Citation Needed - Ross Douthat Opinion Pieces

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

2 op-eds by Ross Douthat https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/opinion/abortion-dobbs-supreme-court.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/religion-god.html

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Subscribe now to Moms and Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be hosting this discussion about a very obnoxious white guy with lots of opinions. And I'm joined by four podcasters. Cecil, Noah, Tommy, Eli.

I'm the only one of us with a podcast about a podcast, I think. I don't know if that's meta or sad. I'm not sure which. As our Patreon-only opening sketches constantly remind us, Cec remind us that is not an or type God I have been doing this long enough to remember podcasting from before it was cool Which is the only reason they let me do it? When did it become cool is it now now no we record in advance. He's being optimistic No, we record in advance. He's being optimistic

All right fingers crossed. All right, Noah What person place thing concept phenomenon or event we're gonna be talking about today a couple of op-eds from my least favorite op-ed writer the New York Times is Ross Douthat and Why yeah great question man So a couple of months ago Tom did an episode that was just a bunch of op-eds from shitty billionaires and I thought, wow, that seems way easier than writing a whole thing. And it was. Yeah, right? Right?

Yeah. It turned out to be. It's one of my favorite episodes that we've done. I love that. Yeah. No, it was a ton of fun. And I was like, well, you know, I have a long list of op-ed writers that I hate read on a regular basis, kind of in the job description over at Scathing Atheist.

So I thought, you know, I would offer two of his worst for you guys to dig into. Honestly, the fact that you've been reading the New York Times op-ed section is worse than when we found out Tom shocks himself awake every morning. Yeah, it's we're concerned. So, all right. So Ross has a new book out about why we should all be religious. And he's been, yeah, he's been promoting that of late, including in the op-ed that inspired this episode. It came out a few weeks ago as when we recorded this anyway, that would be February 7th of 2025. And the title of the op-ed is my favorite argument for the existence of God.

This feels like getting challenged to a duel, but the box with the pistols just has the argument from ignorance and a tautology in it. Okay, for the version in my head, I open the box, it's completely empty, and I punch Ross Stout that in the face. I'm not a violent person at all, but it's so fucking punchable. It's so is the most punchable. podcast host Keith has placed a few pictures of Ross in our show notes and his hairline appears to be receding in formation. I think it might be a map of the Battle of the Bulge like over time.

Okay, no, no, no. Eli, there's literally no way anything this man has involves a bulge. Yeah. Okay. No, if he shows up in a room with JD Vance, their faces will smash together just out of like, my God, they will. Yeah. Right.

Right. They'll cancel each other out. Yeah. As, as I just want to just remind listeners that after listening to this essay portion, there's a whole book of this. Yeah. A whole fucking book of this. All right. Let's see if I can do the voice here. Over the last few weeks, I've been recording conversations about my new book,

Believe Why Everybody Should Be Religious. And one of the striking things, not unexpected, but still interesting, is how different people react to different arguments for being religious or believing in God. For instance, no illusions kicked me in the balls and did my voice like this. This is exactly what he sounds like. You'll get one very smart interlock in her. Well, fuck you. Just say person.

You're talking about a person who's talking in a discussion because you're doing a discussion in your op-ed. For whom it seems perfectly reasonable to consider religious possibilities in light of the evidence for order and design at the deepest level of the universe, but who just can't swallow the idea that there might be supernatural realities, visions, encounters, literal miracles that inherently evade the capacities of modern science to measure and dissect? You'll never escape my sentence, Batman! Jesus Christ!

Then you'll get another person for whom it's the reverse, for whom the primary case for religion is experiential, while attempts to discover a God in, say, the cosmological constant leave them cold. Okay, I'm sorry, but the two kinds of people who react to arguments for God's existence are the people who think that you're right and then the people who feel that you're right. That's the two people. That's where we're at. Good. I love that he's Vizini from Princess Bride.

It's forming. It's forming into a character. My own view is more promiscuous. Ooh, naughty. You're right is more promiscuous. Ooh, naughty. You're right. I can't wait. I think that the most compelling case for being religious for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and that we are part of that reason is

found at the conversions of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves. I see why you called your view promiscuous. It's fucked. Well, quick thing before I get going. I'm a debaucherous theological ethereal of the night. Yes, I just covered in epistemological cum all the time.

