The Michael Knowles Show - May 28, 2022


Face The Mob ｜ Abortion Is Worse Than Slavery


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

189.14957

Word count

3,311

Sentence count

204

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of Roe v. Wade and the Supreme Court ruling allowing abortion, some argue that abortion is worse than slavery. Is there a moral equivalence between slavery and abortion? And if so, which is better?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Thank you to everyone for joining, especially to the people who disagree with me.
00:00:18.740 Much as I love Flame Wars on Twitter, it is usually not possible to resolve complex moral
00:00:24.140 issues in 288 characters.
00:00:26.500 So I figured it would be better to put the memes and the insults and the one-liners aside
00:00:30.440 and face the people in the replies, mano a mano.
00:00:35.480 The other day, I said inventing a constitutional right to abortion is the single worst thing
00:00:41.160 America has ever done.
00:00:43.260 Someone angrily replied, asking if I didn't think that perhaps slavery was worse.
00:00:47.860 I said that abortion is much worse than slavery.
00:00:51.180 Slavery deprives people of liberty.
00:00:53.660 Abortion robs them of life.
00:00:55.280 Our nation is predicated on the idea that our creator endows us with certain natural
00:01:00.020 rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:01:03.480 But these rights are not equal.
00:01:05.020 Rather, they depend upon one another.
00:01:07.540 We cannot pursue happiness unless we have liberty.
00:01:10.060 We cannot have liberty unless we have life.
00:01:12.660 If life and liberty come into conflict, it is incoherent to choose liberty or a pale perversion
00:01:19.860 of liberty, as we see in the case of abortion, over life, since liberty cannot exist without
00:01:25.260 life.
00:01:25.800 So it seems pretty clear to me that abortion is much worse than slavery, which I tweeted,
00:01:31.360 and then all hell broke loose.
00:01:32.860 So thousands of responses later, memes, insults, even death threats.
00:01:38.400 I figured I would invite anyone who was interested on to show me the lie.
00:01:42.700 So thanks for coming on.
00:01:44.660 What did I say that was wrong?
00:01:48.340 Hey, Michael.
00:01:50.060 Hello.
00:01:50.780 How you doing?
00:01:52.280 Doing good.
00:01:52.940 Doing good.
00:01:53.800 How do you see both of them?
00:01:55.560 How can you make a comparison to both?
00:01:57.740 One would be a child in the womb that we should protect, but the other one is the inferiority 0.99
00:02:03.900 of another human being.
00:02:06.020 So I'm not suggesting that slavery is good or that, you know, we can only pick one of
00:02:12.500 these things to protect babies in the womb or to not enslave people.
00:02:16.640 But I am making the claim that abortion is the worst thing that we've ever done.
00:02:21.440 And we can compare things, even things that are a little bit different.
00:02:25.600 I can compare different kinds of laws.
00:02:27.720 I can compare different kinds of crimes.
00:02:29.160 And that's what we're doing here when it comes to abortion and when it comes to slavery. 1.00
00:02:32.680 So I can compare vandalism and rape, both bad things.
00:02:38.760 But rape is worse than vandalism.
00:02:41.260 And rape is treated more seriously by the law than vandalism is.
00:02:45.120 And rape should be more seriously policed and discouraged than vandalism or even some
00:02:51.040 lesser crime than that.
00:02:52.540 And in the case of abortion, abortion is much worse than slavery.
00:02:56.420 So are you using a moral side to this?
00:02:59.440 Are you saying that the intrinsic value of this unborn baby should be more protected or
00:03:09.520 is worse than slavery because that enslaved person can get out of it?
00:03:15.720 I think that human beings have the same intrinsic value.
00:03:19.160 I'm not saying that the unborn baby is more valuable than someone who is enslaved, but I'm saying
00:03:26.920 the crimes are different.
00:03:28.360 So I think forced labor, which is what slavery is, is very different from murdering somebody.
00:03:34.540 And I think that any of us here today, if we were told you can either work for someone
00:03:40.080 against your will for some unknown period of time or you can be killed right now, I think
00:03:45.340 all of us would take the former option.
00:03:49.400 I think we would all try to preserve our lives because death is worse than servitude.
00:03:54.800 Thank you very much.
