This post is part of an ongoing discussion I’m having on Tumblr with “Sirwolffe.” I’ve edited the post before putting it on “Alas.”
Sirwolffe writes:
You are comparing the right to life with the right to refuse pregnancy. Isn’t it obvious that one is more important than the other? Life is the greatest gift we have, and the most important one too. How can your right to use your body how you wish override that?
It’s not self-evident that a right to life always overrides a right to bodily autonomy.1
Suppose I’m dying, and the only thing that can save me is being medically hooked to you for nine months, so your kidneys will take the poisons out of my blood.2 You are the only person in the world with the rare blood type necessary for this to work. The procedure carries a high chance of having permanent effects on your body, and a low chance of killing you.
In that circumstance, should the police force you to be hooked up to me for nine months, whether you want to or not?
If you’re consistent in your belief that right to life overrides the right to bodily autonomy, then you’d have to agree that the police should force you to do this for me. For that matter, even if it takes nine years – or the rest of your life – you should agree to the principle that the police can force you to do this for me.
But in fact, no court in this country will force you. Because there is no legal or moral rule that my right to life always overrules your right to bodily autonomy. You cannot be legally forced to let anyone use your internal organs for their benefit. Because you have the right to bodily autonomy.
Pregnant people should have that same right.
* * *
Next, a fetus isn’t just human. It is both wholly human, and a live human. A brain-dead patient is dead, not living. An ear growing in a vat is not a whole human.
An embryo3 is not a whole and complete person, any more than a foundation of a building is a whole and complete building. An embryo is made, and there is a person making it, providing all the resources and doing all the work. The embryo is literally incapable of continued existence without a pregnant person filling in the gaps of the many ways it is not yet complete.
Your argument erases that pregnant person from consideration; your argument treats them like a non-person whose rights don’t merit a moment’s consideration. A baby doesn’t magically appear, whole and finished; it is made by a person. A person with rights.
Now, why isn’t a fetus a person? Because it can’t think or feel? It will surely develop those properties within several months.
Earlier in our discussion, you agreed that a brain-dead patient is dead – and that could be a difference of only a day. If you’re allowed to say that a difference of a day, during which a person’s brain dies, can nonetheless be a morally important difference, then why can’t I say the same about a difference of four or five months?
It doesn’t matter if the brain-dead patient was alive yesterday. If they’re brain-dead now, then they are no longer a person with a right to life. Because without a brain capable of sustaining some sort of consciousness, it isn’t a person with rights.
By the same logic, it doesn’t matter if the embryo or fetus will in theory be able to be a person four months from now. The abortion isn’t being performed four months from now; it’s being performed today, on an embryo. And an embryo isn’t a person, and a non-person cannot have rights.
A pregnant person is a person, who has consciousness and rights. An embryo is, at most, a hypothetical person; it has no more ability to think or feel than a brain-dead person does, or a chair does. Maybe in several months it’ll gain that ability – or, then again, maybe not. (Even without an abortion, there could be a miscarriage, it could be born brain-dead. Etc).
So what we’re weighing here, is the rights of a real, existing person, versus the “rights” of a hypothetical person who doesn’t exist and might never exist. When these things are in conflict, shouldn’t the rights of the person who exists take precedence?
There was a time when black people were not legally considered persons.
Regardless of what the law said, there’s never been a time when black people weren’t morally and logically people.4
Hey, what if I say chairs are people? And when you disagree, I imply that you’re being like a racist saying Blacks aren’t people. Is that a fair or logical argument? Or by making that comparison, am I assuming what’s at issue – that chairs are people?
I do agree with one thing you wrote: Being legal doesn’t make something moral. A pregnant person is a person, and morally they should have rights. Morally, you should not have the right to force them to be pregnant against their will.
Even if pro-lifers manage to create laws that treat pregnant people like slaves who don’t own their own bodies, that will just change the law. It won’t change that forced childbirth is immoral.
* * *
One last question: Imagine you’re in a burning building. There’s a hallway with two rooms, far from each other, so you only have time to run into one of the rooms and escape before the roof collapses.
In one room is an adorable four-year-old girl. (Or even a mean, grumpy four-year-old girl who hates puppies. Makes no difference to my example.) In the other room is a suitcase containing fifty petri dishes with one-day-old viable embryos, each of which has been assigned to a person who wants the embryos implanted in their wombs. So if you save those embryos, many or all of them will, six months from now, be babies.
If that were me, I would dash to save the four-year-old girl, and leave the embryos to die. No question at all. Would you really run to save the suitcase of one-day embryos, leaving the girl to die? And if you’d save the girl, aren’t you admitting that there is a moral difference between the life of a born human, and the life of an embryo?
Thanks for the discussion. I appreciate it.
- You said “your right to use your body how you wish,” but I’m going to shorten that to “bodily autonomy.” [↩]
- I’m swiping this example from Judith Thomson. [↩]
- I deliberately use the word “embryo,” even though Sirwolffe said “fetus,” to emphasize that abortions typically happen to either embryos or early fetuses. According to Guttmacher, one-third of abortions occur at six weeks into the pregnancy or earlier, and 90% of abortions occur in the first twelve weeks. 99% of abortions take place in the first 20 weeks. The biological structures needed for any thought or consciousness to exist aren’t in place until the 28th week. [↩]
- This is a side issue, but your understanding of history is wrong. [↩]
Also, it’s interesting that blood donation isn’t mandatory, even though it’s a much smaller imposition than pregnancy.
Organ donation isn’t mandatory, even for corpses.
