The Chemist' s Corner

Conflicting Rights: A Hohfeld Analysis of the Right to Life and the Right to Abort

The Chemist — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:53:48 +0000

In a previous post, three foundational questions in the debate about abortion were raised.

Does a right to life even exist for anyone?
If it does exist, how and when is the right to life conferred to an individual?
Are there instances where a person’s choice has more value than another person’s right to their own life?

This post will seek to address the third question. The heart of the problem is the conflict between the right of a woman to control her own body and the right of a fetus to not be aborted. When examining conflicting rights, such as these, it is useful to consider Hohfeld’s analytical system. According to Hohfeld, all rights can be divided among four distinct classes (also call Hohfeldian incidents) that are described below.

Claims—A has a claim that B x if and only if B has a duty to A to x.
Liberties—A has the liberty to do x if and only if A has no duty to not do x.
Powers—A has a power if and only if A has the ability within a set of rules to alter A’s own or another’s Hohfeldian incidents.
Immunities—B has immunity if and only if A lacks the ability within a set of rules to alter B’s Hohfeldian incidents.

Many describe ‘claims’ as ‘claim-rights’ and ‘liberties’ as ‘privileges.’ Hohfeld further categorized these fundamental incidents into tables of opposites and correlatives. For example, if A possesses a power, then A does not possess a disability. However, if A possesses a power, then some other individual, B, possesses a liability.
With Hohfeld’s system, we now the conflict of woman and fetal rights discussed above, following the excellent work of Dr. William May. In this discussion we only need to concern ourselves with the first two Hohfeldian incidents: claims and liberties. There are three possible logical relations between two persons, A and B, and some incident, x.

A has a claim that B should x if and only if B has a duty to A to x.
B has a liberty (relative to A) to x if and only if A has no-claim that B should not x.
B has a liberty (relative to A) to not x if and only if A has no-claim that B should x.

Notice that claims involve actions (i.e., the x) performed by the party other than the one possessing the claim. In contrast, the action is done by the person who possesses a liberty. For example, people claiming a right to smoke are really claiming a liberty to smoke (i.e., the smokers actually smoke) relative to other people. Fetal right to life involves action performed by another party (the mother) and, therefore, represents a claim. In the most fundamental sense, the right to life means a person should not be unjustifiably killed by another person. An abortion necessarily results in the killing of the fetus. Therefore, the corresponding Hohfeldian incident represented by the fetal right to life is,

The fetus (A) has a claim that the mother (B) should not abort him/her (x) if and only if the mother has a duty to the fetus to not abort him/her.

The right of a woman to control her own body is more nebulous because it shifts from circumstance to circumstance. A grown woman certainly has the right to not eat green beans for dinner if she desires to not eat them. In this context, the phrase means that a woman has sufficient autonomy over her body to enable her to abort her child should she so choose. Thus, the right of a woman to control her own body is actually a liberty in the Hohfeld system, for she is performing an action over her own body relative to the fetus.

The mother (B) has a liberty (relative to the fetus, A) to abort her child (x) if and only if the fetus has no-claim that the mother should not abort him/her.

We now clearly see that the crux of the issue is whether or not a fetus possesses the claim that the mother should not abort him/her. If the fetus has such a claim, then this claim will curtail the mother’s liberty to abort the child. This is an important observation because it significantly clarifies the conflict between the right to life of the fetus and the right of a woman to control her body into the single question of whether or not the fetus has a claim to not be aborted. If the fetus does not possess the claim to not be aborted, then the mother does in fact have the stated liberty.

To answer this question, we need to know if abortion satisfies the criterion of being a justifiable killing. It seems hard to think that it is. No one has such a strong sense of personal autonomy that it eclipses another person’s right to their life. This is because a person’s right to life flows from their ontology and is therefore inviolable. If the fetus does have a right to life (see this previous post for an argument), then the mother is duty bound to not abort the child.

An Argument for the Right to Life from Conception

The Chemist — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:37:27 +0000

There are three foundational questions in the debate about abortion.

Does a right to life even exist for anyone?
If it does exist, how and when is the right to life conferred to an individual?
Are there instances where a person’s choice has more value than another person’s right to their own life?

I believe that the first question is largely non-controversial in this debate. Most individuals recognize the right to life for humans beginning at birth and ending at natural death. Thus, I will tacitly assume that the answer to the first question is “yes, humans do enjoy a right to life.” However, I want to examine the second question in some detail, for that is one of the crucial divides. The third question, although very important, will not be dealt with at this time. However, a few posts here by other bloggers have touched on this very important issue.