And with that established, I shall begin my very serious essay. Okay, but slutty argument or no, that sentence amounts to, I think, the best reason for believing in God is multiple reasons for believing in God exists, and you'll probably like one of them. Yup. Consider three big examples. The evidence for cosmic design and the fundamental laws and structures of the universe, the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole, and the persistence and plausibility

of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions. Ooh, ooh, can I consider them through a 3,000 year old lens when the ancient Greeks disproved them? Or would you prefer I consider them through a lens a bit more, what's the word Ross? Stupid, stupid. Yes. Definitely more stupid, please.

Yeah, through a glass darkly. Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Nope. Don't. Indeed. Nope. Nope. Not how indeed works.

Wow. I don't think that word means what you think it means. I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone towards at least a version of Pascal's wager, but it's the fact that a religious perspective makes sense out of all of them, why the universe seems calibrated for our appearance and why consciousness has the supernatural seeming dimension and why even non-believers report having religious experiences that makes the strongest case for some form of belief.

Hey, Ross, if I give you a fucking secular experience, and I would be happy to, will you shut the fuck up forever if you have one of those? But do I have a favorite argument within the larger run of converging claims? Oh, God, I hope not. I was thinking about that. I'm rooting so hard for him to say the word inconceivable. It's pretty hard. I'm control F it, control F it.

Yeah. I was thinking about that while reading the effort by the prolific and precocious, he's apparently still an undergraduate essayist who writes under the name Bentham's Bulldog to rank or grade a long list of arguments for God's existence. That's right, listener. He links us to an arguments for God's existence tier list. Oh, come on.

Don't worry, we're going to cover it on scathing. It's that's a scathing. I'm not sure I could manage such a ranking. To be honest, there are some arguments on this list that I can't claim to fully understand. But I do generally think the arguments related to the experiential supernatural, mystic occurrences and miracles are underrated, especially among professional arguers relative to more philosophically driven claims. Yeah, people who know things for a living underestimate my favorite thoughts is not

the brag you think that it is. However, the supernaturalist games inevitably relies on anic data and subjective reporting. Lying. That's lying. Not lying. Anic data. Keith, can you feel me using the words anic data every time I lie for the rest of our friendship? Because I feel it. You look for me. Listen, I've felt it for years, man. In a way that other arguments do sexually for those allergic to such claims,

logical people, people who do a different underrated argument that I'd be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above, the line of evidence from the fine tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness. Admittedly, it is kind of a miracle that you can breathe with your own head that far up your ass, so I kind of believe in miracles now. The fine tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that the parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely if you will, in an extremely narrow

range, with odds on the order of one in a bazillion, that's a technical number, don't question it, not one in a hundred hundred that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. If you change one number on this winning lottery ticket, it's a loser. So that's God. That's an infinite God who did 13.8 billion years of lottery drawings just in this universe. To quote Bentham's Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong primipatia case for some originating intelligence.

Quote, if there is no God, then the constants, laws, and initial conditions could be anything, so it's absurdly unlikely that they'd fall into ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life. End quote. likely that they'd fall into ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life." End quote. Tardigrade crumples up a tiny version of this op-ed and shoots it into the universe's smallest garbage can. Go ahead and put the sun closer. We're fucking fine.

It's like God's running a DEI program for these feeble fucking humans. Sorry, I'm a water bear. The fine tuned version of the universe is the one where there's one hospitable planet with sentient life every trillion or so light years. First up for a limited time. The strongest material counter explanation for these wild seeming coincidences that can see very familiar from today's pop culture and comic book movies. The idea of a multiverse, which answers the apparent bazillion to one odds against our life bearing universe appearing accidentally by postulating a bazillion universes that we unfortunately can't see or taste or touch. From this postulate, you get the conclusion that we're in the universe capable of sustaining living observers because of a selection effect.

The non-life-bearing universes don't get observers because, well, they're not life-bearing, instead of being filled with alt-superheroes, as in the Marvel multiverse. And we're the one in a bazillion case by definition, because that's the only situation where an observer could exist. Okay, and not only is that not the main objection people have to the argument of fine-tuning, it's not even an argument against fine-tuning. You may as well say that the strongest materialist counter-explanation for a fine-tuned universe is that we have the receipt for that jacket you borrowed from us right there. Right, yeah, though this observer problem exists regardless, yeah. I think that argument has a lot of obvious weaknesses. Moreover, along with the reasons to doubt that the multiverse hypothesis actually describes reality, there are also reasons