Amp,
I think that your first argument is very unconvincing. “Right to life,” as pro-life people use it, does not mean “the right to be kept from dying.” If that was what they meant, then all consistent pro-life people would be in favor of universal health care. (For what it’s worth, I am in favor of universal healthcare but not because I think that there is a right to be kept from dying).
Rather, pro-life people mean that there is a “right not to be deprived of life by another person without due proces of law,” which is why some pro-life people also support the death penalty. As one pro-life and pro-death-penalty person put it to me, he would be fine with abortion if the baby had an attorney and was convicted of murder by a jury. (I don’t support the death penalty, in part because it almost inherently leads to race- and class-based inequities. I am also skeptical of our system’s ability to determine guilt or innocence with anywhere close to certainty, and I think that we always have more human alternatives available nowadays. But I digress.)
In your example, you are obviously talking about a generalized “right to be kept from dying.” To show how stark the distinction is, do you think that the potential donor has the right to kill the person with the kidney disease? I hope not.
I hope I have time to respond to your other points too! (By the way, I used to post as Schroeder around these parts.). I also know that the natural response to my objections is the famous “Violinist” example. I have a response to that, too, but my son has finished watching TV and is begging me to play with him.
SamC: But in the case of pregnancy, the right not to be deprived of life IS the right to be kept from dying. Now, if in the future pregnancies can be had through artificial wombs that are in nobody’s body, we have a different situation, but I’m talking about the one we have now. Even if you consider the embryo or fetus to be a person, to force someone to remain pregnant is to force them to use their body, their internal organs, to keep someone else alive. To not acknowledge this is to not fully acknowledge the personhood of the pregnant person.
SamC: So maybe you agreed to be a human dialysis-machine at first. But after a while, you can not take it anymore. Maybe it’s just too stressfull, maybe the impact on your health is worse than you thought, whatever. Are you, because you at one point in time agreed to help, legally obligated to continue helping forever. Should the police chain you to your bed to keep you from escaping?
Plus, anti-choice people might claim that they only do not want a person actively killed without due process. But if one used a form of ending a pregnancy that worked not directly on the fetus – not removing it surgically, for example, instead merely influncing the womb to stop making it grow and feed it – so not actively killing, merely ending the process of actively supporting growth and developement – and then once the embryo was no longer viable, the body would remove it witout surgery – the anti-choice people would not be ok with that.
Also, the first point is directly connected to the next: we do not legally force anyone to offer use of their body to keep someone who actually is alive from dying, but embryos are not even themselve alive. Anti-choicers want people with uteri to be forced to let their body be used so that something alive can be created. Using them as the resource or everything, whether they want it or not.
Anti-choice people value the potential to create a life more than they value the rights of a living person who already exists.
Which is a different, but just a plausible, explanation for people who are anti-choice but pro death penalty and ant universal healthcare, pro war and anti welfare etc.
“Life begins at conception” is a religious concept. There are many religions that do not believe this. It is not a biological fact. American Christian should not be able to impose their religious beliefs about ensoulment on the rest of us.
Furthermore, the fact that many (most?) pro-life people I know and most pro-life organizations I am familiar with are not interested in supporting interventions that significantly reduce abortions (like provide or even just educate people about long term contraception–see Colorado’s experiment with birth control). If abortion really were murder, supporting immoral birth control would clearly be the lesser of two evils.
Man, if only embryos had somebody to argue for them in court, somebody like, oh, just to throw a name out completely at random, Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas, Texas.
I’m sorry to be so sarcastic, but abortion rights, and their limits, HAVE been determined by an open and adversarial legal process.
I don’t know what else “due process” is supposed to mean in this context.
As for the distinction between “the right to be kept from dying.” and the “right not to be deprived of life” I’m not sure how we’re supposed to draw the line at a time when the fetus can’t survive outside the womb.
And as for the time when the fetus CAN survive on its own, current US abortion law allows states to make this exact distinction. It is legal for states to restrict or ban abortion after the fetus can survive outside the womb, and in fact many states do just that.
Early term abortion is a time when withdrawing your support for the fetus is exactly the same as inevitably killing it. When it becomes possible for it to live on its own, many states actually do step in (Although I suppose some people might prefer federal laws restricting late term abortions).
Which we know 100% to be true, since that’s what RU486 does (blocks progesterone so the uterine lining breaks down).
The argument I’ve heard from pro-choice people is that birth control supports a culture of childlessness that makes people more likely to choose abortion, so even though it prevents some fraction of unwanted pregnancies, it basically raises the fraction of pregnancies that are unwanted in a way that more than compensates. I think this argument is wrong, and indeed there’s no evidence behind it and some against it, but the basic structure is one we use in social justice sometimes, so I’m wary of dismissing it out of hand.
““Life begins at conception” is a religious concept. There are many religions that do not believe this. It is not a biological fact.”
It is a biological fact that life begins at conception. It is not a biological fact that personhood begins at conception. But fetuses are obviously alive, and the confusion of terms here bothers me because pro-life people are so quick to sieze on it.
Gametes are also alive.
“Suppose I’m dying, and the only thing that can save me is being medically hooked to you for nine months, so your kidneys will take the poisons out of my blood. You are the only person in the world with the rare blood type necessary for this to work.”
That analogy doesn’t really work because it is comparing the apple of a stranger leeching off someone to the orange of a mother-child bond.
If your mother came to you and said (2 months along) that she would have to be in a coma for the next 7 months and someone has to tend to her intravenous feeding tube, but then she would survive the disease …
… and you said, “that’s nice mom, but I’m not legally obligated to do sh!t for you” …
… you’d be absolutely within your rights. Absolutely.
And someone might come along and say, “no one is going to take away your right to let her die, we just want to raise consciousness that being compassionate and helping her is another way of thinking about it”.
