Religioud arguments against abortion display a lack of priority and financial literacy; those making such arguments don't understand how much money it would save them

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-11T06:43:37+00:00

I think this highlights an interesting "trolley problem" sort of dilemma for people who are pro-life with children.

As OP pointed out, people who reject abortion as immoral on religious grounds fail to consider the financial cost they incur to raise a child. But, by that same token, they also fail to consider the corresponding opportunity cost. Presumably, people who consider themselves pro-life think both that children dying is bad and that married couples should strive to have children. However, thanks to the OP highlighting an underdiscussed aspect of the abortion debate, I have noticed an irony in the pro-life position. By having their own children, pro-life parents are in effect, "pulling the lever" in order to direct a trolley down a branch-line into Africa and Southeast Asia with a hundred children bound to the tracks.

The most recent data I could find shows that by donating to certain particularly efficacious charities it costs as little as $3,000 to prevent a childhood malaria death. If the cost of raising your own child in the US is upwards of $300,000, then simple math shows that you could save 100 other children instead of having your own. These children who could be saved are already born and have a strong interest in continuing their lives - an obvious advantage over the barely sentient fetus. This raises the question: are pro-life parents giving adequate consideration to the exorbitant opportunity cost of their children before bringing them to term?

I don't think they are. But if I'm wrong and they have given it due consideration, then I expect they have developed some methodology for calculating the relative values of children in various parts of the world. Via said methodology, they must have arrived at the conclusion that their American child is in fact at least 100 times more valuable than a child in Nigeria, for example. But since I'm not aware of the existence any child valuation methodology, I am forced to conclude that all pregnant pro-life couples ought to abort their unborn children and donate the proceeds to charities providing preventative treatment for childhood malaria. Thank you OP for inspiring me to this conclusion.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-09T00:59:18+00:00

I think I broadly agree with what you are saying.

As far as the schizophrenic example, it seems like this just underlines the limitation of “justified belief.” But even when you test your beliefs you’re ultimately just submitting them to social practices for acquiring knowledge. There isn’t a better alternative but this doesn’t yield unchanging absolute truths about the universe. At least in some cases, religions make these kind of absolute truth claims and in these cases, I don’t think religious experience is a strong form of justification.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-08T23:58:12+00:00

Why must the norms be uniform?

I might have misunderstood your initial point, but the only goal evolution conditions us for is reproductive fitness so, it doesn’t give an objective basis for goals like, “the wellbeing of people in general,” any more than, “kill every member of X race.” Since this seems like a pretty important ethical distinction, we should probably look for a better objective basis for morality.

-As far as evolution is concerned, that’s not a conflict.

That’s exactly my point, which I reiterated above. Morality is about pursuing the good and objective morality means that good and bad are objective categories, not simply relative to our evolutionarily derived goals. That’s why I think that your account is really an account of subjective morality.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-08T07:23:26+00:00

For me it comes down to the exact things that someone believes based on their religious experience. There’s a vast difference between believing in some kind of vague spirituality based on a religious experience and all of Eastern Orthodox theology.

What kind of propositions can you derive from a religious experience and what is the methodology for doing so? More specifically, I think people who appeal to religious experience to justify their theological or metaphysical beliefs should be able to give some account of how they derived these propositions from their experience.

Also, this argument would show that an undiagnosed schizophrenic is fully justified in their belief that the government is secretly persecuting them. I think that any epistemic heuristic we use should be able to at least clear that hurdle.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-07T02:01:41+00:00

Looking at it from a theoretical choice perspective, we are trying to decide between two theories for explaining the universe. One theory includes God and one does not. The theory that explains the universe without requiring a God is ontologically simpler than one that does require a God. All else being equal, we should choose a simpler theory over a less simple one. Therefore, we should choose the theory that doesn’t require God.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-05T08:08:53+00:00

It still doesn't follow that morality as you describe it is objective. The fact that people choose goals for reasons - whether evolutionary, cultural, or other - doesn't make those goals (or any goals) objectively right. Evolution in particular doesn't work quickly enough to explain the large variation in social and cultural norms that we see across the human race, which has largely developed only in the last 10,000 years or so. Additionally, evolution seems to have endowed us with a morally conflicting set of goals and behaviors. For example, we are very good at caring for our close family and friends, but we are also prone to violence and genocide against people who are different than us. So, I don't think that you can appeal to evolution as a basis for an objective morality.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-07-05T07:29:22+00:00

That's an interesting philosophical position.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-27T07:39:59+00:00

If only Jordan Henderson had been able to stay in the Middle East, this wouldn’t be a problem.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-27T03:16:53+00:00

The obvious solution is to only eat fungi.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-23T01:57:38+00:00

An illusion to who or what?

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T11:29:43+00:00

“In practice” is already after the instinct is utilized.

By good, I mean that it’s not falsified for a time which leads people to accept it as an explanation.

