Sum Yung Gai

The fact that you think this is a workable analogy really doesn't bode well here but let me try to explain this: Pro lifers think abortion is murder in the sense that it is an innocent life is being taken. What they do NOT necessarily believe is that abortion can or should be *legally categorized and prosecuted* in the same way as, say, a premeditated mass shooting (first degree murder), or accidentally hitting someone with your car (manslaughter), or leaving a loaded gun out where someone was able to pick it up and shoot themselves (negligent homicide). Some pro-life people think that women who abort are victims themselves -- that they don't fully understand the implications of the choice they've made, and they deserve compassion. Some pro-life people really just want the procedure banned but have no particular desire to punish women for accessing it, because it's only the former thing that will actually save lives. And some pro-life people would in fact like to see women prosecuted for aborting, but they keep it to themselves and don't pursue it as policy, because they know it's an extraordinarily unsympathetic position and that making it part of the platform would be political suicide, hurting their ability to accomplish what they want more -- which, again, *is to reduce or eliminate abortions.* You don't have to find this persuasive in the sense that it makes you rethink your own beliefs about whether abortion is murder, but if you want to understand the mindset of pro-life people, you have to accept that this is how they think about the issue and the tradeoffs that surround it. This is what they believe. James Surowiecki has had all this explained to him a dozen times over, of course, and more eloquently than this; he just doesn't want to hear it because he doesn't actually want to know how pro-life people think. He prefers the made-up villain version of them inside his head, which is easy to mock and dismiss. But that's his impoverishment; feel free to not duplicate it!

this is an argument i will never get. "it's deserved" i didn't do shit to get born here. it's not deserved. it's luck. and most people are unlucky as hell

LONG POST WITH TL;DR It's fascinating that they would try to turn this into a breakfast question style hypothetical cognitive test, when clearly the quality of hypothetical scenarios is entirely different. The breakfast question is designed to be a simple, easily conceivable hypothetical that everyone has experience with. Everyone has eaten breakfast, or is aware of the concept of breakfast at the very least. "How would you feel if you had eaten breakfast" is simple, it doesn't pose an existential question, and, most importantly, it's feasible and ubiquitous. Rejecting this hypothetical is asinine, because there is no basis upon which to reject it. However, in this context, the hypothetical is of a much different quality. It asks an existential question (how would you feel if you were, at every level, not you), it's complex (you were born somewhere you have never been and have no knowledge of, and you are probably a completely different person), and it is utterly nonsensical. Here's why: The hypothetical is born from a misunderstanding of the original argument. The debate is not about a random person being born somewhere, it is about a specific person being born in a specific place. For me, *I* cannot have been born in Sudan because then I would not be *me.* There are certain objective qualities that define who I am as a person, and placing me in Sudan at birth would erase some of them, therefore I would not have been born; a different man would. I do not know how I would feel in that scenario because I don't know what it feels like to be born in Sudan. A Sudanese person would not be *me,* because *I* am not Sudanese. At my foundation, at the very core of my being, I cannot be Sudanese, because I am American. That is not by chance, it's not luck, it's not my choice, it's just who I am intrinsically. On those grounds, I reject the hypothetical because it's preposterous, not because I'm incapable of answering the question. The answer is "if I were Sudanese, I wouldn't be me. I don't know what it is like to be Sudanese," which should be perfectly sufficient to a rational and honest conversation partner. But here we are. TL;DR: This hypothetical can be rejected on the grounds that it is nonsense, it asks an unanswerable existential question, and it is born out of misunderstanding of the argument.