to doubt that if it did describe reality, it would actually undermine the argument for design and God. But let's stipulate just for the sake of argument that we might be in a multiverse that the apparent fine-tuning that enables Self-aware life forms might be there just because these parameters and conscious observations itself are just a package deal okay podcast listener if you're lost right now about why he's currently doing a Two paragraph long back flip up his own ass. It's because he has to disqualify Impossible things can't be true as an argument against multiverses because he knows we're going to use it on God. That's what he can't mean like

that's not possible. Even then, there is still a strange jackpot aspect of our position that cries out for explanation. We aren't just in a universe that we can observe. We're in a universe that's deeply intelligible to us. A cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite, and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart. Okay, you make it sound like we figured out a lot of things,

but let me just point out that we stopped believing in vaccines because an MMA comedian read a debunked study about horse paste. Okay? And Ross, by the way, the religion that you're arguing for has a goddamn meltdown every time we figure out a new science thing. Right. We were like, hey, look, we got a new vaccination.

The stem cells is eating a baby. Dude, what? It's the same. You're eating a baby from 1973 Netherlands right now. Same. And if you're wondering what a universe that doesn't have discoverable rules would look like, it's this essay. That's what it is.

Apparently. Yeah, right, right. This capacity of human reason is mysterious. On one level, it's the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel points out in his Critique of Materialism, Mind, and Cosmos, it is, quote, not merely the subjectivity of thought, but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case, end quote, that presents a problem for a hard materialism,

since under materialist premises, our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. Okay, first of all, Nagle's a theologian, not a philosopher, you need more than one subject to be a philosopher and to his argument for those at home is how do we know? What's objectively true if we don't invent an omniscient ghost that agrees with us What is objectively true in a nutshell? Yeah, but the success of human reasoning is remarkable even if you wave away the problem of consciousness

and assume the evolutionary pressure suffices to explain some modest form of successful reasoning. That the response to stimuli that enabled early homo sapiens to recognize the pattern, say of a predator's behavior, ended up having adaptive uses beyond just panther dodging, granting our hominid ancestors some kind of basic capacity of understanding. Yeah, I mean, hey, you know, if evolving reason were such a successful adaptation,

well then that species that evolved, it would have swiftly taken over the dominant position on the planet and spread to every corner of the globe. Oh, fucking wait! And Ross, why can't you catch that tweety bird in any of those cartoons? I don't understand. Even then, it seems like that in many, many potential universes, those capacities would

have hit a ceiling in terms of what they could accomplish, and there would have been either inherent limits in mind or complicating aspects of the hidden architecture preventing superficial understanding from ever going really deep. It seems dazzlingly unlikely that an accidental observer would just keep on cracking codes at each new level of exploration as the practice gave way to the theoretical, the simple to the complex, the intuitive to the far more mysterious, without any evolutionary pressure forcing each new leap. Humans do hit an intellectual wall sometimes. This op-ed is a great piece of evidence to contrast the last paragraph in this op-ed.

And we don't have cold fusion. We can't live to 500. We can't teleport. What the fuck are you talking about? I don't think we've actually nailed down what fucking lightning or yawning is. Yeah. Is it credible? Nagel asked that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past of fixed capacities are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time? Inconceivable even? Evolution's pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival not discovering calculus or equals MC squared

So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out Mary Blair Marabita dick to You! The capacities! Marie-Belay-Dick-tooth! Get the fuck out of here! Just say, you know, wonderfully, whatever that means. I had to look it up. I think it's wonderfully.

Yeah, me too. Yeah, right. In this instance, it just means like, wouldn't you know it. That's a great line, Ross. I'm your friend Peter Thiel. I'm helping you write this. It is important to understand the deepest love of physics and of chemistry to achieve man's spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of telecon.

Suppose that as a child, you developed a private language to use with your siblings or your friends a simple set of codes slightly more sophisticated than Pig Latin with the eminently practical purpose of enabling private communications that grownups wouldn't understand. Let that stand for the survival-driven toolkit of our primitive ancestors. Imagine an overly reductive analogy created to suit my very narrow rhetorical purposes. And a ridiculous one too. Now suppose that much later in life you discover that that childish system enables members of your circle of friends to read and understand a set of ancient texts as complex as Shakespeare and Aristotle put together that contained all the secrets of Mayan astronomy, Greek philosophy, and Egyptian

mysticism and that you happened to discover hidden in the attic of your childhood home. It was a wardrobe actually that I discovered. Would you just assume? Well, I was a bright kid and putting one over on grownups really builds linguistic skills. No wonder I was able to read ancient books of esoteric knowledge that just happened to be hanging around in my vicinity. Actually every time you solve a riddle or a math problem, that's Jesus. Or would you accept the more obvious conclusion that you and your friends were characters

in a larger story and that the book was in some sense placed there for you? Ross, you literally started with like little grunting noises as a baby and here you are writing an article that includes the phrase, mirabile dictu, but you're not an intellectual miracle of God's intelligent design. It's because you're a pretentious asshole. And that is why you think you're a miracle of God's intelligent design. Okay. But I also want to know what a universe without God would look like to Ross then.

