Abstract
Our contention is that all of the major arguments for abortion are also arguments for permitting infanticide. One cannot distinguish the fetus from the infant in terms of a morally significant intrinsic property, nor are they morally discernible in terms of standing in different relationships to others. The logic of our position is that if such arguments justify abortion, then they also justify infanticide. If we are right that infanticide is not justified, then such arguments will fail to justify abortion. We respond to those philosophers who accept infanticide by putting forth a novel account of how the mindless can be wronged which serves to distinguish morally significant potential from morally irrelevant potential. This allows our account to avoid the standard objection that many entities possess a potential for personhood which we are intuitively under no obligation to further or protect.
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Notes
Warren, in her paper on the moral significance of birth, provides counterexamples to Rini’s claims that “Newborn infants have aims but fetuses do not.” Warren points out that late term fetuses, like infants, turn away from bright lights, respond to loud noises, voices, or others sounds, and are also responsive to touch, taste, and motion [8, pp. 49–50].
We assume killing is morally worse than letting die, and the evidence for that belief is that one must take on more burdens to avoid killing someone than to allow an individual to die. For support, see Frances Myrna Kamm [9].
We are not aware of any other principled defenses of abortion that do not also generalize to allow infanticide. For example, just stipulating that birth bestows the moral status required for protection against being killed does not provide a principled distinction between abortion and infanticide.
Variations of the equality defense can be found in Catherine McKinnon [15], Martha Nussbaum [16, pp. 342–343], Melinda Roberts [17, pp. 162–164], Alison Jaggar [18, pp. 147–149], Cass Sunstein [19, pp. 29–44], and Sally Markowtiz [20, pp. 12]. Even Thomson [21] expresses some sympathy for this position, though she is better known for appealing to a bodily control defense [1].
Perhaps wars were once fought in such a physically demanding manner that the armies had to be drafted from only the ranks of men. More likely, the nature of battle only required wars to be fought by the conscription of men or women of sufficient strength. Perhaps then the physically strong were disadvantaged by their biology but not wronged. However, the benefits and burdens of fighting may be too disanalogous to child bearing to be used in an analogical argument.
Any concerns that such unequal burdens are not considerable enough—thus, that infanticide is unjust while abortion is not because nursing is not as difficult as carrying a fetus to term—will be met by our response below to the fourth argument.
Our view is shared by Kamm [22, p. 98].
We should qualify our claim and recognize the case of Sally Markowitz, brought to our attention by an anonymous referee, who would seem to accept the inequality defense of abortion even if that means abortion could be banned in a truly egalitarian society. The conclusion of Markowitz’s 1990 article is, “Let feminists insist that the condition for refraining from having abortions is a sexually egalitarian solution” [20, p. 12]. So, that remark and earlier comments that are somewhat dismissive of the autonomy defense of abortion may indeed mean that Markowitz would prefer the equality justification to the autonomy defense of abortion. Markowitz writes, “Autonomy arguments though are not much of an improvement. They take into account the well-being of individual women but they manage to skirt the issue of woman’s status, as a group, in a sexist society” [20, p. 3]. Nevertheless, we still suspect that most of those who appeal to the equality defense will fall back on the autonomy defense given that it could mean abortion rights would lose that justification in an egalitarian society.
If one objects that the mother would just be letting the child die by not feeding it, then imagine a hungry infant aided by a relentless adult who continually places the newborn upon the woman’s breast. The only way to stop such imposed feedings is to kill the infant.
To meet the objection that such women could still avoid the pregnancy by giving birth prematurely, we stipulate that some pregnant women are too frail to safely induce labor, though they could safely abort.
Contrast viability with the onset of an obviously morally significant trait like having a mind like ours. If a mutation resulted in such a mental life arising in the fetus before viability, many who previously accepted abortion at that stage would find it nearly impossible to do so anymore. At best, they would have to rely upon Thomson-like arguments that refer to features extrinsic to the fetus, such as it being an unjust burden upon the unwilling mother.
Harman surprisingly declares that she “will not offer any independent argument for” the claim that “a being has moral status at t just in case it is ever conscious and it is not dead at t” [2, p. 184].
