”I assure you that you can prove a negative”

In certain circumstances, perhaps. Again, prove that you’re not a closet rapist.

The reason we have the standard that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty is because it can be near impossible to prove that one hasn’t done something of which they’ve been accused. Especially if they haven’t a verifiable alibi and had the means and motive to commit the crime of which they’ve been accused.

”Contrapositives are negatives that can be proved”

OK but not all negative things are contrapositive.

Sorry but I find Professor Hales argument less than convincing because it’s a categorical one. I would be less skeptical had he posited that “sometimes or even often, you can prove a negative” but as he gave no examples of when you can’t prove a negative, his implication is that you can always prove a negative. Outside the ivory tower of philosophy, it’s just too easy to find real world examples of negatives that can’t be proven.

”no one is saying, “You can’t prove the fetus isn’t a person, therefore it is.” Rather, a lot of argument is used to support the proposition that the fetus is a person, and the burden of proof is put on those who would deny it.”

The pro-life argument is that a fetus is a baby and the support or ‘evidence’ they offer is almost entirely faith based or intuitive. Clearly, pro-choice people do not accept that evidence and without scientific evidence that one side or the other is correct, all that is left is the matter of individual conscience. If Pro-life advocates managed to make illegal abortion, how would that not be imposing a mostly faith based opinion upon the minority?

”Can you prove the negative “You can’t prove a negative”?”

Sure. By giving a real world example. Someone has been accused of murder. They are completely innocent but circumstantial evidence makes them a strong suspect. They hated the victim. They have no verifiable alibi. They had the means and even the motive for committing the crime. The DA decides to prosecute the accused. The crime and trial is taking place in England. The accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Prove they didn’t commit the crime. Prove the negative.

”We’re not talking — once again — about a question decidable on science or logic alone;

That’s exactly my point. And without empirically provable evidence, all you have are opinions.

”nonetheless, it is a question that must be decided.”

And we have decided to leave it up to the individual’s conscience. But out of the sincerest beliefs and an inability to face and accept what a separation of church and state sometimes requires, the Pro-Life faction cannot allow the matter to rest.

It’s not stubbornness that you see upon my part, it’s an inadequate attempt upon my part to make myself clear and/or a futile attempt to repeat a message that some do not want to hear.

”Prove that killing an innocent person is murder, or prove that it is not. This is how the pro-life side views the question.”

Unfortunately, that view is illogical because the Pro-choice side doesn’t have to prove that it’s not murder, since it’s the pro-life side which is making the claim that the fetus is a person. So it’s up to them to prove their assertions because it is upon that assertion that they rest their case that abortion should be illegal. But again, unfortunately all they can offer is faith based beliefs and intuition based opinion.

”For you to say that we should just default to individual conscience because a bunch of people think there’s no innocent person involved is quite possibly to sanction murder. If you accept it, then ipso facto you do not believe it is murder (or else, you think murdering is ok, so long as people do it with a clean conscience?).“

It’s not a ‘bunch’, it’s the majority and just as importantly, several iterations of the the Supreme Court have found that there is no lawful basis, other than faith based opinion or an intuitive sense, to legally agree that a fetus is a person.

If, there is a soul or spirit, then whenever that spirit/soul enters the body is when that fetus becomes a person and any killing after that event would indeed be murder. The problem is that we can’t prove when a fetus becomes a person, at least not with empirical evidence, upon which the entire ‘hinge’ of the issue hangs…

And the majority of people don’t feel that the fetus becomes a person until sometime after the third trimester. It’s not that it’s ok to kill with a clear conscience, it’s that you can’t demonstrate that it is murder, all that you can offer is your opinion.

A bunch of white people did believe that black people were not really persons and some did so sincerely. In time, the preponderance of evidence convinced more and more people that people of any color were people too.

Eventually, the reality that Shakespeare used in his soliloquy about the Jews, who also were thought by many, to not be ‘persons’ carried the tide; “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

”Why is murder wrong? Why is slavery wrong? Why is theft wrong? At some level ALL of these “opinions” come down to what our view of persons and their rights are, and NONE of it can be proved in an absolute Cartesian sense, precisely because personhood is a metaphysical question.”