Great question. Would language evolve spontaneously and with no backwards compatibility? Would there just be a gall walking around the forest one day and he'd be like, Ah, fuck, I am French. No, no, no, Chris, I have no idea what you're saying, man. I'm French now. I live in a universe where there's no gall and I just eat. I am not French. God, there's no more of this. Sorry. As the previous slide suggests,

the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather, it's more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt. Not only that God exists in some distant unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start. So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God God he created him. Mirabele dictu. All right, well, I'm gonna rip Peter Thiel's arms off and put them in a dueling box so I can punch Ross Dutte in the face with one of those arms. And we're gonna take a quick break for some Apropos of Nothing. Which is why we're forced to conclude that hegemonic economic theory is unprincipled for mutual thriving.

Thank you, I rest. Thank you, Mr. Enright. All right, Mr. Bosnik, you have 10 minutes. Okay. So, I think money is those blue lint chocolate balls. So, if you think about it,

there's like way too few of them for everybody. Sorry, what? Mr. Enright, please. No, sorry, he just said that he thinks money is a Chocolate ball the little blue ones from the link company. No, I just count against my time. No, no, it doesn't mr Enright there will be time for questions at the end. Please let your opponent speak right No, it's just this is a debate about economic theory

If my opponent is gonna start by pretending not to know what money is. I don't know what money is. Yes, you do. We can't debate this topic like this. Well then you should clarify what money is in your response and also disprove his argument. Okay, but you see how I can't do that, right? I can't disprove an infinite number of untrue things while making my own point. Sounds like you're a bad debater to me. Sorry?

Yes, you sir, in the audience. I would also like you to make your point in a way that makes me feel good. Sorry, what? Yeah, it's just, you know, when you're explaining your position, if you could do it in a way that doesn't make me feel bad or stupid, that's just very important. Why is that important? Well, if it doesn't, it doesn't feel good, I won just very important. Why is that important? Well, if it doesn't feel good, I won't believe it.

Why? Why don't you care what things are true? Sorry, sorry. I relate money to immutable and persecuted parts of my identity. Can I think it's chocolate? Obviously, yes, that's fine. No, no, you can't. Why would you be able to do that?

Wow. Sure seems like you're on the side of persecution right now I also feel that way now does their stuff count against my time. I still have a lot to say okay You know what I give up. Yay. I win money is chocolate now Yes, that is how it works. I hate you all so much. I knew it was chocolate this whole time I feel good about it. I'm gonna burn the building down. And we're back. I brought some bloody arm stumps in a box ready to go. So let's read

some more. Ross, do that. What's next? All right. Well, let's do abortion, guys. This one's a little bit older. This is a sad one to revisit. This one is from November 30th of 2021, and I'm still pissed off about it. It's called the case against abortion. Oh, I'm so excited to hear what we're pretending not to know this time. A striking thing about the American abortion debate is how little abortion itself is actually debated. The sensitivity and intimacy of the issues that makes the feelings of so many Americans

means that most politicians and even most pundits really don't like to talk about it. Okay, now that I think about it, this is brand new to me. It was the A-bor-regeneration? Let's find out what that means. I can't wait. The mental habits of polarization, the assumptions that the other side is always acting with hidden motives or in bad faith

mean that accusations of hypocrisy or simple evil are more commonplace than direct engagement with the pro-choice or pro-life arguments Yeah, it tends to happen in an argument where one side is objectively evil That's because it's not happens. It's because it's not about reproduction The argument is really about shaming people who carry all the child creation burden for fucking that's what it is Okay, okay, see so but it's man men and I'm just checking in here, but this is not going to limit our fucking.

Right. I mean, we. We can fuck each other. Yes, we can. And the Supreme Court's outsized role in abortion policy means that the most politically important arguments are carried on by lawyers, arguing constitutional theory at one removed from the real heart of the debate.