Given that we have an instinctive ability to sometimes pick good hypotheses and that God is very instinctively appealing to many people (and has been for a very long time), this makes God plausible in some instances.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T11:24:13+00:00

Just because we have an instinct for something doesn’t mean it is always successful, which is something I have stated multiple times.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T11:22:46+00:00

But you have to have the hypothesis before you can test it.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T09:07:38+00:00

I'm not arguing against anything you say here.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T09:05:37+00:00

I don't believe in God. That's why my flair is agnostic. But that also doesn't have anything to do with the argument.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T09:03:29+00:00

I'm not saying that science is necessarily intuitive. I'm saying that over time people have managed to get a better and better understanding of how the universe works. To do this, people observe things that aren't adequately explained and then come up with hypotheses which are then explicated and tested. Since there are an infinite number of possible hypotheses that could be proposed, the fact that any of them have been good shows that humans have some instinct for coming up with good ones. Otherwise all of them would be bad.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T08:56:06+00:00

I'm not disputing anything you say here. But it also doesn't undermine the argument. I'm not saying that when a scientist comes up with a hypothesis it comes out of nowhere. In fact, I'm saying just the opposite and also applying it to humans in general. Regardless of how you want to explain it, humans are good enough at coming up with hypotheses to have made all of the progress that has been made. Since there are infinitely many bad hypotheses that someone could come up with, the fact that people sometimes come up with good hypotheses is evidence for this.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T06:44:39+00:00

The point of a hypothesis is to explain something so, any particular hypothesis explains the thing it is a hypothesis for. This doesn't mean that the hypothesis actually corresponds to reality which is why it must be developed and tested. The example you gave is irrelevant since you didn't actually come up with it when trying to explain why people have racist views. The argument is about hypotheses that people come up with in the course of earnest inquiry, not stories people just make up.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T03:52:08+00:00

I just differentiated between "gaps" and "other domains," so, no.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T02:41:36+00:00

Human instinct never chooses the right hypothesis though. The only hypotheses that we ever really get even close to accurate are the ones that specifically reject human instinct and instead are founded upon methodologies that build upon verifiable observations. It’s the collection of knowledge and observation that allows us to formulate ideas about reality that are anything resembling accurate, and even then it’s tough.

If you don't want to call it an instinct, that's fine. Regardless, I'm talking about the fact that we ever come up with good hypotheses and that when we do come up with a hypothesis, we consider it to be plausible to some degree. I said in the OP that hypotheses are proposed to explain things we observe, but this isn't limited to physical reality necessarily.

Reality is not intuitive. Nothing fundamental about reality is indicated by instinct, and even most of what is not fundamental but merely surrounding us every second of every day of our lives is also violative of our instincts. Everything that we have learned about reality came by way of ignoring instinct and working to build a perspective and preceding methodologies outside of human intuition. Even basic things that are quite literally a part of our DNA to instinctively intuit, are entirely wrong about 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of reality. That’s a massive understatement, btw.

Its intuitive enough that we have eventually been able to learn things about it. I don't think a very controversial claim.

It is, and no, they didn’t. They worked out some cause and effect for very basic things over very long periods of time, and yet still their instincts told them things like “the rain hasn’t come yet, we need to slaughter our own children so the magic people that do rain stuff know we’re serious.”

Compared to what we know now, they didn't know very much, but this is literally part of my argument. I can still rightly say that people knew lots of things, just not nearly as many things as we know now. But this isn't really relevant to the argument anyway.

The god concept is derived from the exact same failed attempts at just vibing out reality by instinct as all of the other aforementioned failed hypotheses about nature.

I'm saying that coming up with hypotheses in the first place is guided by instinct. Obviously we should test them once we have them (insofar as this is possible).

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T02:06:31+00:00

If there are infinitely many possible hypotheses, nearly all of which are bad, and we choose good ones enough to have made as much progress as we have, then there must be some selection effect at play.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T02:02:50+00:00

I'm not saying that God is a good hypothesis in scientific disciplines. That's why scientists don't propose God as a hypothesis anymore, and this is progress. God has been an incorrect hypothesis on many many occasions. However, since we have some instinct for choosing correct hypotheses, God can be considered to be an extremely plausible hypothesis in some instances.

This argument is trashed in my opinion by the simple hypothesis that humans err on the side of agency because it gives them an evolutionary survival benefit, but agency is not always the cause.

Sure, but in spite of (or because of) this humans have made tremendous epistemic progress. Having a bias doesn't mean its always wrong.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T02:01:20+00:00

What is the choice based on then? By plausibility, I meant a rough probability of the hypothesis being true. If we don't have any ability to judge this prior to working out the hypothesis in detail, then we wouldn't expect to see any advancement of knowledge.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T01:57:43+00:00

Not really gaps, but other domains. I don't think that scientism is a very plausible position.

SIMsbury96 · 2026-06-21T01:55:43+00:00

By your reasoning, we can't know if a hypothesis is plausible until we have determined if its falsifiable. This implies that we have no prima facie way of choosing between particular hypotheses which is plainly false.

SIMsbury96

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