00:03:56.160 Thank you.
00:03:57.660 Hi, Mike.
00:03:58.680 How are you?
00:03:59.680 I'm better now that I'm talking to you, Riley.
00:04:01.860 Is the argument that abortion is more of a moral stain on the individual or society?
00:04:07.740 I'm saying both.
00:04:08.680 I think it is immoral at the level of the individual, but also immoral at the level of
00:04:14.300 a society.
00:04:14.860 And my specific claim that led to this whole hullabaloo is that abortion is the worst thing 0.89
00:04:20.780 that America has ever done.
00:04:22.640 So I was speaking specifically about the country and the Supreme Court in Roe versus Wade.
00:04:27.000 But of course, that which is wrong at the national level is wrong at the individual level too.
00:04:30.640 One moral quandary I sort of wrestle with would be, would it be better for an individual to
00:04:37.660 engage in abortion and say, have a measure of repentance later on rather than a person
00:04:45.220 engage in the act of slavery and have no moral repentance?
00:04:50.640 That, I think, breaks the comparison because then you're comparing things with an extra variable
00:04:57.160 in here that therefore can't really be compared.
00:05:00.640 Uh, it would not be better for the baby, for someone to have an abortion and then repent 0.96
00:05:05.000 of it, uh, than to enslave somebody and not repent of it.
00:05:09.160 I guess it might be better for the person who would potentially have been, uh, enslaved,
00:05:13.680 but, and it certainly would be better for the person who repented because then they can
00:05:16.680 seek salvation.
00:05:17.300 But you see how introducing that, that variable into it makes these things really impossible,
00:05:24.160 I think, to compare.
00:05:25.620 So if we're just comparing the two crimes specifically of abortion and enslaving somebody there, I think
00:05:33.220 we would agree that there is, there's, uh, no question.
00:05:36.900 Abortion is much worse than slavery.
00:05:38.880 Thank you.
00:05:39.440 We're going to bunk next bunk.
00:05:42.920 I want you to deep, deep bunk my argument.
00:05:44.400 How are you doing today, buddy?
00:05:45.360 I'm doing well.
00:05:46.960 Yeah.
00:05:47.180 So why, why ought I value the principle of life as you were defining it?
00:05:50.600 Well, you, you clearly do, I guess is what I would say.
00:05:53.680 You ought, I would assign value of life at the point of a conscious experience, a sentient
00:05:57.200 experience to be more specific.
00:05:58.440 So should we be able to kill people in a coma?
00:06:01.000 Should I, should we be able to kill people in a comatose state?
00:06:02.920 No, because they would have stated the, um, given their given preferences before the comatose
00:06:07.480 state.
00:06:07.840 And then we ought preserve those from when they wake up from the comatose state.
00:06:10.500 That seems like an unworkable system.
00:06:11.500 What if we don't know that they're going to wake up from their comatose state?
00:06:15.000 Well, it's kind of hard to say that we just don't know.
00:06:17.420 Like the, obviously it's very easy.
00:06:18.920 There are plenty of people where we don't know if they're going to recover from their comas.
00:06:21.400 That happens often.
00:06:22.340 I'm sure there are people who we don't know we're going to recover from their comas.
00:06:24.960 I think that we ought to err on the side of life in that situation, but that's because
00:06:28.620 there was previously stated preference, right?
00:06:31.100 So their preference is all that matters.
00:06:32.640 So if, before they go into the coma, they say, you know, I'm, let's say they had a bad
00:06:36.700 day at work and they come home and say, gosh, I don't know if I want to be on this world
00:06:39.840 anymore.
00:06:40.680 And then they go into their coma.
00:06:41.720 Then you think we should honor, honor their preference and kill them.
00:06:44.840 Actually, we have things within the United States of America to allow people to die.
00:06:47.540 It's called DNR.
00:06:48.260 Do not resuscitate order.
00:06:49.300 And that it states that they don't want to be brought back to life.
00:06:51.200 And I think we ought respect that preference.
00:06:52.740 Yes.
00:06:52.920 So you, so what, what you're saying is rather than merely debating the issue of, of abortion being
00:06:59.360 bad at all, or certainly being worse than slavery, you're, you're advocating for the goodness
00:07:04.300 of assisted suicide.
