Here is what they said.

I posed the following open-ended questions:

1. “What are your views on abortion?”

2. “If you oppose abortion, why do you oppose it?”

3. “Under what circumstances do you think it should be legal to get one?”

The open-ended responses fell into these categories:

• 90% said abortion is wrong because it is murder (i.e., wrong like killing an adult is wrong)

• 24% said abortion is forbidden according to their religion

• 14% said they think it violates the rights of the unborn child

• 10% said Roe v. Wade misinterpreted the constitution

Note that the reasons listed above were those that people spontaneously wrote in their open-ended responses. Some wrote multiple reasons, which is why the probabilities exceed 100%.

Here are typical (exact quotes of) responses I received:

• “I believe that life starts at conception and abortion is the murder of innocent children. It is evil and immoral.”

• “An unborn baby is still a life. People who are pro-choice are not giving a choice to the baby”

• “I am against taking the life of an innocent baby. However, I am also careful not to judge those who are caught in a situation of rape, incest or life of the mother.”

• “I’m against abortion because it takes a human life. That’s really all there is to it! It’s simply murder”

• “I oppose it because I believe that God is in control of the pregnancy to begin with and we should not attempt to alter God’s plan.”

• “It goes against God’s Word, which teaches that life begins at conception”

• “the constitution of the United States does not speak to the legality of abortion, so it must be decided by legislators.”

On multiple-choice questions, here are the percentages of respondents who felt it should be ILLEGAL in different situations:

• 86% thought abortion should be illegal in normal circumstances (NOT an instance of rape, medical issues, incest, etc.)

• 67% thought abortion should be illegal for incest/genetic abnormality

• 53% thought abortion should be illegal when birth poses a 50% chance of death to the mom

Who were these respondents? I recruited them using our platform for running studies, Positly.com.

Regarding demographics: 42% of the respondents were women, 58% were men, and the average age was 45.

Only 12% consider themselves “not at all religious,” with 63% considering themselves “very” or “extremely” religious, and 79% considering themselves at least “moderately” religious.

51% of respondents live in the suburbs, and 22% in rural areas, with 27% in urban areas.

Choosing labels for themselves (with the ability to pick more than one) 34% of the respondents chose Christian Conservative, 26% Traditional Conservative, 25% said that they were actively against giving themselves a label, 12% selected Libertarian, and 8% selected Centrist. None were Liberal or Left-wing.

The qualitative responses above were collected as part of a broader study that involved a total of 396 people on Positly.com sharing their reactions to Roe vs. Wade being overturned. Of these, approximately 30% were very happy it was overturned, 10% were a little happy, 15% were indifferent or neutral, 7% were a little unhappy, and 38% were very unhappy it was overturned. (Not all of the qualitative responses made by those who were very happy it was overturned were analyzed to produce the summaries above; instead, a smaller subset was chosen at random for analysis of their qualitative responses.) 

In the same study, I also asked all participants when they consider someone a living human person that it would be wrong to kill. Here are the response selections made by 120 people in the survey who said they have left-of-center (liberal) political views and 190 people in the survey saying they have right-of-center (conservative) views (right-leaning participants were purposely over-sampled in this study):

Notes on this chart: Respondents selected one time point from the following multiple-choice list of options (note that each is recorded in the chart as time since conception, as opposed to time since the most recent period the mother had, which is approximately 2 weeks prior to conception): At conception (i.e., when a human sperm enters a human egg/ovum), 4 weeks after the woman’s last period (about 2 weeks after conception), 6 weeks after the woman’s last period (when the beating of fetal heart tissue is detectable), 13 weeks after the woman’s last period (the end of the 1st trimester), 24 weeks after the woman’s last period  (when the fetus is viable, that is, capable of living outside the uterus), 26 weeks after the woman’s last period  (the end of the 2nd trimester), Just after birth, At one year of age, At three years of age,  At five years of age, At 10 years of age, At 18 years of age). The following responses were not included: 1 person said 18 years, 1 person said 1 year, 1 person said 3 years, and 1 person said 5 years (the first 2 outliers were on the political left and the second 2 outliers were on the political right). The total number of responses from people on the political left (including the 2 outliers) was 122 and the total number of responses from people on the political right  (including the 2 outliers) was 192.

