Today, somebody brought up the dilemma about whether you'd save five embryos or a toddler in case a building was burning and you had to choose. The dilemma is meant to show an inconsistency on the part of pro-lifers. If the pro-lifer chooses the toddler, which he almost certainly will, this is supposed to show that the pro-lifer doesn't really think the embryos are valuable human beings.
I wrote up a response, but before I could post it, the person had deleted their comment. Thankfully, I used the "copy" function before hitting the post button in case something went wrong. But now I've got this thing saved on my clip board and nowhere to put it, so I'm going to put it here. This was my response.
How does that show that pro-lifers are wrong? At worst it would only show that pro-lifers are inconsistent. They could be right in thinking the unborn are human beings and wrong in how they respond to moral dilemmas.
But I'm not sure it even shows that they are inconsistent. Consider a parallel scenario in which a hospital is burning down, and you could either save one 16 year old girl who was about to be released from the hospital later that day anyway, or five people who are in a coma and may or may not ever come out of them. Keep in mind the poor girl is screaming for help, while the coma patients are completely unconscious. I suspect you'd save the 16 year old girl, but it wouldn't follow that you thought the lives of the people in the coma were any less valuable. It's just that the 16 year old has a greater capacity for suffering, you have more of an emotional attachment to the 16 year old because of her youth and her being awake and able to suffer, and because she has a better chance of living a full life than the people in the coma. All of those same factors would come into play when choosing the infant over the embryos.
Or consider a scenario in which you can save a 20 year old or a 90 year old. You'd likely choose the 20 year old, not because 20 year olds are more valuable than 90 year olds but because the 90 year old is likely going to die soon anyway. In the same way, a toddler already has a greater chance of living a full life than an embryo since the embryos' only chance of living a full life is if they are successfully implanted, and IVF's are not always successful. There's trial and error involved.
Or consider a scenario in which a total stranger in another room who was mean to your mother earlier that day is in danger, but so is your mother. You can only save one of them. Surely you'd save your mother, not because you don't think the other person's life isn't valuable, but simply because of your emotional attachment to your mother. Well, people are naturally more sympathetic to crying helpless babies than they are to embryos in Petri dishes, but this has nothing to do with whether embryos in Petri dishes are valuable human beings.
There are lots of trolly type dilemmas in which you have to choose between saving various people, but none of these scenarios imply that it's okay to kill certain human beings when such dilemmas are not involved. So your question is just a set up for a fallacious line of reasoning.
There are two kinds of value that a person can have--intrinsic and instrumental. Intrinsic value is the value a person has merely because they're a human being. A homeless person with no friends or family has just as much intrinsic value as anybody else, and that's precisely why it's just as wrong to kill the homeless person as it is to kill anybody else. Instrumental value is the value something has because of its social connections or its contribution to society. Embryos could have equal intrinsic worth with toddlers, but they would not have the same instrumental worth. So while it may be just as wrong to kill an embryo as it is to kill a toddler, when it comes to choosing between embryos and toddlers, instrumental worth comes into play. That would be another reason to choose the toddler over the embryos that is not inconsistent with the pro-life position.
To show that pro-lifers are wrong, you've got to do better than than try to show that they behave inconsistently. You've got to either point out a flaw in their arguments for the humanity of the unborn, or else you've got to offer up an argument of your own showing that the unborn are not living human beings.
After writing that, I went over to the Secular Pro Life blog I have linked over there to the right to see what they had to say about this dilemma, and I found a post by Clinton Wilcox on the subject. His arguments are even better than mine, so have a look at what he said: Pro-Choice Thought Experiment: The Burning IVF Lab.
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