Lirael,
True; my point was not that they don’t overlap but, rather, that moral significance derives from the former. It is possible to deprive someone of life through an act or an omission. If I never fed my children, I would be depriving them of life by failing to keep them from dying. If I were a nightclub owner and I failed to keep my building in line with fire code, and a fire killed all of my customers, I would be depriving my customers of life by failing to keep them alive.
On the other hand, if a child I have never met dies of starvation, I have not deprived anyone of life, even though, if I had tried hard enough, I could probably have prevented him or her from dying. If I don’t give blood, I am not depriving any particular person of life. The key distinction is usually whether person A exercises power, in a relevant sense, over person B (or has a duty to person B or has a special relationship with person B, etc.).
lauren,
This is what I meant by the famous “Violinist” example. In the Violinist example, though, the person was hooked up to the machine in her sleep, so your example is actually more analogous to what happens most of the time with pregnancy. Your example is interesting, but, to me, it’s not really convincing. If you agreed to be a kidney donor, but, in the middle of the transplant, you just left, leaving the donee to die on the table, I would think that the state had an interest in regulating that. (Not by chaining you to the table, of course. That’s weird.) The same goes even for your example. If you agree to help someone and that person will die as soon as you stop helping them, I do think you have a duty to continue helping them. (Your example is different from most pregnancies, though. No pregnancy lasts “forever,” and, in most pregnancies, you are not confined to bed.)
Christopher,
Well, my friend was being tongue-in-cheek. Of course no one would charge a baby with murder. (Although don’t put it past us.) But normally when the state kills someone, the person gets, to say the least, an individual determination. So far, I’ve just been arguing that if a fetus or embryo is a person, abortion should be illegal.
A quick word on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, though, (the case in which the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and changed the standard from third trimester to viability): It seems very weird to me to say that an embryo or fetus gains personhood at viability. Viability is entirely a function of technology. Someone’s personhood surely can’t be based on something entirely extrinsic to him or her.
JaneDoh,
“Life begins at conception” is a religious concept.
Is “Life begins at birth” a religious statement? Is “Life begins at 21 years” a religious statement? What about “Life begins when a child develops a sense of self?” Why not? If those are all religious/philosophical statements, then I’m afraid we no choice but to make laws based on religious statements. (I don’t think any of them are inherently.)
Or we could realize that “when life begins” is a factually null statement and use something else. Just sayin’.
Patrick,
I was just trying to use the same term as Jane Doh, but sure. How about “morally significant personhood?” That’s just a more cumbersome way of saying what most people mean by “life” in this context anyway.
(Also “factually null,” perhaps, if you think of facts only in terms of science. But law, whether criminal or civil, is ultimately based on philosophy. At least it’s more precise.)
I’ve always felt this hypothetical doesn’t quite catch the nature of the conundrum. What about if it’s put this way:
Suppose you’re in a building during an massive Earthquake and the building collapses. When you come to, you realise your lower body is pinned under a large person who is alive, but unconscious. Even using all your strength you cannot move this person at all and remain pinned. You don’t know how long it will be before help arrives. Just within reach is a fire axe that fell loose during the Earthquake.
Do you have the right to hack your way through this stranger’s body to enforce your right to autonomy?
desipis: in that analogy, who’s the pregnant person and who’s the embryo? (I’m not sure it works either way, but my response might be gibberish if I get it wrong!)
In the middle of an operation wouldn’t really be possible due to anesthesia. But beforehand, even if the person has been prepped for surgery and the search for other donors had been stopped, etc? Yes, you can change your mind right up to the last moments before surgery. And other people might think you’re a horrible human being, and they might try their hardest to convince you otherwise, but they wouldn’t bring the force of law to bear against you. Because you have a right to decide what happens to your body.
Okay. So. Time and health effects.
If you agree to help that person, and it turns out you have to help them for ten years, do you still think you are morally obligated to do so? Twenty years? The rest of your life? At some point you’re allowed to prioritize your own health and life, right? Why should anybody get to decide that 9 months is an okay amount of time for someone else to be forced to use their body to support someone else?
Health effects. No, you’re not confined to bed, but pregnancy causes permanent changes to the body; it can be very dangerous even for healthy women. The difference between pregnant and not-pregnant is not merely whether you’ll have to buy some new clothes and then go through labor in nine months (in itself a possibly dangerous thing). You can make comparisons to kidney donation all you like, but kidney donation is safer than pregnancy on both short and long term time scales, and requires much less time investment from the person doing it, and we still don’t use the law to force very healthy people do it, even though it would save lives. Because you have a right to decide what happens to your body.
Yeah, I’m fairly sure the law does not recognize under any circumstances this “duty” to go through with organ donation.
Also, I thought even not-Bella from Fifty Shades refused to sign a sex contract.
::tongue-in-cheek::
Let’s compromise. Fetuses shouldn’t have the same moral status as people, but they don’t seem to be morally equivalent to rocks, either. So let’s say that a fetus is morally equivalent to a dog, give them protection under cruelty-to-animals laws, and allow abortions under the kinds of circumstances in which people can justify euthanizing a dog. ;)
SamC: Step one is just recognizing that the whole “life begins at conception, that’s just FACT, and that means abortion is killing” argument is objectively false because life doesn’t “begin” anywhere in the sexual reproductive cycle.
Once you’ve got through that, you can consider whether other moral concerns are at issue. And with respect to your point re philosophy, the application of an ethical code requires an understanding of what you are applying it to, or else your application is useless. And that’s when science walks back in the door.