Argument for the Right to Life from Conception

A deductive argument that humans possess the right to life from conception is given below:

P1. If the right to life is an intrinsic property of humans and human life begins at conception, then humans possess the right to life from conception.
P2. The right to life is an intrinsic property of humans.
P3. Human life begins at conception.
C. Humans possess the right to life from conception.

A good argument has two essential features. First, the argument must be sound. This argument follows the general argument type known as modus ponens, which is a valid form of argumentation in classical logic. Second, the premises of the argument must be more plausible than their negations. If an argument satisfies these two criteria, then the consequent of the argument cannot be rationally denied. For that reason, we should examine the three premises in greater detail.

The First Premise

I do not think the first premise is controversial. If the right to life is an intrinsic property of a living human (see below for a discussion of the meaning of this term) and human life can be shown to begin at conception, then it is reasonable to affirm that humans possess the right to life from conception. A defense of intrinsic rights and the beginning of human life will be provided below.

The Second Premise

An intrinsic right is taken to be an essential property of the person. Intrinsic rights are differentiated from other “rights” such as the right to vote, the right to drive a car, etc. Those “rights” are better termed privileges, which are non-essential properties of a person. Unfortunately, our language has muddled these two issues up, leading people to conflate the right to life with the right to drink a beer. The two are not on the same level.

Most people have no trouble recognizing that all humans have an intrinsic right to life after birth. The idea is clearly articulated in the Declaration of Independence and is the philosophical bedrock for the legal definition of murder. Furthermore, most people do not have any problem identifying situations in the past or in contemporary cultures where this right is violated for some individuals or groups of individuals. Indeed, one need look no further than the Nazi Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields, or slavery in the American South for poignant examples. The sticking point comes when we examine the rights of humans before birth.

Defenders of a pro-abortion stance argue that rights should be conferred after the fetus either reaches a specific point in development (e.g., nervous system development, point of viability, birth, etc.) or acquires a minimal set of attributes. This topic takes us deep into moral relativism, and this short blog cannot possibly give a full and adequate treatment of the subject. Suffice it to say, the list of attributes or point in development typically differs from person to person; hence, it is impossible to argue against specific examples. It is important, however, to ask why we should accept any one set of criteria once they are proposed. There is no agreement as to what developmental characteristics mark the fetus as a person requiring rights nor is there a clear set of attributes that is universally accepted. This is a serious problem for those who espouse a functional definition of life. As an example, the bioethicist Peter Singer has famously championed infanticide of disabled infants and non-voluntary euthanasia of “people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved.” Most pro-abortion defenders balk at this suggestion, but why should we not accept Singer’s criteria? Likewise, there is no convincing reason why we must accept any functional point (such as birth) as the unique point at which life begins and rights are conferred to the baby.

A secondary issue with functional definitions of life is that those definitions are notoriously difficult to contain. A clearly defined list of characteristics that determine when rights are conferred to a human is only useful if it can be applied to all people. For example, suppose we accept the idea that a properly functioning central nervous system is a/the criterion for the right to life to be conferred. It is not at all clear why the following scenarios are not morally acceptable based on this criterion:

Terminating the life a person who is under a powerful anesthetic or in a coma.
Killing a person who is a quadriplegic.
Relegating a person who has suffered a debilitating stroke and lost feeling in half of their body as a second-class citizen simply because they do not retain functionality of a complete nervous system.

This takes us to the real crux of the issue. If human rights are merely something that we invent and develop, then there really is no such thing as a right to life for anyone at any time. This means looking back in time and passing judgment against slave owners, the apartheid, those sanctioning the Cambodian killing fields, or the Holocaust, to name a few, is ultimately incoherent. Who are we to pass judgment on what another person thinks is right concerning killing another person or in some way treating them as a means rather than an end, if people do not possess any rights? The problem is that people don’t live like that, and we know it. People have no trouble recognizing slavery as a clear example where an entire culture endorsed the dehumanization of people purely for pigment levels in their skin. However, if rights are a function of some qualities defined by a culture, then it is irrational to claim American slavery is immoral for those individuals practicing and endorsing it. This is the inevitable conclusion of the subjective morality that is driving the pro-abortion movement to define unborn babies as non-human. Thus, if the pro-abortion advocates want to embrace the negation of premise one, they seem to have a very heavy burden to shoulder in demonstrating that one individual (or culture) may pass judgment on another individual (or culture) in the absence of intrinsic rights. Furthermore, they have the difficult task of establishing when rights are conferred and for what reasons.

A better approach is to confer rights based on the ontology of the person. Humans are unique and deserve basic rights because God has implanted His image within them. This grounds fetal rights based on what it is – a special creation of God worthy of protection – as opposed to some complex of attributes that it gains and may lose at some later point in life. Therefore, we can provide a theological argument to support affirming the first premise.

