own. I think I need to do more logic exercises, but your analysis in the forums is always insightful and…..logical!

[gerard.casey]

Mises007: tried to email you the PDFs (Book and Article) at rgafni7@gmail.com but my email bounced back to me again, giving me an ‘unknown address’ error message.

[ronigafni]

Hi Professor Casey, I just went back to this post and noticed your response. I am still very interested in the emails and would like to give you another email address. I know it has been quite some time but I would still love to see those PDF’s. rgafni84@gmail.com

[gerard.casey]

Mises007: I’ll try sending those files to you again. Hope they come through this time!

GC

[ronigafni]

Got it, thank you so much

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