Patrick,
First, I would want to know what you mean. I’m 90% sure that, using your logic and terms, the “life begins at birth, that’s just a FACT, and that means abortion isn’t killing” argument is objectively false because life doesn’t “begin” at birth. Obviously, though, “life” doesn’t mean “organic” in this context.
Or are you saying that there is literally no scientific difference between pre- and post-conception? If that’s what you saying, I guess that depends on what you mean by “conception.” Are you just criticizing me for using technically inaccurate or imprecise language? That would be fair enough.
It is “scientific” (I believe, if I’m understanding you correctly) to say “At some point, an embryo begins emitting separate brain waves” or “At some point, an embryo has a separate heartbeat” or “At some point, the sperm is joined with the egg to create a zygote” or “At some point (usually at birth), a child starts breathing on their own” or “At some point, a baby develops a sense of self.” To draw moral significance from any of these “facts” is an act of philosophy, law, policy, or religion.
True. But few people have first order philosophical commitments to heartbeats. People have moral commitments, and the heartbeat or whatever is the information used to determine how the moral commitment applies to the situation.
The “life begins at conception” crowd are trying to argue something like this:
1. We have, and you should have, a moral commitment against terminating human life.
2. Life begins at conception.
3. So it’s morally wrong to terminate a human fetus, since it’s human, and alive.
The most obvious problem is that life doesn’t begin at conception. Gametes are alive. Life is an unbroken cable stretching through history.
Once you get past that, you need some other distinction. Some try to maintain the above by quibbling about “human.” Others use different criteria.
No matter what though, competent philosophy is going to need to explain what the moral commitments in question are, determine what the facts are, apply the moral commitments to the facts, and consider any problems that creates.
Patrick,
What kinds of moral commitments are involved in the proposition, “It ought to be illegal to kill an infant two seconds after birth?” Do the same moral commitments apply two seconds before birth? What about two weeks?
I’m asking these questions not because I don’t think you have an answer but because I think it will help clarify what kinds of “moral commitments” you consider valid.
You might consider it “quibbling,” but, to me, whether these people are right or wrong, it seems perfectly reasonable for them to draw a moral distinction between human and non-human life. (BTW, a kidney or a fingernail might be “life” and might be part of humans, but they are not “human life.” You might disagree with that statement, but hopefully you can at least recognize it as rational.)
Also, to the extent that you meant “and you should have” in your first premise to be a subtle dig, I just want to point out that ALL laws potentially involve pushing a philosophical view on people who may not share it. If you didn’t mean it as a dig, you can ignore this paragraph!
That’s weird, that’s what I was doing to you.
That’s the quibble I mentioned. Whether it’s rational depends on how they’re drawing the distinction, whether they apply it consistently in other contexts, and whether it’s transparently a back hacked rationalization they don’t actually believe at all.
Patrick,
I have a moral commitment to human life. I don’t think it’s a quibble at all.
For one thing, even a zygote has a full set of DNA. A zygote has everything they need to continue to grow (aside from nourishment, but people connected to feeding tubes need nourishment too). The zygote does not borrow cells from the mother but grows through cell division (by the way, this is also the way born children grow). Yes, a zygote it different from a fetus, and a fetus is different from an infant. But a infant is also different from an adult. (The foundation/building example doesn’t work because buildings don’t grow by nature and have no inherent moral worth. Also, a half-built building is also not the same as a fully-built building. Wouldn’t a half-built building be analogous to a baby?)
Am I completely convinced by my argument? No; but anywhere you draw the line will not be completely convincing. I am far less convinced by drawing the line at birth.
Here is one quick philosophical argument (keep in mind that I’m arguing about personhood now, not about the morality or legality of abortion, which is a separate argument):
An ontological change (from life to human life) can occur only when there is a sudden, huge change. There is a sudden, huge change between an unconnected sperm and egg and a zygote (for one thing, a zygote begins growing). There is no other point between then and birth when a sudden, huge change occurs. At some point, though, an ontological change does occur. (After all, no one disputes that human children have moral worth.) Therefore, the ontological change occurs when the sperm and egg become a zygote.
Without this argument or an argument like it, you run into a sorites paradox. (I.e. one grain of sand is not a “heap.” Is one plus one? What about n+1? Is there a value for n where n + one equals a heap?)
Or, you accept the sorites argument and deal with it head on, instead of building your morality around fake concepts like “ontological change.”
And… The reasoning you’re engaged in is completely backwards, re the ontological change thing. “I have a pre existing conviction that an ontological change occurs, so it must occur at the point I can describe as being a discrete change instead of the point where a slow change occurs” is incredibly bad philosophy. This is the poster child for using ideas like “ontology” as a substitute for thinking.
Ask why you consider a baby morally different re abortion from two gametes. If the answer comes on the form of “they’re ontologically different,” throw the answer out because that’s just a different way of saying that you haven’t yet answered the question (even presuming ontology is useful, you can’t say that things are ontologically different in a moral way until you understand what moral concerns go into the choice to designate one ontological category as morally different from another). Having answered that question, you’ll be pretty much done. The rest is generally very easy.
You’re not really being fair, and I feel like I’m arguing in the dark because you haven’t defined any of your terms or even given me any examples to work with. What is a “moral concern?” Why can’t I have a moral concern for the preservation of human life? You have to start somewhere. There is no 100% a posteriori moral argument. Where do you start? Would it be okay to kill someone painlessly in their sleep if the person was completely unknown by anyone else? Who would experience harm? Suppose you were the only person who knew them and you found them very unpleasant, and you knew that your conscience wouldn’t be bothered by it.
