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In order to avoid rehashing the same fundamental assumptions in every Philosophy Essay, we have compiled a list of the 4 things we take for granted as the bedrock of our Philosophical arguments. We believe these fundamentals are universally agreeable.

Below is a list of each presupposition followed by a detailed explanation as to why we maintain them as necessary.

1. Philosophy is a discipline that must ignore “imperfections” in the way the world currently operates.
2. The severity of injustice is related to that which it deprives in a directly proportional manner.
3. Biased classifications are necessarily unjust.
4. Something can only be categorized by its most fundamental, unique, component.

1. Imperfection is Irrelevant

“That’s not how the world works”.

We hear this phrase all the time, bandied about as a trump card against various proposals for plan or policy (personal or otherwise). It’s easy to assume that such an argument sufficiently demonstrates the errors in the opponent’s proposal. While this may be true of gap-years and politics, it’s usage is fundamentally incompatible with honest Philosophy.

Here we are not aiming to provide specific policy proposals or issuing draft-bills for Senate. We are plying for the Truth about abortion. Thus, how the world operates is not relevant to our discussions. Truth is one of the few fundamentally binary realities, something either is or isn’t True. Our modern obsession with “relativism” has normalized begging the question; whether truth is relative, is either True or not. Therefore, while existentialist Philosophy may be capable of arguing that “purpose” or some like phenomena is subject to individual speculation, it is incapable of sufficiently demonstrating whether or not said “purpose” is acceptable.

Whether or not something is acceptable is the domain of Philosophy, but in our discernment thereof we cannot allow the state things are at present to redirect the proverbial gavel.

If slavery is wrong, it is wrong. That judgment is, and must remain entirely independent of difficult situations that may develop as a consequence of policies that may be derived from the Truth Statement “Slavery is Wrong”. One could, even in our current day, point to innumerable examples of slavery (child, labor, sex, etc.) and argue for their incremental dissolution due to the downstream economic effects of banning it outright. Those policy proposals may be barbaric, but they are also segregated from whether or not something is “wrong”. Thus, on this website, our aim is to demonstrate that abortion is wrong, unequivocally and without debate. What such a Truth Statement could mean for policy is something we will also discuss, but not in our Philosophy Essays.

2. Injustice is Directly Proportional

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.

While modern measures of justice may deviate from the above sentiment we can nonetheless recognize the simplicity of parallel justice. The fundamental truth underlying the ancient concept of “eye for eye” is that proportional judgement cannot be considered “unjust” or “unfair”.

Injustice is defined as “a lack of justice”, and justice “just treatment”, circular, so we must look to the root: just. Oxford dictionary provides: based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair for just as an adjective, and: exactly as an adverb. Lady justice is depicted with scales in her hand, belying the presumption of equal measures in just judgements. The purpose of the word “justice” is to describe the relationship between an action and its effects on others. An action being “just” or “unjust” is a measurement against equality or fairness. Both justice and injustice describe action, and any action can be categorized as one or the other. If an action is described as “just” then the implication is that inaction, is injustice, and even further, than any action of lesser or greater severity is unjust. Thus, injustice implies that either the action is not sufficiently severe or that it is too severe to be just.

The definition of injustice is built upon the foundation of proportionality. Thus we can say that an injustice is any action which deprives the object of said action of “proportional inheritance”. Obviously innumerable actions can fall under this definition of injustice, if someone spills your drink, you have been denied the “proportional inheritance” of having tasted the entirety of said drink. In this case, filling your drink back to the exact level it was would be just, and filling it yet further would be generous. Thus, how an action is reprised is relevant to the final disposition (just or unjust), but even with sufficient reprisal, one still suffered (past tense) an injustice.

It can be deduced from this that the greater the injustice, the further from proportionality the “scale” tips, requiring a proportionally greater reprisal, and it can be further deduced that certain actions could become insurmountably disproportional such that no form of reprisal could sufficiently restore the scale to justice.