00:07:06.420 I think that these two things definitely do play into each other, right?
00:07:09.840 So the idea that we ought to preserve something that has yet to come into existence, right?
00:07:13.660 The conscious experience and the conscious preferences of a baby.
00:07:16.080 But I, but I'm not, I'm not suggesting, I want to, I want to correct your premise.
00:07:19.520 I just want to correct your premise before you get too far down the rabbit hole.
00:07:22.780 Then we'll get right back to what I was saying.
00:07:24.100 Sure.
00:07:24.700 So what, what you're saying is if you want to preserve consciousness, but I'm not saying
00:07:29.700 that I'm concerned primarily with preserving consciousness.
00:07:32.320 I'm saying I'm interested with preserving life and not ending a life, whether the life
00:07:36.440 is conscious, whether the life is an adult or a, who has expressed preferences or a teenager
00:07:42.960 who expresses preferences perhaps with less credibility or a child who has not reached
00:07:48.580 the age of reason and cannot actually consent to do anything at all, or a toddler or a baby
00:07:53.540 in the womb.
00:07:54.220 So I'm suggesting something more fundamental than consciousness.
00:07:56.920 So what I'm trying to get at then is that we don't seem to value things that will never
00:08:00.700 have consciousness ever again in the same way that we do value things that will have
00:08:04.900 a conscious experience or have asserted conscious preferences that will have them again.
00:08:08.360 Would you agree with that statement?
00:08:09.100 I agree that we, yeah, we tend to regard conscious beings more than we regard unconscious beings.
00:08:15.620 I think, frankly, I think that's a little bit part of the problem.
00:08:18.580 Do you think that we should value things that have not, do not have consciousness, that
00:08:22.920 will never have consciousness again?
00:08:23.780 Do you think we should value them the same that we do a human being?
00:08:26.640 I'd have to know what you, do you mean someone who is brain dead?
00:08:29.760 Well, I think we should value them.
00:08:31.060 We should value them, but I think it's, I think we should value them, but it's perfectly
00:08:34.060 fine to remove their extraordinary medical care because they're, they're not alive by,
00:08:38.100 by any real definition of life.
00:08:39.920 But that, of course, does not describe that.
00:08:41.120 But wouldn't you be terminating their existence?
00:08:42.060 That doesn't describe babies.
00:08:42.920 That sounds really wrong.
00:08:43.880 That sounds really morally wrong.
00:08:44.820 No, they're already dead is what you're saying.
00:08:46.640 If you're talking about brain death, you're talking about someone who's already dead.
00:08:48.980 So I think we kind of circled back on this, but, but I guess before, before I let you
00:08:52.480 go, I just, I guess, is there any way that this relates to an unborn baby or to the question
00:08:56.200 of slavery?
00:08:57.200 The question that we're having right now is, do you value the potentiality of conscious
00:09:00.760 experience?
00:09:01.260 Would you value that?
00:09:02.300 I value, I value the potential of all life, including conscious experience.
00:09:05.440 This is a much more interesting branch of conversation because I can't see.
00:09:08.220 I'm glad I can interest you.
00:09:09.000 It's just straight to the hypothetical, right?
00:09:10.260 Like, I think these conversations are very interesting.
00:09:12.560 I love doing them, right?
00:09:13.440 They're my favorite thing in the world, actually.
00:09:15.740 I love discussing ideas.
00:09:16.940 It seems like you do too, which is actually really great.
00:09:20.000 But what a point that I'm getting at is that if you think we could, do you think we can
00:09:23.420 assign a moral value to something that is potential that has not existed yet?
00:09:28.000 Okay.
00:09:28.320 We got to go.
00:09:28.700 We got to move on.
00:09:29.320 I'm sorry that we didn't touch on the topic at hand, but I enjoyed our interaction.
00:09:33.200 Yeah.
00:09:33.540 I enjoyed our interaction too, dude.
00:09:34.580 Have a nice day.
00:09:35.940 Lina.
00:09:36.900 Hi, Michael.
00:09:37.600 Nice to meet you.
00:09:38.480 Nice to meet you.
00:09:40.460 Actually, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this just because I'm not from the US.
00:09:45.700 I'm from Canada.