This piece was first written on June 27, 2022, and first appeared on this site on June 30, 2022. The last section was added on July 5, 2022.

Here’s hoping philosophers will make further progress on some of these!

1. The Trolley Problem: self-driving cars will be put in situations where there is a choice between sacrificing the passenger to save two pedestrians. Or they might have to choose between killing a 5-year-old pedestrian vs. killing a 70-year-old one.

2. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: every year, >100 billion mammals, birds, and fish live seemingly miserable lives on factory farms while ~1 trillion insects are raised yearly for food/animal feed. To what extent can insects/sardines/tuna/chickens/cows/pigs experience suffering?

3. Designing Utopia: if humanity survives long enough, and if technology grows exponentially in the long term, someday, we should have the technology to create something close to a paradise on earth. But what kind of paradise would we actually WANT to create? What should we be aiming for?

4. The Teletransporter: one-day technology may make it possible to upload or simulate a human brain on a computer. Cryonics contracts even let you specify if you would want this done to your frozen brain if/when it becomes feasible. But is that upload/simulation really YOU?

5. Uncertainty Uncertainties: some approaches to doing good allow expected value calculations from studies. Other ways require speculative arguments about the future. If, in both cases, we estimate a 10% chance of success, are these “10%”s equally good, even though one is much more uncertain?

6. Gender Disambiguation: there’s a battle over what precisely determines gender. Is it determined by your belief of what your gender is, a qualia of internally feeling like you are a specific gender, your soul (or some other non-physical property), your genes, your body, your gametes, your preferred social role, your presentation, your brain, the name we give to a choice each person makes, another permanent trait, another mutable trait, a cluster concept ambiguously referring to dozens of correlated traits, a meaningless concept, or something else? Maybe philosophers can at least narrow down this list of potential definitions by identifying that some are internally contradictory, incoherent, or at odds with what most people are trying to refer to.

7. The Nature of Intelligence: some think there’s an important sort of “intelligence” humans have that neural nets could never have (no matter how big, no matter how much data they were trained on). If so, what is the nature of this “intelligence”? If not, what are the implications for us, philosophy, and the future of humanity?

If you read this line, please do us a favor and click here to answer one quick question.

This piece was first written on August 10, 2021, and first appeared on this site on March 5, 2023.

A. our theoretical understanding of what things are “really” like (physics, atoms, etc.)

with

B. our direct, first-hand experiences as humans.

Examples:

(1) Ethics – most people experience a visceral feeling that some things are inherently and universally morally wrong (e.g., murdering children). Yet it’s unclear what, in the universe of atoms (or in physics), could make (or explain) something being “wrong.”

(2) Free will – we feel as though we constantly make choices (e.g., picking options that we didn’t have to pick). Yet the possibility of choices is hard to square with the existence of laws of physics as we know them. Where could a choice possibly fit into those laws?

(3) Consciousness – we each know we are conscious (in the sense of having experiences / there being something it is like to be us) because we directly witness our own experiences. Yet it’s unclear how or why configurations of atoms could ever give rise to internal experiences.

(4) Identity – we feel like we have a unique, persistent, indivisible identity. Yet, if we imagine thought experiments involving splitting, copying, or rebuilding brains in the physical world, it’s hard to see how a unitary identity could be maintained in those circumstances.

(5) Knowledge – there seem to be many things we each intuitively know to be true (our own names, what orange juice tastes like, how to tie our shoelaces), yet it’s hard to explain what the state of “knowing” these things corresponds to in the world, or to define what “knowing” is.

(6) Mathematics – we all know it’s true that 1+1 = 2 and that the number 2 “exists” in some sense. But it’s hard to say in what sense this is true/existent because numbers and addition don’t seem to exist in the physical realm the way that, say, a particular sandwich does.

This piece was first written on December 23, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 17, 2023.