I'm grateful for this channel. It helps keep me grounded in philosophical reality.

I can't believe I missed this live :( I haven't been able to join live the past few shows. Thank you both!

Found your channel because of this video. Love the higher level philosophy here.

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🤖 Trent Horn discusses pro-life arguments and philosophy. 02:19 📚 Trent's upcoming book "Devil's Advocate" explores dialogue on various apologetic topics. 03:31 🌍 Current cultural moment puts life issues at the forefront, awaiting decisions on abortion. 05:10 💬 Philosophical discussion on pro-life position, potential liberal arguments. 08:24 🧠 Trent classifies pro-choice arguments based on views of the unborn's personhood. 13:09 🗣️ Encouraging dialogue on life issues, urgency in taking a stance. 17:28 🤔 Importance of recognizing the gravity of being wrong in pro-life debate. 19:46 🤖 Pro-choice arguments involving personhood and consciousness explained. 21:11 🧠 Rebutting pro-choice argument on consciousness in unborn fetuses. 39:07 🚶‍♂️ The argument of "I can do whatever I want with my body" is weak; many actions are restricted or come with responsibilities. 40:01 🩸 Analogy: Refusing to donate organs vs. pregnancy. Pregnancy involves a deliberate act that is naturally ordered towards creating a person. 42:19 🩸 Abortion is not like refusing to donate an organ; it's more like donating an organ and then violently taking it back and killing the person in the process. 43:44 🩸 Analogy: Taking back an organ from a child that you donated to, even if the child had nothing to do with it, would not be morally justified, indicating the moral distinction in abortion. 44:26 🚫 Pro-life argument extends beyond cases of rape. 45:10 🚫 Killing vs. letting die distinction and responsibility are significant factors. 45:24 👶 Uterus analogy: Child's right to life includes right to mother's body. 46:20 ❓ Personhood entails moral claims upon one another. 47:04 💔 Bad people forcing heroic or evil choices. 48:00 🔀 Forced options: good, evil, no choice, or neutral choices. 48:54 💔 Forced choices diminish culpability due to coercion. 50:04 📚 Philosophy analyses of TV shows like "24". 51:40 🦸 Heroes make rare heroic choices in forced options. 52:08 🌍 Pro-life movement needs empathy, practical support, and philosophical foundation. 53:16 ⚖️ Ectopic pregnancy cases: Saving one life indirectly causing another's death. 54:25 ⚖️ Comparing evictionism analogy to abortion: Limited parallelism. 55:36 🏠 Parental obligations grounded in human nature and natural law. 58:07 🕊️ Parental obligations include providing basic needs for child's development. 59:29 🛡️ Practical advice: Prayer, discipline, asking questions, finding common ground. 01:00:37 📣 Trent's resources: Council of Trent, books, website, podcasts. Made with HARPA AI

“I can’t do philosophy because you need a long beard” 😏

RE: "Uterus analogy: Child's right to life includes right to mother's body." No it doesn't. Nothing includes any right to share, or to be sheltered and sustained in, or to take anything from the inside of, any other person's body. RE: "Personhood entails moral claims upon one another." But this debate is no longer a debate about moral claims. It's a debate about enforcement. This is how _Dobbs_ has changed the argument. It's not about philosophical abstractions any more, like "do the patient's rights supersede the fetus' rights?" or "how important is the distinction between letting someone die and vs killing someone?" or "what moral obligations do we incur when we have sexual relations?" It's about concrete, solid-experience questions like "Are you willing to let the government police your sex-life?" and "should a patient who suffers a still-birth be investigated by the police, and subjected to the risk of being charged with a major felony?"

I absolutely love 24 and I have that book "24 and Philosophy." Love it!

One thing on responsibility of SCOTUS, I think you miss. It is up to us to elect legislators and executives that understand the morality and keeping our laws. SCOTUS is not a super Legislature and we do not want them acting as one. They are not the last stop sanity check. It is up.to us to engage our fellow citizens so that they see the morality of pro life arguments and the basic rights in both life and the Constitution and let SCOTUS function as intended.

Could you help me find the two part conversation with Stephen Napier you mentioned having done? I can’t find it anywhere.

As a Christian, so many of these arguments make me itch. I understand that the vast majority of abortion proponents aren’t religious, but why not use that to strengthen why Christian moral ethics are literally superior as in they come from God & WE NEED GOD. Why not just state outright that abortion & murder are wrong because we are all made in the image & likeness of God (full stop). And when the person says “I don’t believe in God & so you can’t foist your religion on me” you can say “well, then it sounds like we need God to tell us that infanticide/ child sacrifice is morally unconscionable”. Most of these other arguments seem to lead to abstraction & that’s where we are now.

I think we should make a distinction between human being and person. I also think that as humans we tend to prefer our own species and give ourselves intrinsic worth, which is not so surprising, but also arguably, false.

Playing devil's advocate. I would bring up the common and very strong pro-choice argument of saving the mother's life. We are saying the mother MUST die to save the child's life. A victim MUST die because she killed in self-defense (killing is wrong regardless the motive is the reasoning). Which also means the mother is guilty for "thinking" about getting an abortion and deserves to die because of it. Catholics have a lot of resources to help pregnant mothers, but if they have no exception to save the mother then it's a contradiction. Assuming rarity or improbability doesn't mean impossibility if we are judging by world population of women who may need abortions. With that in mind, would you, as pro-life, let the mother die to save her child? If religious pro-life cannot address this argument (not dismiss it with fallacies) then their position is weak. Mind you there is medical abortion not just surgical.