Metaphysics isn’t need my friend. Those things are wrong because in order to commit them, you have to accept the premise that others haven’t the rights you claim for yourself and there’s no objective basis for that opinion.

Yes, resultant medical harm can come with sodomy but as long as the activity is between consenting adults who pose no financial burden to society, you and I have no right to deny them that activity. It’s their lesson to learn, not ours to impose upon them.

Slaves are, by definition under coercion and sanitized corpses (?) cannot give their consent.

Yes, opinion based it clearly is but public fornication, as salacious or natural, as some may find it, imposes a burden upon the ‘public’s sensibility’, as it violates established cultural norms and taboos.

”I never disagreed with a *stiff burden* of justification for forbidding private behavior — you’re shifting the goalposts there.”

Not intentionally, I’m responding to more than one person here and trying different avenues of communication to try to make my point clear. When people raise objections without addressing my premise, I assume understanding is lacking or that they are being obtuse.

A view that is “justified with religious argument” to make something illegal with which another does not agree is nevertheless an attempt to impose that religious belief.

”I never said that banning abortion is not an infringement, in some neutral sense, on liberty.”

Nor did I ever accuse you of saying that, I was attempting to make clearer my point, again by offering a slightly different take in discussing the issue.

”My point, and the point of pro-lifers, is that there is no *legitimate* liberty to murder innocent persons.”

Your point is well understood by everyone. Now prove that a fetus is a person as that is the basis of your point and upon which rests the assertion that abortion should be illegal.

”Liberty is not the be-all and end-all of civic values.”

No it is not but without liberty there are no civic virtues, except what the tyrant allows.

”If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” John Stuart Mill

” licensing abortion is not an opinion that can be proved to a neutral third party”

It doesn’t need to be proven. Not until the fetus can be proven to be a person. You’re the one who wants to deny the woman the right to individually decide for herself where she stands on the issue.

When someone can prove if and when the fetus becomes a person, there will be no justification for dispute.

It’s not “the magic charm” of the word “liberty” but the necessary burden upon all of us to show why someone elses liberty (who holds a different view) should be curtailed, demanding as justification for that infringement, more than faith based opinion or intuition is their perfect right.

”Killing a person is a rather severe infringement of liberty. “

Yes it is. Now prove that it is a person without resorting to personal opinion. If you can’t and still insist that others should be made to comply with your opinion, then you unwittingly or not, support tyranny.

“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Thomas Jefferson

Laws made supported only by personal opinion are but the will of the mob made real.

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” Thomas Jefferson

For those who would point out that we have a republic, of course and, it has spoken, reflecting both the will of the representatives elected to serve them and that judgment by several Supreme Courts, that no basis for making abortion illegal exists, other than that of personal opinion.

Finally, if our discussion is to continue past this point, perhaps it should be conducted through email?

That which is aborted dies. Its not an oak tree that dies, its not a gnat that dies, its not a jelly fish that dies; it is a human being that dies. Perhaps in your world it is merely a matter of opinion if someone chooses to kill a premature baby inside or outside the womb; in my world it is homicide. When one or more humans kill another human it is homicide, justifiable or not.

Sophistry ain’t the way.

I would ask him when a preemie weighing 600 grams becomes a soulful person. After 48 hours? after 2 weeks? Is it OK to kill a viable preemie because it is deemed soulless? We do keep them alive, some of them, at great effort.

In a no-holds-barred cage match, ALL of them, I’d wager…

😀

Thanks for the reply.

1) First, I assure you that you can prove a negative, simply as an implication, if nothing else, from a positive proof. Arguments from ignorance and inductive arguments are not the same as contrapositives, and they do not imply – as they are often taken to imply – that you can’t prove a negative. Contrapositives are negatives that can be proved.

Here’s a paper for your edification, and hopefully for your information:

http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales/articlepdf/proveanegative.pdf

Showing that some proposition is internally contradictory is proving a negative – and indeed, the pro-life is argument is, if anything, that the pro-abortion side’s position is self-contradictory, like arguing for a square circle (or, in this case, a non-person person).