Galen Strawson claims that consciousness can no more arise from non-consciousness than the extended from the non-extended, the spatial from the non-spatial, or the abstract from the concrete. Strawson believes brute generation “is actually incoherent and that emergence has acquired an air of plausibility (or at least possibility) for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face of seeming mystery” [24, p. 12]. He contrasts the brute emergentist relation of the mental from the physical with that of the liquidity from water molecules. The molecules of water have properties and obey laws, so that liquidity can be seen to consist in nothing else but their lawful interactions. It is not at all mysterious how their movement gives rise to liquidity. To put it in David Chalmers’s language [25], the facts of liquidity are fully determined by the lower level physical facts, assuming one has the upper level concept of liquidity. But the emergence of consciousness from the non-conscious physical is not like that. And there is little hope that a future science will enable us to discover an entailment from the physical to the experiential because future physics will just be more of the same structural and functional explanations. We only know of the fundamental physical entities by their relations—i.e., how they affect other objects. For example, what it is for something to have mass is to accelerate when encountering certain forces and the like. But conscious experience is not functional. Any future physical functional story of causal inputs and outputs could operate in the absence of experience, i.e., in Chalmers’s zombie world. The problem is that conscious experience involves something it is to be like and this is not a functional conception.
The current technologically dependent onset of viability means a woman’s body can at most be used for about three months against her wishes.
Someone lacking a right to be on or in one’s body means they can be removed even if they do not want to be. But they can be removed only if that can be done safely. To better appreciate this, imagine that someone who is bird watching and absent mindedly trespassing on one’s private property trips and breaks his neck. That person has no right to remain there. But if moving the person would be fatal, then his right to life permits him to stay where he otherwise does not have a right to be. So, our position about the wrongness of abortion and infanticide can be maintained even if we admit that the fetus has no right to be in someone’s body and the newborn has no right to be on it.
Patrick Lee speculates that it may also be that the violinist is tainted by the kidnappers and so is experienced as inheriting some of their evil [27, p. 127].
The bearing of projective separation and projective grouping on abortion is explored in more detail in Hershenov [28].
Thomson herself says it would be permissible to switch the trolley and thus to use the hefty person as a means to saving the track-bound persons [29, p. 102]. That the person on the looped track is used as a means to the others’ survival makes the example more analogous to the violinist using someone for support than the standard trolley example.
This “relevant sense” is that they are not responsible for the harm or have any greater duty to risk such harms as perhaps soldiers and police and maybe even trolley track workmen have on certain occasions.
It is worth pointing out that we have taken on the strongest version of Thomson’s position, one whose appeal is strengthened because it lacks certain analogies with abortion and assumes the rejection of certain common sense moral assumptions. If the violinist, a stranger whose predicament one is not responsible for, must be saved, then many would grant that there is an even stronger case for supporting the fetus that is one’s own child and who is in need because of the mother’s choice, in non-rape induced pregnancies, and can only be removed by being killed. (1) It is commonly held that we have special obligations to our children that are not consent based. (2) It is also widely held that being responsible for another’s predicament provides some obligation to ameliorate the situation. (3) Finally, it is typically maintained that killing is worse than letting die. We have not helped ourselves to any of these claims in contesting Thomson’s violinist thought experiment. Adding them to the mix just strengthens our pro-life position.
If Kingma is right about the fetus being a part of the mother, there is only a morally significant impact if this is accompanied by the successful defense of the claim that the fetus is not a human being but undergoes substantial change and is replaced by a human being that comes into existence with the separation of birth. Reasons to doubt this claim are presented below in the main text.
Likewise, imagine that only part of the fetus is a part of the mother. The mother could not do what she wants with that part because it is also a part of her. We do not see why a different treatment would be called for if the fetus were completely a part of the mother or one twin were completely embedded within another.
It is counterintuitive to have adult organisms within adult organisms but it does not strike us as that odd to think of fetuses as parts. They are special parts in that they are designed to separate and grow and flourish (unlike other parts that are designed only to separate—sperm, baby teeth, etc.) Human beings within human beings certainly does not strike us as more counterintuitive than the recognition that male fetuses are parts of their mothers, such that the mother has a penis, four eyes, and four legs. The sting can be taken off if this is understood to be just a temporary situation of a young human being within another.
Did the embryo go out of existence when it became embedded in the uterine wall? That is hard to believe. We doubt that there is a principled distinction that can be made between before and after implantation, where it was one kind of substance during the first 5–7 days post-fertilization, then another at implantation, then another at birth.