Yup, really hard to guess what the "philosophical" arguments are from a christian apologist "professor".

All the arguments in favour of animalism from natural language are so terrible. By that same logic you should commit yourself to the genuine, ontologically weighty existence of flaws because "There are some flaws in pro choice arguments" sounds true in natural language. Obviously language is often deliberately imprecise in order to make communication easier.

Let me say to start, I am anti-abortion. However, if we want society to be anti-abortion as well, we have to have good, secular arguments. I don't think Trent's analog to kidney donation or response about ectopic pregnancies are good enough. Having a baby and donating a kidney (or bone marrow for that matter) are not analogous. Trent said having an abortion is like "asking for a kidney back" after you've donated it. That's not true. Having a baby in the womb is 9 months of "donation" with life-long post "donation" consequences, even if a mom gives the baby up for adoption. You donate a kidney? Get the surgery, and then you don't have to think about it again (other than about how good of a person you are). Same thing with marrow donation. I really don't know what a better analogy is, but the kidney and marrow analogs are susceptible to attack. In ectopic pregnancies, there is literally no chance that the baby will survive to term. It's impossible. Trent's analogy to taking the heart from a terminally ill patient to give to a person who needs a heart transplant isn't a good analogy. With an ectopic pregnancy, the mother's health is at risk solely because of the fertilized egg's location. That's more akin to someone holding the mom and gunpoint. Can we remove the fertilized egg? Trent's argument about the jaws of life and the double effect is also not a good analogy. Trent assumes that the mother's tube is damaged. In many cases of ectopic pregnancy that is not true. Many times the treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is medication or a laparoscopic procedure to remove the fertilized egg but SAVING the fallopian tube. If the tube ruptures, however, it is very likely that it cannot be saved. In cases of a unilateral salpingectomy, fertility is usually not affected, but if this is a second surgery or bilateral, then the mother would have to get IVF to have a kid. So, where and when can we perform a preventative unilateral salpingectomy when the mother is not experiencing an emergency and doesn't otherwise have any other problem?

Doesn't abortion send a fetus-soul to the loving arms of Jesus? It can't possiblly end up being tortured by his father for a trillion years (and that's just the start). Why isn't abortion a sacrament?

Wow. Do you two miss the mark. I am not a philosopher, but my son and my father both are legit, credentialed philosophers and i have spent my entire life engaged in such discussions. I was also raised catholic and at age 17 was raped and impregnated. I can tell you with absolute certainty that no one in that situation cares a rats ass about your implicit view that as christians you have the lock on the moral highground (the jews might argue that and they are pro choice). Nor do people in this situation care about specious philosphical arguments that have nothing to do with reality. I was actually looking forward to hearing some concrete pro life arguments directed to people that might find themselves confronting this situation, but you are clearly only interested in debating other philosophers who are equally disconeccted from reality and lacking in both compassion and knowledge about what pregnancy really entails. It must be nice to be so fervently convinced that you are right and that those who believe there may be circumstances where abortion is appropriate are wrong. Since you are fond of analogies, here is one. Lets say a soldier is captured by an enemy and taken to a work camp, where it is known that liberation is no more than 9 months away. Does the capturer have the right to force the POW into hard labor, even if it is only for nine months? Wouldn't that be SLAVERY, as it is taking away an individuals bodily autonomy and forcing it into service of another? Would you say that because the soldier volunteered for service and knew capture was a distinct possibility, the soldier forfeited his right to bodily autonomy? And what if, as a by product of that hard labor, the soldier suffered 24 hour sickness, constant pain, the loss of emotional control, the loss of bladder control, the painful metamorphosis of his body and increasingly compromised mobility along with all the physical vulnerability that entails, the inability to sleep, and ultimately at the end of his confinement, excruciating agony. Would it be moral of the captor to force that labor if, for the entire 9 months of that captivity, the soldier faced the real possibility of permanent physical damage or death? Would you not call that TORTURE? And what about the inevitable lifelong trauma, unimaginable clinical depression that would come with being forced against his will to endure such an experience? Would you not call that PTSD? Now suppose that soldier, as an act of reconcilation and as you put it "heroism", was forced to care for and become legally responsible for his captor for nearly 2 decades?. We have a geneva convention that protects soldiers from the very same situation you would force upon women and even 10 year old girls, because it is considered inhumane. But hey, because it involves a zygote, embryo, or fetus incapable of independent life until between 20 and 28 months its ok because it's only 9 months, right? THAT is the argument you have to defeat, but you and your ilk are too cowardly to go there. You never confront it because you know its unwinnable. I wish i could say your hubris and arrogance astonish me, but unfortunately they don't. You need to stop the implicit assumption that pregnancy is a beautiful, miraculous thing. It isn't. It's hard, often tortuous and dangerous. For most of human existence its been the #1 killer of women. In many places it still is. The US has the worst maternal mortality rate of any developed country and its getting worse. These are the realities and they are why women must have choice. Anything less relegates them to dehumanized breeders...but you with your moral highground are entirely comfortable subjecting women and girls - who may very well already be traumatized and pregnant against their will, to slavery and torture for the benefit of what is fundamentally a parasite. If you want to win the moral highground and persuade the pro coice contingent you will have to do a hell of a lot better.

so Horn is happy to embrace a fundamentally wrong argument like the 'future like ours' argument, as long as it supports his desired conclusion? how very 'apologist' of him. agenda first, truth second.