Whether Ruth Bader Ginsburg retired on time See both sides of the debate can blame women guys But her emails yeah, no those extra four years really matter She should have known what Mitch McConnell was gonna do before I did great for sure. Yeah, definitely should have been read Mitch McConnell's mind But with the court set- We're still fighting actually. Thank you. Yeah. But with the court set to hear Dobbs

versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, God, Jesus. a direct challenge to Roe versus Wade, it seems worth letting the lawyers handle the meta arguments and writing about the thing itself. So this essay will offer no political or constitutional analysis. It will simply try to state the pro-life case.

And here it is. I look like a fetus with a beard and elbow patches and you shouldn't be allowed to kill me. Russ, just be honest about your argument. Just be honest. Okay, okay, but Heath, you shouldn't be allowed to kill me is a terrible argument from Rouse Stoutman, right? This dude should not make that argument. be allowed to kill me is a terrible argument from Rouse out. Right.

Should not make that argument. No, that's fair. As the core of our legal system, you will find a promise that human beings should be protected from lethal violence. Sure. Walt Ross. He's an American and he says that that promise is made in different ways by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It's there in English common law, the Ten Commandments, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We dispute how the promise should be enforced, what penalties should be involved if it is broken, and what crimes might deprive someone of the right to life, but the existence of the basic right and a fundamental duty not to kill is pretty close to bedrock. There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing. Well, actually there are bunches. There's also the majority of people actually.

Or it is killing and it's awesome. At a less advanced stage of scientific understanding, it was possible to believe that an embryo or fetus was somehow inert or vegetative until so-called quickening months into pregnancy. We now know the embryo is not merely a cell with potential like a sperm or an ovum or a constituent part of a human tissue like a skin cell. Rather, a distinct human organism comes into existence at conception and every stage of your biological life. It was really nice of him, wasn't it? I think he knew how you were going to do the voice.

I think he knew. From infancy and childhood to middle age and beyond, it's part of a single continuous process that began when you were just a zygote. Cool. Okay. Well, now we've established that life begins at conception is Ross gonna tell us about all the people we have in fridges at IVF centers around the world right yeah we're gonna hear about all the little baby demolition man's need to correct the birthdays by a couple months or years Ross we know from embryology in other words not scripture or philosophy That abortion kills a unique member of the species homo sapien an act that in almost every other context is forbidden by law Okay, I mean seems like scripture from the all-knowing God would have mentioned that but

Marabale dick to we figured out how to kill a cum peanut to save a full human Or just to kill the cum peanut cause it's awesome either way I don't care Unlike actual peanuts we never actually blame the cum peanut on the planters so This means that the affirmative case for abortion rights is inherently exceptionalist, demanding a suspension of a principle that prevails in practically every other case. This does not automatically tell against it. Exceptions as well as the rules are part of law, but it means that there is a burden of proof on the pro-choice side to explain why in this case taking another human life is

acceptable indeed a protected right itself. It's too bad he stopped reading that sentence at life and didn't get to the liberty or pursuit of happiness. Otherwise he would be able to explain it to himself. But, uh, You can't. It's saved a lot of trouble. One way to clear this threshold would be to identify some quality that makes the unborn different in kind from all other forms of human life. Adults, infant, geriatric. You need an argument that acknowledges that the embryo is a distinct human organism,

but draws a credible distinction between human organisms and human persons, between the unborn lives you've excluded from the law's protection and the rest of the human race. Um, the cum peanut is part of someone else's body? Are we done? Free the demolition band babies! Ross, you can do it! Free them from the prison, Ross! Okay Ross, again, when aborted, fetuses would all pretty much qualify as organ donors if their bodies were just bigger, man.

They aren't alive by the same standards we use when we pull a plug on grandpa. It's not hard. Oh, we're gonna sorta get there. In this kind of pro-choice argument, in theory, personhood is often associated with some property that's acquired well after conception. Cognition, reason, self-awareness, the capacity to survive outside of the womb, and the version of this idea that human life is there in utero but human personhood develops later fits intuitively with how many people react to a photo of an extremely early embryo. It doesn't look human,

does it? Though less, though, to a second trimester fetus where the physical resemblance to a newborn is more palpable. For the record, Ross, it's the last one about using another person's body as a condo. If it were about that reason, I would have aborted you in the first half of the episode. You understand that, right? If that's what it was. I mean, is he really arguing here that, you know, I guess we do intuitively understand I'm full of shit, don't we? He is! Yes!

But the problem with this is- I do not look like a cum peanut. It's hard to identify exactly what property is supposed to do the work of excluding the unborn from the ranks of humans whom it is wrong to kill. If full personhood is somehow rooted in reasoning capacity or self-consciousness, then all manner of adult human beings lack it or lose it at some point or another in their lives. If the capacity for survival and self-direction is essential, then every infant would lack personhood.

