In October 2017 Patrick S Tomlinson proffered a scenario forcing pro-life people to choose between saving a child and saving some embryos and then declares that “everyone agrees” that a child is worth an infinite number of human embryos. Like most hypotheticals, it’s phrased to force you to choose between mutually exclusive propositions. This is a “heads I win, tails you lose” argument, a Kobiashi Maru. It is impossible for Thomlinson to be wrong, therefore it’s not scientific. It’s an ethics argument, and his entire basis lies in having a different ethos than respondents. Mephistophelian values are not my values, so I reject the premise of your argument as well as the terms concomitant therewith. In fact, I would probably solve the Kobiashi Maru the same way that Kirstie Allie did in Star Trek II and die trying to save everyone. Once you’ve removed Option C (die trying to save both) from consideration, it forces a choice in which I don’t actually happen to believe. Then you pat yourself on the back for forcing us to choose between bad and worse and excoriating us for not following our conscience. Remember that villains are those who issue this kind of ultimatum, not the sophisticated or virtuous.
Mr. Thomlinson proudly maintains that nobody has offered a viable solution. BY viable, he means one that meets with HIS ideals. He dismisses all contenders with an air of smug satisfaction and destroys other people for having a different opinion than his because the way he’s phrased the hypothetical, it’s impossible for his ideological opponents to not come off as hypocrites. His pseudo intellectualism is bound up in logical fallacies like Ad hoc ergo proctor hoc: If you don’t’ save the embryos and save the child, you are lying about life being concomitant with conception, and if you save the embryos but not the child, you can’t possibly care about people. Well, if someone has to die, I can’t possibly be expected to prove I care about all people, but then again, neither does Thomlinson. He doesn’t care about the respondents. The challenge, like his logic, is flawed, because it sets out to destroy the belief system of the respondent without replacing it with one the respondent considers an acceptable alternative. “you play by my rules” he declares, and then he mocks you when he wins using rules skewed towards the house. Wow, how clever. His premise is based on the argument that his definition of life is superior, but his definition seems simply to be “an embryo isn’t life”. Well, what is life? When does it begin? Is he claiming that it doesn’t begin until you’re five? I hear that life begins at 50. What makes his definition better than mine other than it happens to be his definition and he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because nobody has come up with a logical answer to an emotional hyperbole.
Liberals are like everyone else in one important way. They’re human and flawed too, and the argument can be made that they don’t care about people either. Let’s change the challenge to be two different five year old kids at two ends of the building. One is a kid related to the liberal and the other is a stranger. Which kid does the liberal save if he is FORBIDDEN to save both? If the liberal argument is legit, then he would have the same percentage of saying the stranger and the relative, but we all know from human behavior that people preferentially preserve people they know and like. Ergo, you would see statistically that the liberals will not treat the stranger the same as the known child. You could conclude therefore that liberals do not care about all life equally, which he will protest, but if you are not allowed to die trying to save both, it’s impossible in this scenario to successfully argue that you do, just like the hypothetical he created where neither outcome successfully argues that a pro-lifer is pro life. He is FORCED to let someone die. He is forbidden to die trying to save everyone. Odd.
Tomlinson’s argument is based on the principle of sacrifice, but he is asked to sacrifice nothing in issuing the challenge. The simple fact is that decisions are made all the time where a sacrifice is made for practical or preferential purposes. It is not practical to preserve embryos. I don’t know how to store them, transport them, or raise them, but it is easy to find someone to raise the child and somewhere to store him. People who argue against the pro-life movement are not willing to make sacrifices. They usually like to make choices without consequences, ergo the rationalization at every turn for abortion. Sometimes they will clothe their naked villainy in odd old ends stolen forth from holy writ and seem the saint when most they play the devil, claiming they don’t want the as yet unborn kid to be in a disadvantaged life. Really, they don’t want to be disadvantaged. Remember that Barack Obama, Nobel Laureate, and hero of the liberal left once said he didn’t want his daughters PUNISHED WITH A BABY. That’s the difference between Tomlinson and me. Babies are punishments to him. They are an opportunity for me to share in the creative power with my Maker. We simply cannot see eye to eye in this scenario because we value and define life differently.
The liberal argument also revolves around the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one. Yet, that math doesn’t add up when it comes to Tomlinson’s hypothetical. Mathematically speaking, he should be defending the feti, because they are many rather than the child who is one. However, liberals usually do what benefits THEM. Hence this challenge, which is not to benefit respondents but to validate Tomlinson as being a wizard of smart who saved believers from their false and farcical faith. In fact, Tomlinson claims that a child is worth millions of unborn, which is completely contrary to the argument aforementioned. It relies on what he calls a “life”. Those embryos aren’t going to cry as he leaves them behind or stare at him as he runs away or have their parents sue him for not saving them, but if he abandons the child, he runs that risk. In typical fashion, emotion will overcome mathematics, and he will save the child who looks like a human because he doesn’t want to see that child’s face haunt him until he dies. What if there are more human cells in the “embryo” collection than in the child? The needs of the many? When it comes down to brass tacks, the liberal argument always devolves into emotion over reason. It is not reasonable to save the embryos when more can and will be made, unless you consider that those might be the embryos of an infertile couple who paid good money for them and doesn’t get another chance. It is not reasonable to try to save both because that might cost you your life. Well, isn’t that just selfish? Who are we kidding? This isn’t about the kids. It’s about the person posing the hypothetical and the trap he creates for the unwitting person who believes differently from him.
There are people who might actually choose the embryos if we know more about them and do so legitimately. I know fairly well a number of couples who relied on fertility clinics to even conceive. It’s exorbitantly expensive to get one of these, and if one of those were mine, I would probably want to save them, and in doing so save thousands of other embryos to the benefit of people I don’t know or like since I can’t tell them apart. I know a student who was able to have a child because of something I taught in class. Don’t tell me that her child is less important than the child of a stranger she doesn’t know and might dislike. I didn’t know any of my nieces as embryos, but I know their parents, and I know that those parents never doubted they were carrying a living vessel inside them. They were excited to see the organs and then limbs form. They got to create life, and who is Tomlinson to deny them that hope? If you think that those kids would be better off in stem cell research, you have no heart. Each of these kids, just like the helpless animals liberals always want to rescue, has a distinct and endearing personality. I would do anything to save these little girls born to my brothers, and given what I know about them, if I knew an embryo in that vial belonged to one of them, you bet your touchas I’d leave that five year old child behind to save my own possible relative. Who is Tomlinson to decide that the emotional and financial capital expended by those whose embryos he expects us to doom to death are not worthy of saving? Who is he to decide what is human and who is worthy? Who is he to decide that my faith is bunk? Whose beliefs am I supposed to have? This tyrant of a man has essentially established a scenario hoping to impose his beliefs on others. He has spent a considerable amount of time preparing, postulating, and phrasing his argument to make it impossible for a respondent to give an answer he finds acceptable without sacrificing their own beliefs. Then he demands a coherent and cogent response from the uneducated and unprepared, and when they fail to meet his arbitrary standard, he declares them inept and rejoices at making them feel low. When we were young, that kind of behavior was the behavior, not of the enlightened, but of the bully, and it is just as worthy of scorn here as then. The infertile couples who long for children they can never bear probably cannot articulate what that one human embryo that might become their child is worth to them. To Tomlinson, it’s completely worthless, just like his logic. The Kobiashi Maru is ultimately a test of character.
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