00:09:46.820 And in Canada, basically, there's like no limit on abortion. 0.84
00:09:49.860 You can perform an abortion at any moment during gestation, which I don't agree with. 0.63
00:09:54.400 But I was just wondering, since we had like a similar debate in law school.
00:09:58.920 And basically, the teacher explained that being pro-life would be just as bad as slavery since
00:10:08.340 they subjugate women in the same way that, for example, black people or indigenous people
00:10:13.040 are subjugated under white men or white people in general.
00:10:17.500 And then the whole pro-abortion argument was, like the basis of it was that the fetus is
00:10:25.820 a part of the woman's body.
00:10:27.280 And because of that, like nothing else matters.
00:10:30.400 Sure.
00:10:30.620 Well, it's helpful to know that the word fetus means offspring.
00:10:34.160 It's a Latin word and it means offspring.
00:10:36.380 And so when people try to create a distinction between a fetus and the baby, they're talking
00:10:41.300 about a distinction without a difference.
00:10:43.200 And you mentioned that your teacher said that the fetus, the baby, is part of the mother.
00:10:50.600 That is manifestly not true.
00:10:52.560 The fetus has different genes than the mother.
00:10:56.160 So the baby is, while the baby is within the mother's body, the baby is not just part of
00:11:01.880 the mother in the way that like my fingernail would be part of me or the cells of my fingernail
00:11:06.880 would be part of me.
00:11:07.900 The baby is unique at the genetic level, at the spiritual level.
00:11:11.720 And just physically, you can see it.
00:11:13.100 You can look at it on a sonogram.
00:11:15.040 Now, to the question of the woman being oppressed by having to take care of this baby and how 1.00
00:11:22.280 this is similar to a black slave in Louisiana in the 19th century, I think there's a big 1.00
00:11:28.040 difference here.
00:11:28.620 I think the obligations, the natural obligations that a mother has for her own child are different
00:11:33.800 than the obligations of a black slave to pick enough cotton for his white master. 0.90
00:11:40.720 I don't think those are the same thing.
00:11:42.600 I think what the teacher meant when they were talking about the whole slavery argument was
00:11:47.060 that basically by not having the decision to choose whether you have the kid or not,
00:11:54.400 it's the same thing as taking off, like taking out the rights of black people. 0.60
00:11:58.940 So just as a practical matter, the mother does have the choice in greater than 99% of cases.
00:12:05.080 So these issues of rape or incest in abortion account for less than 1% of all abortions.
00:12:11.760 So generally speaking, this is consensual sex.
00:12:14.500 And when you have sex with somebody, you are consenting to the consequences of sex.
00:12:18.040 Whether you want to admit it or not, you are consenting to that act, which is begetting the child. 0.58
00:12:23.340 Then beyond that, you get to this issue of even the 1% or fewer than 1% of cases that are not consensual.
00:12:33.340 And it raises the question, do you have moral obligations that you don't consent to?
00:12:37.780 And of course we do.
00:12:39.220 If some homeless, filthy, dirty, rotten beggar showed up on my door dying of thirst, I would have an obligation. 1.00
00:12:46.940 Even though I don't know this beggar from Adam, I would have an obligation to give that beggar water 1.00
00:12:51.040 and to care for that beggar and then maybe care for the beggar for a little period of time. 0.99
00:12:55.120 And then if I were unwilling to have him become my new roommate, then I would get him some help
00:12:59.680 and someone else could help to care for him.
00:13:01.700 So I think that's a pretty good analogy when it comes to the baby.
00:13:05.120 We all know that we have natural obligations to our parents, to our grandparents, to our communities,
00:13:10.760 to our country, and to our God.
00:13:12.960 And so if you, yes, if you look at the issue only through the lens of rights and what you're entitled to
00:13:17.980 and your own desires, then you might come to these crazy conclusions.
00:13:21.360 But our life is not defined entirely or even primarily by our rights.
00:13:26.080 It's defined, I think, more importantly, by our obligations.
00:13:30.060 Thank you so much, Michael.
00:13:31.320 Yep, great questions.
00:13:33.200 Thaddeus, what a great name.
00:13:34.640 Thaddeus.
00:13:35.120 Hi, Michael.
00:13:35.980 I would want to bring you this scenario in which the left would try to rationalize abortion.