To say nothing of the premature babies that are unviable without extreme medical interventions, but regarded rightly as no less human for all of that. Cool. All right. So now he's going to address the third one, which is our actual argument, right? At its most rigorous, this organism but not person argument to okay yeah I think that if I have a stage of neurological development that supposedly marks personal its arrival a transition equivalent in reverse to brain death at the end of life but even

setting aside the practical difficulties involved in identifying this point we draw a legal line of brain death because it's understood to be irreversible the moment that was to human organisms healthy functions can never be restored. Sorry, can I just reject the premise of like, well, the whole thing? Yes, I forgot to do it earlier. Just whenever I'm not saying that I reject it. Sure. Duly noted. This is obviously not the case for an embryo on the cusp of higher brain functioning. And if you knew that a brain dead but otherwise physically healthy person with spontaneously regained consciousness in two weeks, everybody would understand that the caregivers had an obligation to let those processes play out.

Or almost everyone, I should say. There are true rigorists who follow the logic of fetal non-personhood towards repugnant conclusions. For instance, that we ought to permit the euthanizing of severely disabled newborns as the philosopher Peter Singer has argued. Okay, Peter Singer, the source of Eli's morality. Yeah, that is a pretty good angle for us to do that. I am listening now. I'm back on board. This is why abortion opponents have warned of a slippery slope for abortion, a slippery slope from abortion to infanticide and voluntary euthanasia. That's pure logic. The position that unborn human beings aren't human persons can really tend that way. But to their credit, only a small minority of abortion rights supporters are willing

to be so ruthlessly consistent. Instead, most people on the pro-choice side are content to leave their rules of person a little hazy and combine them with the second potent argument for abortion rights. Namely, that regardless of the precise moral status of unborn human organisms, they cannot enjoy a legal right to life because that would strip away too many rights from women. Hey, you found it! It only took you like a thousand words to get to the answer that you're going to reject. A world without legal abortion in this view effectively confines women the second class citizenship. Their ambitions limited, their privacy compromised, their bodies conscripted, their claims to

full equality a lie. Yep, that's a bite. Yeah, no notes actually, no notes. These kind of arguments often imply that birth is the most relevant milestone for defining legal personhood, not because of anything that happens to the child, but because it's the moment when his life ceases to impinge so dramatically on his mother. There is a powerful case for some kind of feminism embedded in these claims. The question is whether that case requires abortion itself.

Oooh, is Ross about to suggest time travel? Certain goods that should be common to men and women cannot be achieved. It's true. If the law simply declared the sexes equal without giving weight to the disproportionate burdens that pregnancy imposes on women. Okay, and here I'm sure we'll see him strongly advocate a position for universal basic income, childcare and healthcare and hold my breath. Justice requires those burdens through means both traditional and modern,

holding men legally and financially responsible for all the children that they father and providing stronger financial and social support for motherhood at every state. You hear that women bearing the children of their rapists? Ross wants to make sure you get the child support from your rapists that you deserve. Jesus Christ. He's pitching childbirth like a class action mesothelioma ad. But does this kind of justice for women require legal indifference to the claims of the unborn?

Is it really necessary to found equality for one group of human beings on legal violence towards another entirely voiceless group? We have a third amount of practical evidence that suggests the answer is no. Consider, for instance, that between the early 1980s and the later 2010s, the abortion rate in the United States fell by more than half. The reasons for this decline are disputed, but it seems reasonable to assume that it reflects a mix of cultural change, increased contraception use, and the effects of anti-abortion legal strategies,

which have made abortion somewhat less available in many states as pro-choice advocates often lament. Okay, so to be clear, again, for those of you sort of lost in the sauce with that language, it's entirely the middle one. And saying that it's one or three are enough reason to light your New York Times subscription on fire and throw it through the window of their offices. Well, it has to be, right? Because the birth rate didn't go up during that time. It literally has to be. If there was an integral and unavoidable relationship between a person and female

equality, you would expect these declines, fewer abortions, diminished abortion access, to track with a general female retreat from education and the workplace. What? No. Why? No, no, you wouldn't. Why would you expect that? No such thing has happened. Moving on, moving on. That's whether measured by educational attainment, managerial and professional positions, breadwinner status or even political office holding. The status of women has risen in the same America

where the pro-life movement has modestly gained ground. And there are no other factors at all. Of course, it's always been possible that female advancement could have been even more rapid, the equality of the sexes more fully and perfectly established if the pro-life movement did not exist. Certainly, in the individual female life trajectory, having an abortion rather than a baby can offer economic and educational advantages.

