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<\/a><\/p>\nI warned commenters against turning the Soup Nazi Approach to Sex<\/a> post into an abortion debate. Any free-ranging discussion of abortion tends to fail; I\u2019ve only had productive conversations when I spend a lot of time narrowing the focus of a conversation and screening off anything else. I\u2019m not surprised to see the discussion that broke out entering a tailspin, but I think there\u2019s something to be gleaned from the wreckage.<\/p>\n I\u2019m certainly not recapping the whole thread, so I picked the quote below because it gives me a good opening for my riff, not because I have any intention on weighing in on who started it. So, at some point in the discussion, a commenter said:<\/p>\n And if we\u2019re going to pick out inconsistencies in people\u2019s opinions about abortion\u2026 how about all the people who claim to believe that a fertilized egg is a person, and yet who don\u2019t give a toss about the natural abortion rate of fertilized eggs? Its about 30%. If a fertilized egg is a human being, that makes implantation failure the single greatest cause of human death on the planet. And yet the amount of research money going into preventing these deaths is approximately zero dollars and zero cents, American. I wonder why that is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is meant to be a proof that Christian views on fetal death are inconsistent and can\u2019t be the basis for legal or ethical restrictions. The conversation didn\u2019t go well, and the word \u2018sociopath\u2019 got broken out downstream. Let me try and fill in the gaps of this discussion, since I am<\/em> interested in talking about how we evaluate different kinds of death. I am still not<\/em> interested in having a broad discussion of abortion in the comments of this post.<\/p>\n Christians tend to differentiate between \u2018natural death\u2019 and all other types (one commenter in the last thread labeled abortion and murder as examples of \u2018induced death\u2019). This categorization happens by some black box method (I definitely don\u2019t understand it well enough to categorize it). So, although all deaths are sad, depending on what this black box outputs, there are different levels of duty to prevent death, and, in some cases, there is a duty to not<\/em> act to prevent death, since such an act would be an implicit rebuke to the natural order.<\/p>\n Thus, Christians frequently oppose abortion but put spontaneous miscarriage in the same category of death by old age. Depending on how their black box of \u2018natural death\u2019 works, they could fall on either side of the extraordinary measures\/Terri Schiavo-type debate. Almost all of the black boxes are opposed to cryonics, uploading, and other transhumanist attempts to achieve immortality.<\/p>\n Without nailing down how a particular Christian\u2019s natural death black box works, you can\u2019t spring the rhetorical trap the commenter set. The real argument was not about the intellectual integrity of abortion advocates, it was about whether their black boxes were calibrated correctly. So although it looks like you\u2019re having a simple argument about a contradiction, you\u2019re actually having a dispute that goes to the heart of their morality and metaethics. You\u2019ve signed on to something at least as hard as persuading them that gay relationships are on the same moral footing as heterosexual ones.<\/p>\n