You say that I “assumed” that an ontological shift occurs at some point. Yes, I assumed a premise that I thought most people shared. If this were an invalid move, it would be impossible to have discussions like this except in thousand page treatises. So you don’t like the word “ontology.” All I meant was that most people believe that, at some point, human life acquires inherent moral worth. Maybe you don’t believe this. Answer my questions above and then I’ll know and either (1) have to think of a more basic premise or (2) agree to disagree.
The claim that gametes don’t count as “human” life, but a fertilized and implanted egg does, entails a morally relevant factual distinction between the two. To coherently maintain that, one needs to have some idea what it means for life to be “human,” and why we should care, and a coherent explanation for how that criteria applies differently to gametes versus fertilized, implanted eggs.
So no. You can’t just start there.
It you want to just claim that people have a first order moral belief that abortion is wrong, then you can skip this part. But then no one else has any reason to care.
Sam:
Is this an argument actual pro-choicers make?
I’ve seen lots of pro-lifers use the erroneous “life begins at conception, because SCIENCE!” argument. In contrast, I don’t recall ever reading a sincere “life begins at birth, that’s just a FACT” argument. (Googling “life begins at birth” turns up many examples of pro-lifers arguing against this view (or this strawman?), but no actual pro-choicers arguing for it. Although I only looked at the front page of results).
It seems to me that I have seen a lot of pro-choicers argue that either life or personhood begins at viability, or begins with “brain birth.” But I suspect “life begins at birth, that’s just a FACT” is either a total strawman, or at best an extremely unrepresentative example of a pro-choice argument.
What DOES happen at birth is a game-changing reduction in the conflict of rights between the pregnant person and the child. Basically, these rights cease to be in conflict. Which is why birth tends is an important marker for people who think the rights of the pregnant person are too crucial to be ignored.
The only people I’ve seen who make “life begins at birth” arguments are observant Jews, because in the Jewish tradition, human life begins at first breath.
Actually, you can back out of any organ or tissue donation any time you feel like it. If you agree to be a hematopoietic stem cell donor, go through the prep, and then change your mind after they hook you up to the machine and are half way through the donation (but not quite far enough along to provide enough cells for a viable transplant) then you’ll be unhooked and go your own way. Even though stem cell donation is orders of magnitude safer than pregnancy. Even though you agreed to it. Even though someone will die without it. Legally, you have the right to refuse. I may think you a jerk for doing so, but legally you have the right to refuse or to withdraw consent at any time.
It’s harder to back out half way through a kidney donation. General anesthesia and all that. However, in some situations one person donates a kidney to a stranger on the condition that that stranger’s relative donates a kidney to the first donor’s family member in need. This is done when the strangers are better tissue matches than the relatives. When this agreement is made, the surgeons operate and transport the kidneys simultaneously because if someone backs out, the other person is simply out of luck.
The bottom line is that legally you have the absolute right to refuse to allow your body to be used for another’s benefit, no matter what the consequences to the other person. The only exception to this rule is pregnancy. Why should pregnancy be different?
Life began in the precambrian. All life has come from other life since then. Fetuses are alive. Zygotes are alive. Unfertilized gametes are alive. Somatic cells are alive. Bacteria are alive. What is the point of this argument?
Consciousness, on the other hand, begins, at the very earliest, in the very late third trimester. Given that the definition of “death” is “brain death” not “when the very last cell in the body dies”, the question “when does the brain begin to function” seems to me a more relevant one in terms of determining when a human life began. However, it’s an irrelevant question with respect to abortion given the precedent in other areas of medicine that no person may claim organ or tissue from another without their consent, no matter what danger the intended recipient may be in.
Not really. Fertilization is actually kind of a gradual process. Is the “huge change” the moment when the sperm meets the oocyte? When the membranes fuse? When the pronuclei fuse? These are all separate and distinct steps in the process of fertilization. Of course, a fertilized egg only has about a 20-50% chance of actually implanting and growing. A fair number of them simply fail at the first cell division. So it’s not like the fertilized egg is definitely or even probably going to end up a baby with no intervention. If a human life starts at conception, shouldn’t we be more concerned about this fact? The death of up to 80% of people before their first day of life is over would seem to me to be a big deal, yet I’ve never gotten any “pro-life” person interested in trying to save these early failures of fertilization.
Another question: Have you ever heard of the hamster egg assay? It’s a test for sperm quality in which a human sperm is used to fertilize, in vitro, a hamster egg. Is the product a human life? Usually they don’t divide. Sometimes they do. Are we obliged to keep those that divide alive as long as possible? Human life and all?
Patrick,
First of all, like I said in my last post, I’m arguing completely in the dark here. I’m not sure what you even mean by a “morally relevant factual distinction.” Give me an example of one that applies to a two-second year old but doesn’t apply two weeks before birth. I gave you a couple of “factual differences” between a seperate sperm and egg and a zygote: self-growth (mitosis) and human DNA.
So I repeat my earlier thought experiment:
Here’s another one:
Suppose there was an island that was completely cut off from the rest of the world. They have zero contact with anyone in the outside world. You are the only person who knows about it. You also know that the island contains a large amount of gold that you would like to donate to an underdeveloped country. Your donation would alleviate a lot of suffering. But the people who live on the island refuse to give you the gold, and they refuse to leave the island. You have invented a bomb that can kill people instantly with no pain whatsoever. You know that it would kill everyone on the island painlessly, and no one would be left alive. You have not threatened to use it. (You can see what I’m getting at.) Would it be be wrong to use the bomb? Why?
Second, I could definitely give philosophical reasons why I think human life should be protected, but just not in the confines of a blog comment. It would have to be an essay that I don’t have time to write.