But what if you give birth through a baby genius? That would probably make you a ton of money, huh? He's actually gonna get to that. Have you seen those movies? Individual female life trajectory, does Ross know that all people actually have only one personal life It's all just a collection of life trajectories motherfucker. Yeah, no he goes on on a collective level though

It's also possible that the default to abortion is the solution to an unplanned pregnancy actually discourages other Adaptations that would make American life friendlier to women and Erica You're only allowed to solve things with one thing. What are you talking about? As Erika Bacchi wrote recently in the National Review, if our society assumes that, quote, abortion is what enables women to participate in the workplace, end quote, then corporations may prefer the abortion default to more substantial accommodations like flexible work schedules and better pay for part-time jobs. relying on the logic of abortion rights, in other

words as a reason not to adapt to the realities of childbearing and motherhood. Yeah, no, if I know anything about corporate America, they would love to be more generous to women, but abortion just Allow it She wrote in the feminist magazine founded by william f. Buckley jr Yeah, this is the most weasely take for your bigoted bullshit since Charles Murray pretended He wrote a book about how dumb black people are in the name of universal basic income It's like don't worry guys six months paid maternity leave is hidden right here under this national abortion ban. All I have to do is move it.

Yes. Hey, if there's a problem inequality for the sexist, we'll just let capitalism sort it out. That always works. It does a great job for other stuff. At the very least. The invisible hand for abortion works too. Should have gotten a visible hand jobs and then have to be in this spot. At the very least, I think an honest look at the patterns of the past four decades

reveals a multitude of different ways to offer women greater opportunities, a multitude of pathways to equality and dignity, a multitude of ways to be a feminist. In other words, that do not require yogaiing its idealistic vision to hundreds of thousands of acts of violence every year. Think of the millions of child neglect cases that go unprosecuted every year in the name of so-called miscarriages. It's also true, though, that nothing in all that multitude of policies will lift the irreducible burdens of childbearing, the biological realities that simply cannot be redistributed to fathers,

governments, or adoptive parents. And here, too, a portion of the pro-choice argument is correct. The unique nature of pregnancy means that there has to be some limit on what the state or society asks of women and some zone of privacy that the legal system fears to tread. But that doesn't count because I called no legal analysis at the beginning. So even when I played devil's advocate against myself, that doesn't count. I love where he's going with this. This is one reason the wisest anti-abortion legislation, and yes, pro-life legislation

is not always wise criminalizes the provision of abortion by third parties rather than prosecuting the women who seek one It's why anti-abortion laws are rightly deemed invasive and abusive when they lead to the investigation of the Yeah, here we go here we go buddy What they lead to the investigation of suspicious seeming miscarriages. I thought I saw a miscarriage. Amazing. It's why the general principle of legal protection. He fell. Why don't you guys make sure I don't do a future one?

He's going to put that into every one of them, right? It's why the general principle of legal protections for human life in Europe may or must understandably give way in extreme cases, extreme burdens, the conception by rape, the life threatening pregnancy. At the same time, though, the pro-choice stress on the burden of the ordinary pregnancy can become detached from the way that actual human beings experience the world. In a famous thought experiment, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson once analogized an unplanned pregnancy to waking up with a famous violinist hooked

up to your body, who will die if he's disconnected before nine months have passed. It's a vivid science fiction image, but one that only distantly resembles the actual thing it describes. A new life that usually exists because of a freely chosen sexual encounter, a reproductive experience that if material circumstances were changed might be desired and celebrated, a disconnection of the new life that cannot happen without lethal violence and a victim who is not some adult stranger but the woman's child. I don't understand Judith Thompson's metaphor about bodily autonomy. I said smartly with much smartness. Maybe if I jumble my word salad a bit here, no one will notice that what I really just

said was, why not just keep your legs closed? One can accept pro-choice logic then insofar as it demands a sphere of female privacy and warrants constantly against the potential for abuse without following the logic all the way to a general right to abort an unborn human life. Okay, you know what? Tell you what, if we hear a Mozart violin concerto coming down the pipe, we'll call a timeout. Still probably do it, but like, you know, we'll call time out for a second.