00:13:45.220 So say you have a society with enslavement.
00:13:52.200 Would you want to have that abortion where a child would be in that civilization, 0.98
00:13:58.560 would grow up and be a slave their entire life?
00:14:02.580 Would it be worth killing that kid?
00:14:04.640 Without having, like, due to all the misery and trauma that he's going to suffer throughout his entire life?
00:14:10.260 And I'd like the answer to be trying to have, like, a non-Catholic answer to it because being Catholic, it's easy to debunk that.
00:14:19.680 But I'm just wondering if you could do it from, like, a purely, like, rational standpoint on that.
00:14:23.980 Let's bring up that filthy, dirty, dirty, rotten beggar that I mentioned in an earlier answer. 1.00
00:14:27.600 There's a filthy, dirty, rotten beggar.
00:14:29.680 He's got all sorts of pockmarks from all the drugs that he's used.
00:14:32.600 He's covered in human excrement.
00:14:34.780 People walk past him with contempt and disdain.
00:14:39.400 Even though this dirty, filthy, rotten beggar is probably never going to improve his circumstances.
00:14:43.900 He's been living like this for 40 years, and he's going to live like it for the rest of his life.
00:14:48.200 Even still, I don't think it's justified to shiv this guy in the middle of the night.
00:14:52.540 And a less extreme version of this, of course, would be to ask just about anybody.
00:14:56.400 All of us suffer.
00:14:57.920 Perhaps slaves suffer more or suffered more than we do, but that's not true for everybody in the world.
00:15:04.800 You know, everybody suffers.
00:15:05.920 That's a fact of life.
00:15:07.340 You have to ask them if it is better to be killed than it is to suffer.
00:15:15.020 Is it better not to be living or to live but suffer?
00:15:19.240 And even the people who answer that it's better not to be living are full of it
00:15:24.440 because they're not killing themselves, because they're here asking the question.
00:15:28.460 And I'm not daring anybody to do it.
00:15:30.900 I don't think it would be good if they killed themselves.
00:15:33.660 But their own behavior is showing that they're being a little dishonest with themselves.
00:15:39.880 It's a kind of cognitive dissonance between their behavior and the thoughts that they're expressing.
00:15:44.720 And I think they ought to resolve that cognitive dissonance by observing that their thoughts have gone a little bit awry,
00:15:51.220 and there's some wisdom in their behavior and their natural instinct for self-preservation.
00:15:56.320 All right, that's it.
00:15:57.080 Thank you, everybody.
00:15:57.640 Thank you so much for coming on.
00:15:58.860 I really appreciate everyone coming on.
00:16:01.040 And, you know, the other thing that's really funny is I guess some people disagreed with me,
00:16:04.840 but the vast majority agreed with the statement.
00:16:08.140 And yet the statement went viral for being so outrageous and offensive,
00:16:14.260 and I got all these mean tweets and all these death threats and all this kind of stuff.
00:16:18.240 And then none of those people had the guts to come on and actually discuss the issue.
00:16:23.860 Because it's very easy to get hot and angry and insult people and yell and scream and cry.
00:16:27.980 But if you want to make a coherent argument, that's a little bit more difficult.
00:16:33.000 And it would seem that basically none of the people who did that and who made that tweet go viral
00:16:38.520 were willing to do that or really probably able to do that.
00:16:42.360 So I think it stands perfectly clear.
00:16:44.660 Abortion is much, much worse than slavery.
00:16:48.240 Thank you for tuning in.
00:16:59.520 Is your home's title still in your name?
00:17:02.080 With one forged document, scammers can steal your home title and equity.
00:17:05.720 But now you can protect yourself.
00:17:06.800 Home Title Lock's Million Dollar Triple Lock Protection provides 24-7 title monitoring,
00:17:11.540 urgent alerts to changes, and if fraud happens,
00:17:14.040 they'll spend up to a million dollars to fix it and restore your title.
00:17:17.240 Use promo code DAILYWIRE at HOMETITLELock.com for a free title history report
00:17:21.220 plus a free 14-day trial of their Million Dollar Triple Lock Protection.
00:17:25.320 Head over to HOMETITLELock.com now with promo code DAILYWIRE
00:17:28.540 to ensure your title is still in your name.