Third, it seems like what we’re really debating is “who should bear the burden of proof?” I think that the person wanting to kill the life that may or may not be morally significant human life should bear the burden of proof. To me, there are good arguments either way.
Barry,
Just curious if you read the context of my comment? I wasn’t saying that that was an argument made by pro-choice people. I was just pointing out that any argument of that form obviously doesn’t get you all the way to either position. (FWIW, though, I have seen pro-choice people argue that “science” shows that morally-relevant human life begins at birth.)
I agree, though, with your original interlocutor’s contention that the right not to be deprived of life trumps the right to bodily autonomy. After all, if you are killed, aren’t you also deprived of bodily autonomy? (Remember, at this point in the argument you were assuming arguendo that a fetus is a person.)
I am curious what your response would be to the thought experiment I put to Patrick above. I’m starting to think that you actually don’t believe that human life is inherently valuable. (I don’t mean that as an insult at all. I just thought this was a widely accepted principle, and it seems like you don’t believe it. Let me know if you do! If you don’t, though, obviously I will have to start from another premise.)
Diane,
I’d be interested to read the statute you’re referring to. Do you have a citation? I will have to think about that more.
You’re not arguing in the dark. I’m merely declining to allow you to side track the conversation.
I understand what you’re doing. Since I’ve been arguing purely in the negative, there’s nothing for you to attack. With nothing to attack, the only thing you can discuss is the coherence of your own position. The coherence of your position is weak. So you’re trying to convince me to offer something that you can attack. I’m not interested.
And you’re saying these are the factual differences that explain the moral difference you see between the death of gametes versus the death of an implanted egg? 1) This would make non implantation a human death at least theoretically capable of being a moral concern if we could intervene to stop it (we can- there are numerous drugs that can improve implantation rates), and 2) this would imply that bleeding is a genocidal slaughter of human life, as your body spews millions of blood cells into the cold, life killing oxygenated atmosphere. Are those your beliefs? I’m betting they’re not.
So far, the closest you’ve come to providing an actual explanation is this:
But this is false. If the concept of ontology you’re referencing is linguistic, it is objectively false. If the concept of ontology you’re referencing is religious, then just admit that you have a first order religious objection to abortion and get it over with. So this is a non starter. And the fact that it’s offered to resolve the sorites problem is particularly bad, because the sorites paradox isn’t a problem at all. It’s a mere feature of the language we use to describe things, not a characteristic of the things we describe.
Not Amp, but hopefully you won’t mind if I respond to these points anyway (and of course I don’t speak for Amp when I do so):
Well–first of all, as many of us have been arguing above, there is no other situation where we hold a right to life above a right to bodily autonomy. If we did, for example, organ donation after death would be compulsory: you’re done with your body, why should you say you won’t donate parts of it that might let other people live? But it is not compulsory, because we hold certain things (in this case, religious freedom to be buried according to the codes of your religion as well as bodily autonomy) to be at least equally important as some kind of right to life when those rights are in conflict.
One reason this is important: when those rights are in conflict–when a person doesn’t want to donate blood, or donate organs after death, or donate living organs, but somebody would be saved by that–who should have the power to decide whose rights prevail?
Take it another step: say blood donation is compulsory for healthy individuals. Getting a tattoo removes you from eligibility to donate blood for a period of time; so does visiting Africa. If you have O negative blood, and a right to life exceeds a right to bodily autonomy, does society have a right to prevent you from getting tattoos or traveling to Africa? Maybe you’d be doing good in Africa. Who decides which good is greater, your volunteer work or your blood donation? Extreme sports are dangerous; should we ban them, because accidental deaths in extreme sports will often destroy some organs which otherwise might be donated?
You may say that example is a stretch, but it is already the case that, for example, a pregnant woman can get arrested, shackled, and by court order confined in a rehab facility and forcibly given a drug to help with a certain drug addiction–even though there’s no evidence she had relapsed into addiction from that drug, and even though she’d already stopped taking the anti-addiction drug with apparent success. And you talked above about fetuses getting a lawyer in abortion cases–well, in that case, at at least one of the hearings, the fetus got a lawyer and the pregnant woman didn’t. This among other cases where women are tried for child abuse or murder for having stillbirths when addicted to drugs, even when there is zero evidence that the drugs in question affect pregnancy or cross the placental barrier. The right to life vs the right to bodily autonomy question is not merely about abortion, but about how much control we are allowed to exert over pregnant people’s bodies in the name of protecting the embryo or fetus they are carrying; it’s not a question that begins and ends with abortion or organ donation or whatever example we’re using.
At some point, you might say, you cross a line from merely protecting life to overly restricting the lives of people who might help others. And I’m fine with somewhat arbitrary line-drawing when the ends of a continuum are clear but the middle is kinda messy (see: toddler not an adult; 60 year old definitely an adult; 17 year old, fine, let’s not call them an adult for legal reasons, though some of them probably could handle that responsibility and some couldn’t). But in my view, the proper place to draw that line is that each person decides what happens to their own bodies, because the other way gives people too much power over each other.
Again: this is not a question of killing a random baby, or a random island full of people nobody cares about, or whatever. It’s a matter of whether or not an embryo or fetus gets to live inside another human being, and it is the conflict of those rights that creates the issue. Honestly, I’m not sure how to break it down further than that. Your examples very literally erase the whole reason most people on my side argue that abortion should be legal: the person who is pregnant.
You will have to start from another premise to convince any of us, yes. Not one that says human life doesn’t matter–but one that says you have to at least consider the pregnant person when you’re arguing about abortion. That is the point.
(edited to fix some pronoun issues)
Sam C, one other question: are there cases where you think abortion is allowable, e.g. to save the life of the mother? (The health of the mother, too, if so?)
