[Today’s guest post by Beth Kulikov is part of our paid blogging program.] My husband likes to watch videos of conflict and controversy on YouTube. I recently overheard a speaker addressing a crowd in an open debate at which one young man stated that “the first breath” endows an individual with personhood. Interesting concept; I’d […]
[Today’s guest post by Clinton Wilcox is part of our paid blogging program.] A few years ago, Bob Seidensticker, a Patheos blogger, wrote about an argument he called the Spectrum Argument. I wrote an article in response. Seidensticker just updated a response to me a few days ago, which you can read here. I’d like […]
Today, Dennis Prager released an excellent video presenting five non-religious moral arguments against abortion. Please give it a watch. I’d like to focus on the first of Prager’s five arguments, which is that even if the unborn are not persons, it doesn’t mean, ipso facto, that abortion is moral. Now, I’ve argued elsewhere that the unborn certainly […]
[Today’s guest post by Ben Williamson is part of our paid blogging program.] Philosopher David Boonin, who is a prominent advocate of abortion rights, is in my opinion one of the most sophisticated defenders of abortion rights out of the authors I have read. He is somewhat different from most abortion rights advocates in that […]
So it seems that blogger Bob Seidensticker has decided to respond to my critique of his Spectrum Argument. You can find his original article here, and my rebuttal to it here, as well as Seidensticker’s most recent response here. At the end of his article, he asserts that I have mischaracterized and sidestepped the argument (Seidensticker seems to […]
There has been some confusion on some of my articles as to what it means for humans to have an inherent nature as rational agents, so I’d like to take the time now to expound upon just what is meant by an inherent nature, as well as the concept of capacities and what they have […]
On Patheos, pro-choice blogger Bob Seidensticker has formulated an argument for abortion that he calls the “Spectrum Argument” for abortion. First, I’d just like to take a moment to say that it’s refreshing to find a pro-choice blogger who actually attempts to make a logical argument for his position, rather than the rhetoric, demonizing of […]
I have previously explained two good arguments for the pro-life position, the Substance View and the Future of Value arguments. I would like to share with you a third. It’s an argument that Alexander Pruss has termed an identity-based argument. Stephen Napier defends a similar argument which he has termed the Unity argument, but my exposition of this argument […]
I have spent four parts in this series responding to Warren’s argument that the unborn cannot be considered persons. Warren wrote her essay in 1973 in a publication called The Monist, but in 1982 she re-published the essay with an added postscript. One of the objections she was receiving to her paper is that it would also justify infanticide as […]
In part one, I examined Warren’s claim about humanity, in part two I examined Warren’s qualifications for personhood and showed why the unborn qualify, and in part three I examined Warren’s two questions about personhood and showed that her position fails to disqualify the unborn from personhood. In this article, I will examine her argument […]
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