Last week I suggested an educated guess about abortion and when life begins. I suspect this is uncomfortable for many people.
As I already pointed out, the stakes are high on this debate. On one end we could be depriving women of their rights to their bodies. On the other, we could be murdering infants (or the moral equivalent thereof). So should we really be making an educated guess about a matter so important?
Yes.
Because in the words of Bryan Caplan, I'd rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
The current debate is filled with people who are precisely wrong. They think they know exactly when life begins, but they can't justify it in the least. On the other hand, I navigate various shades of grey. We don't know what exact conditions qualify a being for the moral and legal protections we give people. So we should educated ourselves of the unborn's stages of development, and use our intuition to make a guess.
So then what do we do about policy? Our legal system needs to make firm rules, can we do that based on educated guesses?
Yes we can. As I'll explain in my next post, what we do morally as well as legally within the rhealm of uncertainty is tread carefully.
