Starting Something Versus Finishing What You Started, Including Life
Be sure you support your views with one or more underlying moral principle(s) that have not already been shown to be flawed unless you can say why and how the flaws do not apply or are not really flaws.
Read the set of questions carefully. It is not about abortion, but is primarily about conception versus euthanasia (of an adult). The principle to be developed will apply to abortion, but the question itself is not specifically about abortion.
Keep this in mind while answering the set of questions below: The whole purpose of these questions is to understand whether the criteria that justify finishing something you started and have put time and energy into are the same criteria that would justify beginning it in the first place. Address that general question in answering #10 below.
Suppose you go to a 3 hour and 20 minute play on Broadway that your parents have given you tickets they received for free as part of some advertising promotion they could not attend and were not really interested in anyway, and that they thought you and your spouse might enjoy. The first three hours are somewhat okay, but not all that great, with some of it pretty boring, and the last intermission is about twenty minutes before the end of the show. The last twenty minutes may tie it up real well and make it worthwhile having gone to or it may not. I won’t tell you which way that works out, but the overall experience was not anything to rave about, though it was also not the worst night of your life. On your way out of the theater, the management selects you to give two free tickets to give to friends.
1) Should you accept the tickets and give them to your friends? If you do, you are not allowed to tell them anything about the play or your experience and feelings about it. You either give them the tickets or you do not. If you give them the tickets, they will go (because they will take it as a recommendation and because they won’t want to spurn your offer or offend your apparent generosity). Basically you are controlling whether they go or not, so you have to decide for them by deciding whether to give them the tickets or not. The idea is that this is just like conceiving a child, where what you do doesn’t give the child any real choice in the matter and you don’t get to consult with it, to see what it wants, and it can’t research to see whether it wants to be born or not. (And remember, we are talking here only about conception — which is about fertilizing the egg and creating a pregnancy in the first place, not about abortion. If you conceive the child, you will carry it through to birth. This is not an abortion question. So you have to decide whether to conceive and therefore bring a child into this world or not, and in the same way you have to decide whether to send your friends to this play or not. Giving them the tickets is analogous to conceiving the child.)
The play is not about a subject they are known to be any more or less particularly interested in then you are, so you have no reason for thinking they will enjoy the play any more than you did. They may or may not, but the odds are they won’t like it any more than you did. So, would you accept the tickets to give to your friends or not? Why or why not?
2) Should you stay for the last 20 minutes, or should you have just leave during that intermission at the end of the first three hours? Why?
3) Would you have gone to the show in the first place if you had known it was going to be like this, or would you have told your parents you couldn’t go and suggest they give the tickets to someone else or sell or return them? Why? It will not hurt their feelings if you can’t accept the tickets.
4) Would it make any difference in your decision to give your friends the tickets if you were also given $1,000 on the condition you gave them the tickets and they went to the show? Why or why not? But again you are not allowed to tell them anything about the play or how much or little you liked it. And you are not allowed to share any of the money with them or use it to buy them anything to make up for sending them to this play, even if they do not enjoy it.
5) What if your friends were disabled and though they could go, it would be a hardship for them to travel and get into the theater, and they had to secure a baby sitter for their children, go out on a weeknight, etc? Would you give them the tickets? Why or why not?
Explain and justify your answers. Then suppose that this is an analogy, where the play represents life in general, and giving your friends the tickets represents conceiving and giving birth to a child. The $1,000 represents any pleasure you get at having the child regardless of what pleasure or pains the child finds in life (or the couple has in going to the play). 6) Should you conceive a child and give birth to it under any of these conditions? Why or why not?
To help make clear the premise of the scenario, consider this scenario also, which is supposed to be the same basic problem: Tickets go on sale two months ahead of time for a concert by a band you are somewhat interested in seeing, but it is not a must-see band for you, not one of your favorite bands. You go to the box office (because the tickets are not on sale online) and the line is long but should move quickly. However, it does not move quickly, and after various promising starts you find you have been waiting in line for nearly three hours, but it will be just twenty more minutes (for sure). 7) Should you wait the twenty minutes, or should you leave and do without the tickets? 8) If you had known the total wait would have been 3 hours and 20 minutes, should you have gone to get the tickets in the first place? 9) Should you call a friend to come down to get in line at the end of the line (so the friend has to wait 3 hours and 20 minutes to get his/her tickets — because you can’t let the friend cut in and you can’t buy more than your own ticket at the window) or not? If you call the friend, you are not allowed to tell him/her about the length of the wait in line. The friend has about the same level of interest in this particular band that you do, as far as you know.
10) The purpose of these questions is to understand whether the criteria that justify finishing something you started and have put time and energy into are the same criteria that would justify beginning it in the first place. Why or why not? Are the grounds for remaining alive, for someone who suffers, the same grounds for their being conceived in the first place? What about when they are still in the womb with regard to being born or carried to term? Explain and justify your answer, and use an underlying general moral principle for support (as I used my principle for support in the “supermarket examples” in the Introduction to Ethics).