P1’: Humans should not be unjustifiably killed because humans are created in the image of God (Gen 1:26; 9:6).
P2’: If the image of God is imputed to people at fertilization, then abortion is morally wrong in most situations from the moment of fertilization.
P3’: The image of God is present from conception.
C’: Abortion is morally wrong in most situations from the moment of fertilization.

Of course, some argue that the image of God is not imputed at fertilization. However, I think there is compelling scriptural support that people possess the image of God from the moment life begins. The most notable is the virginal conception of Jesus Christ.

The Third Premise

Arguing against the third premise flies in the face of the numerous scientific discoveries about human development as well as a basic definition of what life is. The Penguin Dictionary of Biology provides an excellent, concise definition of biological life:

“[Living organisms are] complex physico-chemical systems whose two main peculiarities are (1) storage and replication of molecular information in the form of nucleic acid, and (2) the presence of (or in viruses perhaps merely the potential for) enzyme catalysis.”

This definition unequivocally places a fertilized egg as a living organism. Furthermore, the moment of fertilization is marked by the slow block to polyspermy, which is a series of biochemical processes that limit the number of sperm that may penetrate the oocyte to one. This provides a clear point in time marking the formation of a new organism with its own unique life trajectory.

Adding additional criteria to the definition of life is a grave mistake that can lead to bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, some pro-abortion advocates claim that a fetus requires a functioning nervous system to be alive. By this definition, however, all unicellular organisms would fail to qualify as alive. If one goes a step further and requires a functioning central nervous system, then a much larger swath of organisms, such as plants and fungi, may be relegated to the realm of the non-living. Similar absurdities result with other “definitions” of life. It is far more plausible to agree with modern science and affirm premise three rather than its negation.

So What Does All of This Mean?

A simple argument demonstrating that humans possess a right to life from conception was presented. It was further argued that each premise is more plausible than the corresponding negation. Thus, the conclusion of argument cannot logically be avoided. Murder is the unjustified killing of an innocent human. If the argument goes through, then what else would you call an abortion? Certainly the unborn baby is innocent. Abortion is legal in the US, but that does not make abortion any less immoral. Is lawfully killing a spouse in country where such actions are legal moral for those people? Clearly not! The law is in error and must be changed.

The Abolitionist Society of Oklahoma>

Oklahoma Abolition Society

The Chemist — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:47:01 +0000

There is a new organization in Oklahoma that is focusing on abortion abolition. I think the idea of forming local abolitionist groups in the mold of the slavery abolition movement of the 18th and 19th centuries is exactly what we need. The hypertext link will direct you to the Oklahoma Abolition Society. I highly encourage you to look at this organization.

Abolish human abortion!

A Compendium of Pro-life Arguments

The Chemist — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:00:46 +0000

I found myself defending pro-life policy on some online Canadian newspaper. The pro-abort author was, shall we say, less than tactful. My friend Rhology summed up the article well when he said, “You promised vulgarity and implied immaturity, and you didn’t disappoint!” The real action, however, was in the comment box. In my opinion, the conversation developed well. Many pro-life arguments were advanced (e.g., definition of life and its beginning, analogy to slavery or genocide, time when the right to life is conferred to humans, etc.) and most were not challenged. Few pro-abortion arguments were advanced and most of the conversation from their end revolved around ad hominem and bluster. In this post, I want to capture a few of the arguments to save for personal use later on.

The important questions in the context of abortion are as follows:

(1)    Does a right to life even exist for anyone?
(2)    If it does exist, how and when is the right to life conferred to an individual?
(3)    Are there instances where a person’s choice has more value than another person’s right to their own life?

I think the first is not controversial, so I will not go into that here. The second and third questions are the central questions in the debate. These are discussed in more detail below.

Argument for the Right to Life from Conception

Life is a process from the moment of conception to death, and we are all at different points among the spectrum. However, that does not mean that we are paralyzed when it comes to determining when life begins or whether or not that life possesses basic rights. Some in the pro-abortion camp claim that the right to life is conferred when some set of criteria are satisfied. The most commonly cited criterion is birth. I have previously dealt with this subjective demarcation of rights on this blog. In short, these lists are extremely hard to contain, for if the list is meant to define a right to life for humans then it should apply to all humans. Moreover, one should immediately ask who gets to decide what is on the list. We have seen this play out many times throughout history. A dictator or regime defines what is required to be fully human and then uses that definition to marginalize other human beings. Slavery is a clear example where entire cultures endorsed the dehumanization of people purely for pigment levels in their skin. In other cases, such “lists” are used to systematically exterminate whole populations of people.