Also observe that justice is calculated in terms of negation. The following example illustrates this with numbers: If A acts on B in such manner that B is affected -10 points but A is positively affected by 50 points we would still consider this unjust and it scale would only be just if A was robbed of 60 points, or if B was given their 10 points back. In real life this plays out clearly, as we would not consider any action just if only the party taking said action derived greater value than the party affected by it.

Therefore the following must be true: Actions that deprive the affected by a degree that cannot be compensated for cannot be justified by restoration, and therefore proportional (in this case infinite) payment must be rendered by the negation of the responsible part(ies).

Thus, the irreparable cannot be repaired. Justice, in this case, cannot be restored.

3. Classification Must be Independant and Universal

“From my perspective the jedi are evil!”

From the definitions of justice/injustice above we can reason the following assertion: Since bias by nature implies additional weight assigned to the perspective of the agent of a judgement or action, it cannot be considered just, for justice follows only from actions/judgements that are proportional.

Not much further clarification needed in this case. The important takeaway for our purposes is that we cannot assign classifications of things based on biased assertions, for these cannot be considered just classifications. Further, since Truth (as discussed above) is universal, it cannot be party to bias either.

Classifications therefore need to be independent to be considered Just, and universal to be considered True.

4. Nothing can Fall into More than One Distinct Category

“Are you a Man or a Mouse?!”

There are distinct categories of things, and there are general categories of things. Anything may fall into nearly infinite general categories, but may only belong to one distinct category.

For example: A bird can be a bird, a feathered beast, an animal, a lifeform, and earthling, a billed or beaked creature, a descendant of X and Y, predator and prey, etc. However, it cannot be both a swan and an eagle.

So how can we define something when all things are subject to categorization in a multiplicity of general categories? We determine something’s distinct identity by its most fundamental unique characteristic (i.e. a diamond may well be carbon simply, but it becomes crystalline under a specific degree of pressure, therefore diamond = carbon, but carbon ≠ diamond).

Development presents a difficulty here as all things are subject to gradual change. The diamond progresses through stages of crystallization, the apple from seed to tree to fruit again, but each stage of development is unique to its own Distinct categorization.

For now, we will consider the example of an apple. An apple is its own distinct categorization. One can note however that an apple has seeds, skin, stem and flesh. An apple core is also all of these things, yet without remaining edible flesh. Of course, all things are composites of a vast array of others (even the stem is comprised of various cell types and those are further broken into molecular and atomic levels, ad infinitum until the “building blocks” of all matter)

Things are subject to change, but there are limits to the degree of alteration something can undergo before it changes into something altogether different. Throw and apple in the fire and it will remain an apple “burning” for some time, but eventually it will become ash that “was” an apple. Similarly, a human corpse is not a “person”, but it remains human until decay has degraded it beyond recognition.

For our purposes here it suffices to observe that the most fundamental unique aspect of any form of life is its specific genetic categorization. An apple and all its parts share this commonality (as does the apple tree), though all can be considered distinct. A stem or flesh’s relation to the apple is analogous to our relation to our eyes or toes (i.e. part of the continuous whole) but the tree, though genetically identical, it is a distinct entity.

From this we can observe that developmental stages are not necessarily linear progressions without interruption of any distinct categorization. However, though a tadpole is not a frog by way of development, it is a frog by way of genetics.

So far, we have sufficiently demonstrated that we only properly define a thing by what it uniquely is, part/whole or otherwise. How this relates to the issue of abortion should be obvious by now: A human fetus is human by genetic classification. Thus, the humanity of a fetus cannot be argued about in any meaningful sense. The only non-disposable part of any living creature is its genetic code. Our cells will renew dozens of times in our lives, leaving us with little of physical continuity between age 10 and 100. However, genetically, we remain the same human we were at our conception.

The debate then, is not one of humanity, but of personhood. This can only be the subject of Philosophy, and it is absurd to issue statements regarding the rights of a human at any stage of development without recognizing that they presume some degree of arbitrary Philosophical judgement. I digress.

In Conclusion

Now that we have identified and defended our 4 Philosophical presuppositions you, reader, are able to read our Essays without our need to re-hash or clarify these basic principles each time. Please reach out with any questions or objections to the arguments above as they will be continuously revised until robust beyond objection.

-M.

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