Ross Douthat Opinion Pieces

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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 Pool, and Tom 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, Cecil, that is not an or type situation.

That's just not fair.

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?

We record in advance.

He's being optimistic.

Oh, very cool.

Cool.

All right.

Fingers crossed.

All right.

Noah.

What person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

A couple of op-eds from my least favorite op-ed writer, the New York Times' Ross Douthet.

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 just, yeah, right.

Right?

Yeah.

It turned out to be.

And it's also one of my favorite episodes that we've done.

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 to 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 Ahm shocks himself awake every morning.

We're concerned.

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 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 Stouthet in the face.

I'm not a violent person at all, but it's so fucking punchable.

Podcast

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 is 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, this is my god.

This is unreality.

Yeah.

Right, right.

They'll cancel each other out.

As I just want to just remind listeners that after they listen to this essay portion, there's a whole book of this.

A whole

fucking book.

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, Belief, 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.

Oh, Oh, this is exactly what he sounds like.

You'll get one very smart interlocutor for whom.

Well, fuck, you just say person.

You know, 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 fact.

Yeah, that's the two pairs.

Good.

I love that he's Vizini from Princess Pride.

It's forming.

It's forming into a character.

My own view is the more promiscuous.

Ooh, naughty.

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 convergence of multiple different lines 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.

Oh, the quick thing before I get going, I'm a debaucherist theological authority

because I just covered in epistemological calm 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 exist, and you'll probably like one of them.

Yep.

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 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.

Oh, definitely more stupid, please.

Throw it 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.

Nope.

Wow.

I don't think that word means what you think it does.

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 a 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?

But do I have a favorite argument within the larger run of converging claims?

Oh, I gotta help know.

I'm rooting so hard for him to say the word inconceivable.

It's pretty hard.

Control effort.

Control effort.

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 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 derived claims.

Yeah, people who know things for a living underestimate my favorite thoughts is not the brag you think that it is, boss.

However, the supernaturalist games inevitably relies on anecdote and subjective reporting.

Lying.

That's lying.

Not lying.

Anecdata, Heath.

Heath, can you feel me using the words anecdotal every time I lie for the rest of our friendship?

Because I feel it.

I feel it for me.

Listen, I've felt it for years, man.

In a way that other arguments do not.

Sexually.

For those allergic to such claims.

Logical people, people who do logic.

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 can't 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, 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 LA drawings just in this universe.

To quote Bentham's bulldog, this was deemed like a pretty strong primitive 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 in the 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.

This is ridiculous.

It's like God's running a DEI program for these feeble fucking humans.

Sorry, wait.

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.

For a limited time, yeah.

The strongest material counter-explanation for these wild-seeming coincidences is the conceit 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 a 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, 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 parameters and conscious observations itself are just a packaged deal.

Okay, podcast listener, if you're lost right now about why he's currently doing a two-paragraph long backflip of 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 why he can't be 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 debunk 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.

We were like, hey, look, we got a new vaccination.

Stem cells is eating a baby.

Dude, what?

It's the set 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 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, Nagel's a theologian, not a philosopher.

You need more than one subject to be a philosopher.

And two, 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 about 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 sufficed 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 panthertogen, 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 weight.

And Russ, 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 should have fixed capacities or effective and theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?

Inconceivable.

Evolution's pressures that our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E equals MC squared.

So why should capacities that evolve because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out

miribila dictu to the

capacities?

Miribile dictu?

Get the fuck out of here.

Just say, you know, wonderfully, whatever that means.

I had had to look it up.

I think it's wonderful.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, right.

In this instance, it just means like,

wouldn't you know it?

That's a great

question from your friend Peter Thiel and helping you write us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry to achieve man's spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon.

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 grown-ups 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 mythicism, 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 grown-ups 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, Mirabel Diktu, 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 gaul 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 God and I just

I am not French.

God, there's still 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, he created him.

All right, well, I'm gonna rip Peter Thiel's arms off and put him in a dueling box so I can punch Ross Dutat 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 enriched all right mr bosnick 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 lint company?

No, does this 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 going to 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 points.

Sounds like you're a bad debater to me.

Sorry?

Yes, you, sir, in the audience.

Yeah, 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 it's just very important why is that important

well if it doesn't 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 no, no, you can't.

Why would you be able to do that?

Wow.

Sure, it 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 knew it was chocolate this whole time.

I feel good about it.

I've burned the building down.

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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, 2021, and I'm still pissed off about It's called The Case Against Abortion.

Ooh, 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, the mixed feelings of so many Americans, means that most politicians and even most pundits really don't like to talk.

Okay, now that I think about it, this is brand new to me.

It was the Aboriginal.

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 uh, that's because it's not happens, that'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, Cecil, but as men, and I'm just checking in here, but this is not going to limit our fucking, right?

I mean, we can

that.

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 or not.

See, both sides of the debate can blame women, guys.

but her emails yeah no those extra four years really matter

yeah she should have known what mitch mcconnell was gonna do before great work for sure yeah definitely should have read mitch mcconnell's mind

but with the court set we're still fighting actually

But with the court set to hear Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, God

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 he, you shouldn't be allowed to kill me is a terrible argument from Rousseau,

right?

That dude

should not make that argument.

No, it's fair.

At the core of our legal system, you will find a promise that human beings should be protected from lethal violence.

Sure won't, 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 believe.

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 biology.

I think he knew how you were going to do the voice.

From intimacy, from infancy and childhood to middle-aged and beyond, it's part of a single continuous process.

You're just a zygote.

Cool.

Okay, well, now we've established that life begins at conception.

Is Ross going to tell us about all the people we have in fridges at IVF centers around the world?