Drawing comparisons between those defining unborn children as non-human, based on a list of attributes that are absent in an unborn child, with other well-known social ills is extremely profitable in this debate. If human rights are merely something that we invent and develop then there really is no such thing as a right to life for anyone at any time. This means looking back in time and passing judgment against slave owners, the apartheid, those sanctioning the Cambodian killing fields, or the Holocaust to name a few is ultimately incoherent. Who are we to determine what another person thinks is right concerning killing another person, or in some way treating them as a means rather than an end, if that person does not possess any rights? The problem is that people don’t live like that and we know it. People have no trouble recognizing that slavery or the holocaust is immoral because it is abundantly clear that the rights of those people were violated. However, if rights are function of some qualities defined by a culture, then it is irrational to claim that previous cultures with their lists are immoral. In fact, their actions would be perfectly moral. Most people balk at this conclusion, but I see it as an inevitable conclusion of the subjective morality that is driving the pro-abortion movement to define unborn babies as non-human. Claiming rights are conferred at birth is arbitrary, and I am not alone in this assessment. The bioethicist Peter Singer seriously advocates infanticide precisely because using birth as the demarcation of rights is arbitrary under this ethical system. In the end, any list or criteria used to determine the conferral of rights becomes arbitrary. If this is ethic is something the pro-abortion lobby wants to sustain, then they have a very heavy burden to shoulder in demonstrating that one individual (or culture) may pass judgment on another individual (or culture) in the absence of intrinsic rights.

I think a simple argument can be made for the existence of the right to life from birth.

P1. The right to life is an intrinsic property of humans.
P2. If human life begins at conception, then humans possess the right to life from conception.
P3. Human life begins at conception.
C. Humans possess the right to life from conception.

The main points of contention are P1 and P3. However, I think arguing against P3 flies in the face of the numerous scientific discoveries about human development as well as a basic definition of what life is. Furthermore, I think abandoning P1 has a very high price, which I have described above. Murder is the unjustified killing of an innocent human. If the argument above goes through, then what else would you call an abortion? Certainly the unborn baby is innocent. In the US abortion is legal, but that does not make abortion any less immoral. Is lawfully killing a spouse in country where such actions are legal moral for those people? Clearly not! The law is in error and must be changed.

Choice Does Not Trump a Person’s Right to Life

The typical argument here is that it is immoral for a woman to be forced to use her body as a house and source of nutrition for another person against her will. Thus, the woman’s choice should be given higher epistemic value than the unborn child’s right to life. First, I think it is important to notice that this argument implicitly admits that the child has a right to life. By offering this argument, the pro-choice advocate has relinquished the argument that the baby has a right to life. The problem is that no one has such a strong right to choice that it overrides another person’s right to life. We clearly recognize this for humans after birth. Second, it is very important to distinguish between the claims that the unborn child is part of the woman versus the unborn child residing within the woman. Certainly the mother provides an environment, nutrition, and other necessities for the child; however, the baby is not part of the mother’s body. It is a unique person with its own life trajectory.

Procreation is the purpose of sex, and abortion is way of escaping the natural consequences of sex. A person who engages in an act of sex does have a moral obligation to deal with the consequences of that act. In this case, the consequence is the creation of a unique life with its own set of intrinsic rights. It did not ask to be created, and extinguishing this life because of convenience is simply immoral. Furthermore, how else does anyone take care of an infant or elderly person other than using their bodies? My one-old year daughter and three-year old son cannot care for themselves and if left alone they will die. Let me be clear here, I have to use my own body to care for and nurture these people. I go to work to earn the money that provides the basic necessities they need to live. I give what I have for myself to them (this includes my time, money, nutrition, etc.). In some cases, it is horribly inconvenient, and I think anyone with small children will agree with this assessment. If I fail to perform, I am culpable for their deaths due to my own negligence or malicious intent.

Relationship between Abortion and Slavery

Slavery and abortion share a common base. Both deny rights to individuals based on denying their intrinsic rights as humans. Furthermore, it is a historical fact that pro-abortion slogans and arguments are identical to the pro-slavery arguments of the 1800s in the US.

Relationship between Abortion and Infanticide/Euthanasia

It is often claimed that infanticide and euthanasia are red herrings in this debate. This is false. A central pro-life argument is whether or not unborn children possess a right to life. It is necessary to clarify what a human is and what rights a human possesses. These definitions must extend to all humans.