Any drug that prevents the early embryo from embedding in the uterine wall would also be infanticide unless being an infant entailed having been born. We doubt this is a conceptual truth as it appears not to be a mistaken use of the word infant to describe motherless very young children created by God or made in a lab as “infants.”
We are not denying that there could be non-living but conscious entities which have interests and well-being.
So, our theory of interests and harms does not provide any additional reason to be a vegetarian or to treat animals better.
We have argued elsewhere that this conception of potential avoids all the reductios of potential [37, 38]. It does not matter that the cells of the early embryo are totipotent, human somatic cells can be cloned, gametes can have their development induced parthenogenetically, oysters can become persons on alien environments, or kittens can be injected with a serum that produces personhood, etc. None of these developments are such that the cell or multicellular creature would be unhealthy if they did not transpire, so they are not in the interests of such creatures. The mindless (and for the most part, the minimally minded) only have interests in their healthy development.
It should not be thought that our claim that embryos, fetuses, and infants have interests in healthy development is what makes any argument for abortion into an argument for infanticide. This was a charge of an anonymous referee. We certainly do not claim or assume that the principle of our positive view about death harming mindless human beings by depriving them of a healthy and valuable development is why certain abortion defenses also apply to infanticide. We just aim to show that the features lacking in fetuses that appear to justify abortion according to its defenders are also lacking in infants and so would “justify” killing them. People have the intuition that infanticide is wrong independently of anything we believe or stated. We are offering a theory explaining why they may hold that infanticide is wrong, which also explains why abortion is wrong. Our theory explaining the harm to the mindless need not be accepted to see why viability, consciousness, and inequality are not morally significant justifications for granting older fetuses and infants immunity from killing. Readers do not need to agree with our theory of what makes killing wrong to see that consciousness and viability fail to pick out morally significant features or that, deep down, they really are not committed to viability and the onset of consciousness as abortion cut off points but instead attracted to the timing of their instantiation. Our anti-Thomson view that morality is very demanding can be appreciated independently of our accepting our principle about the potentiality of the mindless. Equality too can be seen as insufficient to justify a right to abortion independently of our view about interests in healthy development for it permits infanticide where there is inequality and it does not protect abortion rights where there is equality.
They write, “Anencephalic infants and early fetuses are certainly incapable of engaging in activities modeled after SSP (self-standing person) activities, and so would not gain a high moral status via our account, but this we think is an advantage” [4, p. 269, fn. 48]. We wonder why the ends of the mother to gestate her child and who behaves with an eye towards developing that child into a healthy person (exercises, eats, and drinks appropriately, takes prenatal vitamins, visits the obstetrician) do not bestow great value on her fetus by her actions. Why must the entity she acts for and upon be a conscious participant in the telos? Jaworska and Tannenbaum admit that the rearee does not have to be aware of the rearer’s ends.
“Self-standing person” is Jaworska and Tannenbaum’s name for the individual who has the relevant sophisticated cognitive capacities that bring higher moral status. They are neutral about whether this is the capacity to reason, to be self-conscious, capable of caring, etc.
“For all we know, the infant’s moral status may be the same as the status of the self-standing person” [4, p. 256].
Jaworska and Tannenbaum rule out the fact that a primitive culture’s belief that dogs can become persons can bestow moral status on their actions towards the dogs for there is a failure of a feasibility requirement on the ends of actions affecting their nature and value. But we can make Tooley’s felines require some rearing in order for the person-producing serum to be effective.
The authors write that those dogs “are paradigmatic rearees” [4, p. 255, fn. 27]. We share McMahan’s belief that they are not owed such development and can appeal to our account of interests in healthy development to justify and explain such intuitions.
The non-design environment could involve a presence of chemicals—like that found in the Mars atmosphere imagined by Kriegel and Houssain—three miles below or above the reader.
We would like to thank Catherine Nolan, Joel Potter, Peter Koch, and the members of Plato’s Academy, North Tonawanda Campus (PANTC) Reading Group for helpful discussions about these issues.
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Hershenov, D.B., Hershenov, R.J. If Abortion, then Infanticide. Theor Med Bioeth 38, 387–409 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9419-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-017-9419-7