Frankly, I don’t know a single logician who believes that you can’t prove a negative (nor does the author of the paper above). The law of contradiction is a negative, after all. The rule of the double negative states that any positive proposition can be phrased as a negative (P = not-not-P). And so forth.

But be that as it may, no one is making an argument from ignorance here, i.e., no one is saying, “You can’t prove the fetus isn’t a person, therefore it is.” Rather, a lot of argument is used to support the proposition that the fetus is a person, and the burden of proof is put on those who would deny it. This is not unusual or, heaven forfend, a fallacy.

We are dancing around how to define “proof,” but the usual reason for making the “can’t prove a negative” argument is to support some atheistic or secular argument. And it’s not a little ironic. Can you prove the negative “You can’t prove a negative”? I’d love to see it.

We’re not talking – once again – about a question decidable on science or logic alone; nonetheless, it is a question that must be decided. This is a metaphysical question – i.e., not like saying, “prove I didn’t eat dinner with a unicorn yesterday,” but like saying, “prove that personhood only arrives at point x in the womb.” Applying “no proof of a negative” to such questions is a rhetorical trick. Nothing more.

2) The rest of your reply, unfortunately, just restates what I took issue with. I’m not going to accuse you of being disingenuous, but you are stubborn.

Once again: “…that is what it is left up to the individual’s conscience.”

Prove that killing an innocent person is murder, or prove that it is not. This is how the pro-life side views the question. For you to say that we should just default to individual conscience because a bunch of people think there’s no innocent person involved is quite possibly to sanction murder. If you accept it, then ipso facto you do not believe it is murder (or else, you think murdering is ok, so long as people do it with a clean conscience?).

Imagine if a bunch of people came to believe that black people were not really persons, and so could be killed and enslaved at will. Would you say we just have a difference of opinion here, and since we who disagree are fallaciously asking the racists to “prove a negative” we have to leave it up to the individual’s conscience?

Why is murder wrong? Why is slavery wrong? Why is theft wrong? At some level ALL of these “opinions” come down to what our view of persons and their rights are, and NONE of it can be proved in an absolute Cartesian sense, precisely because personhood is a metaphysical question. The Soviets differed in their view of personhood – a legitimate difference of opinion? The Muslim fanatics disagree as well – legitimate difference? Why do secularists get your blessing but not the Soviets or the Muslims? Because secularists are not “religious”? Neither were the Soviets, who, you will recall, were just good ol’ rational, scientifically-minded progressives.

We can’t escape this debate so easily. Simply mouthing the Mario Cuomo mantra isn’t a resolution, but a cop out.

3) On the sodomy question, I hate to break it to you, but lots of people who engage in it suffer resultant medical harm. But regardless, and to reiterate, this is not a workable principle. Slaves who are treated well and given great medical care suffer no obvious medical harm. People fornicating with sanitized corpses in public cause no medical harm. Hell, live people fornicating in public cause no medical harm. And so on.

I’ll leave you with my recommendation of Smith’s book and leave the harm principle where it belongs.

4) I never disagreed with a *stiff burden* of justification for forbidding private behavior – you’re shifting the goalposts there. The argument is whether the burden has been met, and you seem to be agreeing now that IF it has been, then it IS legitimate to impose opinions on others. If so, I agree, and we can back to arguing the real issue, which is the personhood of the fetus.

5) “…perhaps true but irrelevant…”

No. It is relevant, because you wrote this:

“I’m simply saying that a vote based on an opinion founded in personal faith but which you can’t prove to an unbeliever is an attempt to impose your religious views upon someone else.”

My argument directly addressed that, and the upshot was that there is a difference between “your religious views” and “views that are often justified with religious argument.”

But ok, I’ll bite on your reformulation. The statement is that to pass laws rooted in an opinion not provable/convincing to a “neutral third party” is an unjustifiable infringement of liberty.

First of all, I never said that banning abortion is not an infringement, in some neutral sense, on liberty. My point, and the point of pro-lifers, is that there is no *legitimate* liberty to murder innocent persons. It is not a liberty worth having. Liberty is not the be-all and end-all of civic values.