Calvinism, Arminianism, and Molinism

The Chemist — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:43:49 +0000

At the beginning of last summer, I wrote a short blog post describing my summer reading goals. I wanted to explore the concept of Molinism. I can’t say that I am completely finished with my reading goals, but I do think that I have read enough to say that I am fairly comfortable with Molinism. It has been an adventure to say the least, involving much reflection and meditation on the subject. It is an interesting feeling to shift one’s theology. In this case, it is less of a shift and more of a systematizing. I know what a shift feels like. At one point in my life, I championed a strong charismatic approach to Christian life but that is no longer the case today. I have also shifted from a functional Arminian to a 5-point Calvinist to my current position over a number of years. I guess if labels are important then I am a moderate Calvinist who holds to a Molinist explanation to the tension between libertarian freedom and God’s sovereign decrees.

May God be glorified in all and through all.

Loving the Lord, Not the Argument

The Chemist — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:31:20 +0000

My unannounced and unanticipated hiatus is over. I thought I would have more blogging time during the winter break, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Time has a way of slipping away, and the break was refreshing (both intellectually and spiritually). I spent the very beginning of the new semester at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The flight was very long (Oklahoma to Texas to Florida to New York), so I spent some uninterrupted time with a good book: The Joyful Christian. It is a collection of excerpts from C.S. Lewis, covering a wide range of topics. The chapter on apologetics stood out to me, especially the following quote:

I have found nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the Reality–from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.

I don’t consider myself an apologist in the formal sense, at least not one like the great Christian apologists of our time or times past. However, Lewis struck a chord with me. All to often I struggle with loving the arguments of Christianity more than the source of Christianity, for it is immensely logical and self-consistent. It is explains everything: the origin of the world, the nature of man, etc. It also provides a real solution to man’s main problem, reconciliation to God through Jesus. I constantly remind myself to turn my affections to the source of the arguments. Without Christ Himself, there are no arguments. I suppose my point in posting this is a gentle reminder to myself and those who read this: love the Lord your God for who He is, not the arguments that are grounded by His very existence.

Come quickly Lord Jesus.

There’s Facts and Then There’s Facts

The Chemist — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:00:02 +0000

I find it interesting that adherents to scientism claim that modern science, especially evolutionary biology, has proven intelligent design theories and various strains of Biblical creationism false. The main strategy is simply to claim that ID or creationism conflicts with the facts of science. However, this conflates raw facts, which scientists seek to explain with theories, with the “facts” of the theories themselves. Let me give an example to clarify how this is wrong. Albert Einstein gave a theory to explain the low-temperature heat capacity data of crystalline materials. The theory worked pretty well, but not perfectly. Peter Debye gave a theory that fit the available data much better. Is it valid to say that Debye’s theory ignored the “fact” of Einstein’s theory? Yet, that is exactly what is going on when it is claimed that ID or creationism is proven wrong by evolutionary biology. They are competing ways of viewing the data, which ultimately gets back to whether or not evidentialism itself can distinguish the two. The simple answer is: it cannot. At its root, scientific evidence is the interpretation of raw facts (data) through the context of a worldview. It is this act of interpretation that gives raw facts their meaning, linking together the facts in a coherent manner and systematizing the facts into a theory. It is my contention that the methodological naturalism used in science results in scientific theories that are inexorably tied to a naturalistic worldview. This is what makes using scientific evidence as a truth test for other worldviews so specious.

100 Contemporary Christian Apologists

The Chemist — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 15:29:33 +0000

Brian Auten has given a list of 100 contemporary Christian apologists, including appropriate web links for each individual. This appears to be an excellent resource for Christians.

Horton Hears a Who

The Chemist — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 03:59:06 +0000

I read my son Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss tonight, and I was struck by the over-arching theme of the book. Anyone who is familiar with the book or movie will know that the entire plot of the story revolves around Horton the elephant saving a city, called Who-ville, that is full of people. These people, however, live on a speck of dust, and only Horton is able to hear them. The other jungle animals think Horton is mentally unstable for thinking there are people on the speck and attempt to discard and destroy the speck.

The parallels between the citizens of Who-ville and unborn children are striking. I have no idea if Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) intended his book to mirror so closely the rights of the unborn, but the overlap is unmistakable to me. In the book, we see Horton repeatedly trying to save the very small citizens of Who-ville from death. These citizens have no voice of their own until the very end of the book. Horton summarizes his motivation well with his signature line, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” Isn’t this true with the unborn children today? They have no voice, but they are still persons. Who are we as a country to deny them the basic right to life? May God use this simple story to impress into the minds of my children the crucial fact that all people are persons regardless of size or capability.

Go Vote!

The Chemist — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 14:38:47 +0000

Today is election day. For the (very) few that actually read this blog, please go vote.