Yeah, exactly. But we'll wait until the concerto's over. Indeed, this is how most people approach similar arguments in other contexts. In the name of privacy and civil liberties, we impose limits on how the justice system polices and imprisons, and we may celebrate activists who try to curb that system's manifest abuses. But we don't, with, yes, some anarchist exceptions, believe that we should remove all legal protection for people's property or lives. That removal of protection would be unjust

no matter what its consequences, but in reality we know that those consequences would include more crime, more violence, and more death, and the anti-abortion side can give the same answer when it's asked why we can't be content with doing all the other things that may reduce abortion rates and leaving legal protection out of it. Because while legal restrictions aren't sufficient to end abortion, there really are a lot of unborn human lives they might protect. Consider that when the state of Texas put into effect this year a ban on most abortions. Oh, my. After about six weeks. By the way, he doesn't have a lisp.

He just has the vibes of the zini from from. Yeah. That's what's happening in real life. The state supports it. Yeah, I'm not making fun of an actual speech impediment. I'm just making fun of it. No one made a choice at the beginning of this essay 47 minutes ago, and we are living for it.

Yep, yep. The state's abortion is immediately fell by half. I think the Texas law, which tries to evade the requirements of Roe versus Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey by using private lawsuits for enforcement, it's vulnerable to obvious critiques and liable to be abused.

It's not a model I would ever cite for pro-life legislation. Yeah, and when weed was illegal, nobody smoked it. Can you believe that? Not a single person. God, I'm sorry guys. Amidst all this ponderous purple prose, I admit I'm getting a little bored, but is his point here that when people weren't able to provide others with medical care,

then people got less of that care? That's the point now, yeah. How did we even find out the abortions were happy. Hey, I'm just calling in to let y'all know I got one. Could you write that down in case Ross asks? But that immediate effect, that sharp drop in abortions, it's why the pro-life movement makes legal protection is its paramount goal. Sure. Yeah. And that's why the pro-life movement makes legal protection its paramount goal. Sure, yeah, and that's why the pro-life movement,

Mrabaleh Dikto, is constantly giving out free condoms and demanding that insurance companies cover contraception. Solid point, Ross. Solid. According to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, who surveyed the facilities that provided about 93% of all abortions in the state. There were 2,149 fewer legal abortions in Texas in the month the law went into effect than the same months in 2020. Yeah, when Marty's bar got shut down by the government, they served 100% less alcohol. What are you doing? This is nothing. This is nothing. This is nothing about half that number may end up still taking place. Some estimates suggest many of that other day because he fucking felt like it.

Right. Was that like about half? Where the fuck does that go to say half of those abortions? But that still means that in a matter of months, more than a thousand human beings will exist as legal persons, rights-sparing Texans, despite still being helpless, unreasoning, and utterly dependent, who would not have existed had this law not given them protection. But in fact, they exist already. They existed at our mercy all along Abla dee two okay if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence

What would it be having to read through that shit wasn't worth the hours I saved right in my own fucking And are you ready for the quiz I am I am in fact all right Noah Despite contributing significantly to the thin veil of academic integrity the New York Times lends to theocracy in the mainstream press, Ross Dushat got to do the We're So Sad Trump Won video with all the other New York Times opinion columnists the day after the election. Why? A. They already had the ring light out and Ross was definitely going to cry. B. His opinion isn't anywhere close to the most abhorrent that they've platformed.

Or C. They meant that video just as much as they mean everything else at the New York Times. Oh, god damn it. It's D, all of the above. It is D, all of the above. Also the New York Times is like super important. Just ignore the opinion section. Yeah, the opinion section is trash.

You could kill everyone. No, that's kind of how the op-ed section works, but could be dead. Really important publication. Hey Noah! Hey Caesar! When you have a violinist plugged into you for nine months, you have to feed him. What should you make sure is on hand? Oh Baby buck ribs A Maria C For seasonings or D. Oh Swan lot gay. Oh

That's amazing. Oh God I can't wait. I'm gonna have to go with guavae Maria. Oh, that's amazing. Oh, God, I can't pick one. I'm gonna have to go with Guave Maria though. That's amazing. Oh, I'm sure you're right. Yes. I know that. Guave Maria's fantastic.

I'm gonna make it simple for you. You know what? You made me both read and then listen to this nonsense. And I, hey, we'll never forgive you. Secret answer B, you're almost over. You loved it. We'll never forgive you. Ha ha I will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, the No-Rogan Experience, Dear

Old Dads, God awful Movies, The Scathing Atheist, The Skeptocrat, and D&D minus. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us listen to past episodes connect us on social media or take a look show notes Check out citation pod.com