Abstract
Says one critic of the philosophical debate on abortion: “Philosophers are not listened to because they do not listen.”1 Though I believe the charge is too strong, my own review of the literature makes it uncomfortably understandable. If there is any public consensus on abortion, as reflected in legal systems as well as in public opinion surveys, it is the middle-of-the-road view that some abortions are not permissible but that others are, and that some of the permissible abortions are more difficult to justify than others. But many of the most widely cited philosophical writings on abortion argue that the only coherent positions tend toward the extremes: all or most abortions are put into the same moral boat with either murder or, more frequently, elective surgery. In fact, proponents of the extremes tend to respect one another as at least being self-consistent, while joining in swift rebuttal of those who want it both ways and ignominiously try to be moderates on either murder or mandatory motherhood.
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References
Roger Wertheimer, “Philosophy on Humanity,” Abortion: Pro and Con, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company), p. 127.
For brevity I use “fetus” in a generic sense to refer to unborn humans at any stage of development, including that of zygote, conceptus, and embryo. I assume the fetuses are human beings, genetically defined, and use “person” to refer to those human beings that have as strong a claim to life as a normal adult. I use “as strong a claim” rather than “same claim” because, if very young human beings are persons, their claim to life clearly involves the claim to be nurtured as well as the claim not to be killed, a feature that is not clearly true of a normal adult’s claim to life. I use “claim to life rather than “right” or “prima facie right” because my argument entails that a fetus’s (though not a person’s) claim to life can be held with varying degrees of strength, and I agree with Joel Feinberg (Social Philosophy, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973, pp. 64–67) that this is a feature of claims rather than rights. Though Feinberg may object to my use of his distinction, I agree with him that the “right” or “valid claim” in a given instance is the strongest of competing claims. For an account of the relationship between claims and rights that I believe is consistent with my argument, see Bertram Bandman’s “Rights and Claims” in Bioethics and Human Rights, eds. Elsie L. Bandman and Bertram Bandman (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1978).
One advantage of the potentiality principle is that one need not specify the necessary or sufficient conditions for actual personhood; one need only note that, whatever they are, a potential person will acquire them in the normal course of its development. My own position is that self-consciousness is a necessary and perhaps a sufficient condition for personhood: “The fact that man can have the idea ‘I’ raises him infinitely above all the other beings living on earth. By this he is a person”
(Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1947, p. 9).
See also H. Tristram Engelhart Jr. (“The Ontology of Abortion,” Ethics 84/3, April, 1974, 230 n): “Only self-conscious subjects can value themselves, and, thus, be ends in themselves, and, consequently, themselves make claims against us.” While Joel Feinberg seems to object to thinking of personhood as a property, he does appeal to the fact that persons are “equally centers of experience, foci of subjectivity”
(H. Tristram Engelhart Jr. (“The Ontology of Abortion,” Ethics 84/3, April, 1974, p. 93).
Although using the phrase “in the normal course of its development” rather than “in the normal course of events” emphasizes the teleological (“nature’s aim”) rather than the statistical probability aspect of “normal development,” my later argument about probability and claims assumes that even a teleological notion of “normal” has statistical implications: if the natural end of (a) is to become (A) then it is highly probable that, without interference, (a) will become (A): I believe I am referring to what some Thomists call “active, natural potentiality,” though I deny potential personhood is as claim-laden as actual personhood.
The class of potential and possible persons must be distinguished from the class (membership unknown) of future persons, namely the class of future actual persons who do not now exist but will in fact exist in the future. One must be careful with analogies between our duties to potential persons and our duties to future persons (for such an analogy, see Werner S. Pluhar, “Abortion and Simple Consciousness,” Journal of Philosophy 74/3, March 1977, 167). If there are future persons (as is so likely as to be certain), they will be actual persons whose quality of life will be affected by actions we now perform, while it is debatable whether killing potential persons affects the quality of their lives as persons.
A point I argue in reply to Michael Tooley’s “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2/4 (Summer, 1973), 410–416.
Engelhardt, p. 223.
“Abortion, Infanticide, and Respect for Persons,” The Problem of Abortion, ed. Joel Feinberg (Belmont Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1973), p. 103.
In this I agree with John T. Noonan, “An Almost Absolute Value in History,” The Morality of Abortion, ed. John T. Noonan, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), though he seems to argue wrongly that an abortion involves a high probability of killing a person. Instead, it kills a human that had a high probability of becoming a person.
Notice that if one uses the potentiality principle to attribute a very strong claim to life for the fetus, one has, in effect, denied the belief that late abortions are significantly more morally problematic than early abortions.
See Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory, and John Peel, Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), chap. 2.
The highest estimate I have seen, at variance with most others, is 69 percent, by Harvard physiologist John D. Biggers (Science 202, October 13, 1978, 198).
See R. B. Brandt, “The Morality of Abortion” (The Monist 56, 1972, 504–526), for a quasi-Rawlsian development of this approach.
See also Ronald M. Green, “Conferred Rights and the Fetus,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2/1 (1974), and Benn (“Conferred Rights and the Fetus,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2/1 (1974))
See Magda Denes, spi In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), for one description of the different social effects of abortions at different stages of pregnancy.
Notice that adding the conferred claims approach highly qualifies a possible implication of my defense of the potentiality principle, namely the implication that it is somewhat easier to justify aborting fetuses with defects that lower their probability of attaining personhood. Any arguments for conferring a stronger claim to life on fetuses at a given point would apply to most defective fetuses as well.
Patricia Fauser, James Gustafson, Gary Iseminger, Daniel Lee, and Frederick Stoutland gave me very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Langerak, E.A. (1988). Abortion. In: Goodman, M.F. (eds) What Is a Person?. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3950-5_13
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