Second of all, I’m not sure why you consistently fail to see this, but licensing abortion is not an opinion that can be proved to a neutral third party. So again, why do you default to it? I presume it’s because of the magic charm the word “liberty” has for you, and the argument goes like this:

1) Either an opinion can be neutrally proved correct or not.

2) Liberty is the fundamental value of political life.

3) If an opinion cannot be neutrally proved, then to use it to restrict people’s choices is an infringement on the fundamental value of political life.

4) Therefore, if an opinion cannot be neutrally proved, we ought to default to the non-restrictive option.

But no opinion on personhood can be neutrally proved, so this whole argument is moot. You can’t argue that allowing abortion is not an infringement on liberty, because that is – to use your terms – a logical fallacy known as begging the question. Killing a person is a rather severe infringement of liberty.

This is already too long, so I’ll leave it at that.

“Ok — GB — I’m going to make an accusation: I do not believe you are really a pro-lifer.”

Certainly not one who holds to the conventional view. I simply make a distinction between personal views and the imposition of them upon society. Based upon acknowledging that as I cannot prove my view as factual, I haven’t the right to impose it upon society.

A ‘decent’ pro-lifer?

“It’s not anti-abortion, it’s pro-life.”

Yes, just as it’s not pro-abortion but pro-choice.

“I’ll cease this debate on neo’s blog.”

As you wish.

Actually, many bio ethicists do agree that the fetus is human life.

I never indicated otherwise. The issue however isn’t when life begins but when we become a person.

Pro-lifers take the position that we become a person before birth, I suspect that to be true. The pro-abortion folks take the position that we essentially become a person at birth.

On either side only rests personal opinion, as neither side can prove the other to be incorrect.

You and I have a perfect right to our opinions, we do not have the right to impose them upon others by making illegal what we cannot factually support.

Society does have the right to enact laws based upon social consensus, which is not to say that a particular consensus is logically valid.

“While I will take you at your word, you certainly DO NOT argue like a non-religious pro-lifer.”
Thank you for taking me at my word, it is a sincere one. We shall just have to disagree as to how a non-religious pro-lifer argues but perhaps it would clarify the discussion to know that while I consider myself Christian, I am a non-denominational one. One that does not accept that the Bible is literally true and who believes that it is more important to attempt to follow Christ’s example than to hold to conventional strictures. I also do not see religious belief and rationality to be mutually exclusive, though they must be if one holds to a literal interpretation of the Bible.

“So to make it illegal, what you’re proposing is to impose your opinion, upon others. ”

“ALL law does that. Law is focused on morality. Should I have to tell a pro-lifer that?”

That’s a bit testy, yes-no? No, all law does not impose our opinion upon others. That way lies the tyranny of the majority. My rights stop where yours begin and vice versa. When you hold a view based in personal opinion and cannot prove that view to be factually correct, yet try to make actions based upon the others opinion illegal, then unintentionally or not, you seek to restrict anothers liberty.

I’m sure of many things. I’m also in agreement with Socrates’ observation that the beginning of wisdom is to realize how much we don’t know… Lastly, I try to embrace the dictum that, “the truly educated never graduate”.

Morality is the individual and social determination of what is inherently acceptable and unacceptable. I accept that there is a “universally applicable morality” but take Lincoln’s view of embodying it, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”

IMO, Lincoln was acknowledging that he didn’t know that God was on his side but prayed that God would lead him to God’s side in his perception of the issues. I nor you can ‘perfectly know the full particulars of that “universally applicable morality” all we can hope is that God leads us more fully into its embrace.

I am not content but concerned about all of the social issues to which you refer and any long time visitor to this blog will I trust, so attest. I simply do not agree that in certain matters, the imposition of personal opinion upon others is justified.

I am not arguing as to when life begins, for the baby that is clearly at conception. The matter of abortion however rests upon when we become a person, which I believe is when the soul enters the body. No one however, can prove there even is a soul, much less when it enters the body. So, since I cannot agree to the imposition of personal belief upon those who disagree, I cannot support making abortion illegal. In my view, abortion must be a matter of the individual’s conscience.

Finally, you might examine your tendency to make this personal and then engage in personal attacks, emotion driven responses are generally a sign of the initiators inability to respond rationally.