Right?

Yeah.

Are we going to hear about all the little baby demolition mans as far as the eye can see?

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

mirabelé dictu, we figured out how to kill a cum peanut to save a full human.

Or just to kill the cum peanut because it's awesome.

Either way, I don't care.

Unlike actual peanuts, we never actually blame the cum peanut on the planters.

This means that the affirmative case for abortion rights is inherently exceptionalist, demanding a suspension of a principle that prevails as practically every other case.

That's so ridiculous.

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

he can't.

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, adult, 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.

The cum peanut is part of someone else's body?

Are we done?

Breathe the damnation ban, babies, Ross, you can do it.

Free them from their 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.

We pull the plug on grandpa.

It's not alive.

We're going to sort of 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 a 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?

The 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.

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 personal argument

too.

Okay,

seeks to identify some stage of neurological development that supposedly marks personhood's 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 at brain death because it's understood to be irreversible.

The moment at which the human organism's healthy functions can never be restored.

Sorry, can I just reject the premise of like, well, the whole thing, like I'd have forgot to do it earlier, just all whenever I'm not saying that, I reject it.

So, 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 would spontaneously regain 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 rigorous 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.

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.

It'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 personal 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 consigns women a second-class citizen tip.

Their ambitions limited, their privacy compromised, their bodies encrypted, their claims to full equality a lie.

Yep, that's about, 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 its life ceases to impinge so dramatically on its mother.

There is a powerful case for some kind of feminism embedded in these claims.

The question is whether that case requires abortion itself.

Ooh, 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, child care, and health care and

hold my breath.

Justice requires distributing 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 stage.

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?

Half my DNA is from a rapist.

Please kill me.

Did you guys hear my dad?

Yeah, I think that was an entirely voiceless.

That was voiceful

saying something.

We have a certain 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 just so 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 abortion 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 retreat.

Why would you expect that?

No such thing has happened.

Moving on, moving on, Tom.

No such thing has happened.

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 grounds.

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 to a baby genius?

That would probably make you a ton of money.

Have you seen those movies?

It's an individual female life trajectory.

Does Ross know that all people actually have only one personal life trajectory?

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 as the solution to an unplanned pregnancy actually discourages other adaptations that would make American life friendlier to women.

As Erica

solved things with one thing,

what are you talking about?

As Erica Bakiachi 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 that 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 does not allow it.

She wrote in the feminist magazine founded by William F.

Buckley Jr.

of the National Review.

Yeah.

This is the most weasly 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

hey, if there's a problem inequality for the sexes, we'll just let capitalism sort it out.

That always does such a great job for other stuff.

Invisible hand for abortion works, too.

Should have got an invisible hand job

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 yoking 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 of 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.

Even when I played devil's advocate against myself, that doesn't count.

I love where he's going with us.

This is one 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 suspicious.

Yeah, you're right, there we go.

Here we go.

When they lead to the investigation of suspicious seeming miscarriages,

I taught a farm miscarriage.

Amazing.

It's why the general principle of legal protection.

Make sure I don't do a future one.

He's going to put that into every one of them.

It's why the general principle of legal protections for human life in Euro 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 the

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 warns 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 sign.

Still probably do it, but like, you know, we'll call it a certain point.

Yeah, we'll call it, 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 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 closed abortions

after about six weeks, the state of the world.

Well, he doesn't have a lisp.

He just has the vibes of Vizzini from

Texas.

That's what's happening in real life.

The state's abortion.

Yeah, I'm not making fun of an actual speech impediment.

I'm just making fun of it.

Noah made a choice at the beginning of this essay 47 minutes ago, and we are living for it.

Yep, yep.

The state's abortions immediately fell by half.

I think the Texas law, which tries to evade the requirements of Roe versus Wade and Plan Point versus Casey by using private lawsuits for enforcement, is 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 pros.

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, when you find out the abortions were having, 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, is why the pro-life movement makes legal protection its paramount goal.

Sure, yeah.

And that's why the pro-life movement, Rob Leidictu, is constantly giving out free condoms and demanding that insurance companies cover contraception.

Solid cross.

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 month in 2020 yeah when Marty's bar got shut down by the government they served 100%

less alcohol that month.

What are they doing there?

Nothing.

This is nothing.

This is nothing.

About half that number may end up still taking place.

Some estimates suggest many of them.

because he fucking felt like it.

Right.

That's like about half.

Where the fuck does that happen?

I'm gonna say half of those are more than

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.

Prablé diktu.

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 writing my own fucking essay.

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 Douche Hatt 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 the all of the above.

It is the all of the above.

Also, the New York Times is like super important.

Just ignore the opinion section.

You can kill

your opinion section.

You could kill every opinion piece.

No, that's kind of how the under

section works, but it could be dead.

Really important.

Listen to heat obligation.

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, perplexity.

A

baby Bach Ribs.

Phenomena.

B.

Guave Maria.

C

four seasonings or D,

Swan Latke.

Oh, that's amazing.

Oh, God.

I can't pick away.

I'm going to have to go away with Guave Maria, though.

That's all.

I'm sure you're right.

Yes.

Guave Maria's fancy.

I'm going to make it simple.

You made me both read and then listen to this nonsense.

And I,

A,

will never forgive you.

Secret answer B, you're already over.

You loved it.

No, actually, I don't.

I have to give you a wrong answer so that you could win.

Tom, you stumped him and you are correct.

The New York Times is very important to society.

You are the winner next to you.

Fantastic.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Eli, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and I will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, The No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dads, God Awful Movies, The Scathing Atheist, The Skeptic, and DD 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 citationpod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

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