You are disappearing the pregnant woman. Amp’s explanation of why this is problematic for an embryo in the original piece is also applicable here:
Pregnancy is a big deal. For a lot of people, even wanted pregnancies are not easy, even when things are “normal”.
For what it’s worth, I think the “nowhere else do we infringe on bodily autonomy in that way” argument is a non starter. There’s a very law school esque aspect to that argument, in which an accident of history that in no way involved a reasoned weighing of life versus autonomy is taken as some sort of grand philosophical statement, a bullseye is drawn around it, and the target declared to be hit dead on.
I think the violinist argument is actually really demonstrative, in the opposite way that the somewhat oblivious people who invented it meant. We all might happily agree that there’s no obligation to stay hooked up to the violinist for nine months. But I think a great many of us would happily restrain you and operate against your will if we only needed nine seconds to complete the disconnection of the violinist from your body without killing him, and you were tearing at the tubes.
I entirely endorse what Harlequin wrote.
In addition to her arguments (which are what I would have said, but better put), I will add:
Since I was specifically asked if I believe “human life” is inherently valuable: No, I don’t believe that, not as you seem to define the term “human life.”
Specifically, I don’t think that human life that cannot be a person – that is, which is physically incapable of any substantive thought or consciousness – has inherent value; it has only the value that we (“we” being people) attribute it. I do, however, think that people’s lives have inherent value.
Regarding your thought experiment:
As Kate rightly pointed out, insofar as this and your island analogy are intended to be stand-ins for abortion, they are “pregnant person? What pregnant person?” arguments. No analogy to abortion that in effect says “let’s pretend that no pregnant person is involved in the situation at all” is relevant.
If you’re suggesting that being asleep and unaware of being murdered, is the same as having no mind at all, then I’m simply bewildered. Do you think being asleep is identical to being brain-dead, or to not having a functioning brain? Surely not.
However, if it’s meant as a general query unrelated to abortion, then my answer would be: The person killed, is the person who is harmed. The person killed was a conscious, thinking entity who had a reasonable anticipation of existing into the future, and whose body and life was their own. They are harmed when an outside party treats their body and life as the outside party’s to take; they are harmed when their anticipated future is forcibly removed from them.
Patrick:
The “accident of history” phrasing is silly. It’s not by random chance that we don’t force people to donate organs, or blood; it’s not as if there was a point in history when someone flipped a coin and if it had come up heads then the laws would now go the other way. The reasons the laws go the way they are go, and are virtually never challenged, is that they reflect a widespread consensus in our society that virtually no one wants to challenge.
I think that Judith Jarvis Thomson isn’t nearly as oblivious as you believe. For example, she specifically addresses the question of “what if what’s asked of a person is easy”:
You may not agree with her, but saying that she was oblivious of this problem is obviously untrue.
This is definitely not true. At no point has our society had some sort of meaningful debate about bodily autonomy versus the right to life of organ donor recipients. The rule is the way it is because organ donation skeeves a lot of people out, and we’re a democracy so the skeeved out people can vote.
And no, Thomson is definitely oblivious.
Her argument involves creating a creepy hypothetical that invokes body horror images, running a slippery slope to the extremes in one direction to get people to agree with her position, then claiming that her position is some sort of deontological absolute to mislead people into missing the fact that she could have run the slippery slope in the opposite direction just as well.
Oblivious was charitable.
Patrick, you specifically picked as an example of her “obliviousness” that she didn’t consider the question of “if we only needed nine seconds.” That was your example of her being oblivious. And the fact is, she specifically discussed that exact question.
This isn’t a subjective question. You were entirely wrong, and now for no apparent reason you’re doubling down, rather than simply admitting you were in error.
And your current sneer at her essay – as being nothing but body horror that doesn’t consider the opposite case (of a very short-term, easy obligation) – is so obviously untrue that I can’t even think of how to reply to it, other than to point out again that Thomson specifically discusses the very question you claim she ignores.
Sorry, forgot to respond to this.
I didn’t claim that this issue had been debated. I claimed that there’s a widespread consensus on it – and there is.
If it were merely a case of “organ donation skeeves a lot of people out, and we’re a democracy,” then organ donation itself would be illegal. But it’s not illegal; in fact, I don’t think anyone is even trying to outlaw organ donation, and if someone did try I don’t think they’d get taken seriously or succeed in passing such a law, because banning organ donation would be unpopular.
Being an organ donor is not only legal, it’s admired and even encouraged in much (although not all) of society.
It’s specifically the idea of non-voluntary organ donation that is so out of the pale (in our society) that there’s a widespread consensus against it. And that’s not by random chance.
THANK YOU, Amp. Your post is like a breath of fresh air. (Seriously.) Now I finally at least know what kind of arguments I’m dealing with, and what you do and do not accept as proper premises.
Patrick,
An argument is between two people. It is not at all unreasonable to try to discern what premises we might share before proceeding. I cannot argue with someone who refuses to define terms. (Not out of principle, but just because I don’t have time to cover every possible premise and see which ones are acceptable to you.). When you ask me questions, I politely answer them (although not to your satisfaction, but you have not given any indication what kind of thing would satisfy you); but when I ask you question it is “side track[ing] the conversation.” Seriously? (Thank you for your most recent post, though,)
Amp and Harlequin,
Thank you for your very fair responses. I don’t have time to respond right now, but I will answer your actual and implied “clarification”-style questions.
No; my examples were not intended to be a stand-in for abortion. I apologize for not making that clear, but thank you, Amp, for recognizing that possibility. I think of abortion as being a situation in which there is a conflict of rights. Sometimes in these situations, it is helpful to sous out the rights of one party so that you know what weight is on one side of the scale. That was the intent of my hypos.
