Abortion and the sorites paradox

Don't come to your beliefs on complex topics via two thousand year old fallacies.

Many people in the abortion debate have the intuition that, because there is no clear justifiable line for when a fetus could ever transition from not-a-full-moral-agent to full-moral-agent (deserving government protection), the only line must be at one of the extremes (conception or birth).

This is a false intuition.

Every concept, every word, in language has this same property, namely that there is no clear line between the positive and negative cases. This is called “vagueness,” and has been known since the Greeks: the sorites paradox.

The sorites paradox itself is…

(A) 1 grain of sand cannot make a heap

(B) If n grains of sand cannot make a heap, then n+1 grains of sand cannot make a heap. (That is, one grain of sand can’t make the difference between whether or not you can make a heap.)

(C) It follows that there are no heaps.

The argument is fallacious, because there ARE heaps.

And, the exact same argument can be used on almost any concept in language. Bald, chair, egg, turtle, cup, …, and full-moral-agent.

Just because we cannot identify a line doesn’t mean there is not one.

If you reject the notion that there might be some point where a fetus transitions from one moral status to another MERELY BECAUSE of the inability to justify how it is that one day or one extra brain capability or one new body part could make the difference, then you have to, for the same logical reason, reject the existence of every concept you know of.

Why IS language like this?

In my research I have argued it is due to fundamental computational limitations, limitations ANY finite machine suffers from. The link below is a chapter from my first book, Brain from 25000 Feet.

https://www.changizi.com/uploads/8/3/4/4/83445868/changizibrain25000chapter4.pdf

So, it’s not strange to find that it’s impossible to find a unique justified position where a change from not-a-full-moral-agent to full-moral-agent occurs. That’s what we expect and find in ALL things. So especially so for something as complex as this.