To answer your question, Harlequin, there are definitely case in which I think abortion should be legal, such as life and health of the mother. I realize that these are rights in tension, and that there is not an ABSOLUTE right to life for anyone (for instance, the law allows us to kill in self-defense, and I think the law is correct here).
Ampersand- I did not call her oblivious because she failed to “consider” the 9 second issue. I called her “oblivious” for failing to understand it’s implications, and failing to recognize how her argument would come across to listeners not predisposed to agree with her, or possessed of more philosophical competence.
You can craft a duplicate of the violinist argument that runs the slippery slope the opposite direction. Just flip her script.
The point isn’t that literally no person could disagree with this (some people in this thread would clearly disagree with this). But the same is true of her version of the argument, and the point is that she IN NO WAY addresses this. She completely dodges this. And she has no business dodging it. She ducks it by getting a pre-commitment to a “Rights!” based argument via slippery slope reasoning, then applying the “Rights!” based argument deontologically to the other end of the slippery slope. But that’s not how this works. There’s no reason that each end of the slippery slope should be treated differently.
She either obliviously misses this issue, or she dishonestly hides from it. You can pick.
…really? Do you really believe that?
SamC- There is literally nothing about my position that would be of any use to you in clarifying yours. You’ve insisted that there is some morally relevant difference between two gametes and a fertilized, implanted egg. I asked why. You provided 1) a bad argument about ontology, and 2) two biological facts about fertilized egg cells that you aren’t willing to say are morally relevant to you.
That’s where we stand. Nothing in that requires that I elaborate any further.
SamC–thanks for the answer; that does help me understand where you’re coming from as well.
Patrick:
This hypothetical seems to me to be an argument for abortion as it is currently practiced in the U.S. After all, our laws are not “abortion is legal until childbirth”, or even “abortion is legal until the point where childbirth is safer than abortion for a particular person”–it’s “abortion is legal until the fetus is viable.” So clearly we do already draw the distinction that some rights impositions are minor enough relative to the good that they do that we should make those impositions anyway–we can hold the other person down for nine seconds; the imposition on the pregnant person of being pregnant those extra few months is worth the good it does for the fetus. And you concede in one clause what is really at issue in most debates like this–whether nine months (and the accompanying health changes) is too large an imposition to make.
It is.
Though it almost certainly isn’t the actual argument that led to our current system.
It was presented not to argue for the abolition of abortion (I don’t believe in the abolition of abortion), but to show that Thomson’s thought experiment sucks.
Patrick,
Here is a better argument for what I was saying:
http://uffl.org/vol12/pruss12.pdf.
I have an a priori belief—and a strong moral intuition—that human life has inherent moral worth. (Don’t dis moral intuition too much; it is how thought experiments work, and thought experiments are a generally accepted way of doing ethics.) I thought that many people shared this belief. Apparently I was wrong that you share this belief. But I could have found this out a lot sooner if you had just answered some of my questions.
Because of my mistaken belief about your premises, I thought that I just had to convince you that a fetus was a human life. I don’t know much about biology (after all, I’m a law student, not a biologist; not all of us can know everything), but I more or less randomly selected self-growth and DNA from Google. I may have gotten the science wrong.
Regardless, at some point soon after conception, a sperm and an egg join, merge, fuse, or whatever to become a single organism. That single organism is a separate organism acting for their own benefit. That organism is a human life. I think this fact is morally significant. (Read the article I linked to to see this more fleshed out).
“Ontological” just means “relating to something’s being.” When I said that there was an ontological change, I just meant that, at some point, the organism goes from having not much inherent moral value to having a lot of inherent moral value. I thought we just disagreed about when this happens. Amp apparently thinks that human life does not have inherent moral value but that “consciousness” gives human life inherent moral value. I think that when the zygote became a separate organism, then it is a human life and has inherent moral value. Blood is not acting autonomously to grow into a mature human being. A zygote is.
(The argument that a potential child is not a person is unconvincing to me. A child is a potential adult. That doesn’t mean that a child is not a person. But to say that a zygote or embryo is a potential person is just to beg the question.)
Amp,
I don’t have time for a full answer, but here’s a beginning.
“The person killed, is the person who is harmed. The person killed was a conscious, thinking entity who had a reasonable anticipation of existing into the future, and whose body and life was their own. They are harmed when an outside party treats their body and life as the outside party’s to take; they are harmed when their anticipated future is forcibly removed from them.”
Why does it matter that they anticipated the future? You said in your original post about a brain-dead person: “Maybe in several months it’ll gain that ability – or, then again, maybe not.” Presumably, though, the person who goes “brain dead” for two months anticipated a future in three months. Aren’t you still robbing them of an anticipated future, then?
Suppose a loved one of yours was “brain dead,” but a scientist came to you and said, “Great news! We have a drug that works 99.9939% of the time, but it usually takes nine months!” Do you think it would be murder to kill your loved one in that case?
(NOTE: I fully understand that this is still an analogy in which there is no one analogous to the pregnant woman. I am not pretending like this analogy proves that abortion is wrong. This thought experiment is meant only to convince you that “consciousness” is not co-extensive with personhood.)
Sam:
Yes, but it does mean that the child is not an adult.
A potential adult is not an adult. Similarly, a potential person is not a person.
Either I was unclear, in which case sorry, or you just misread the passage. The “it” in that sentence refers to an embryo, not to a brain-dead person.
By definition, as I understand it, a brain-dead person is someone whose brain can never, ever come back to life. We are not robbing them of the future they anticipated by taking them off life support, because that future is already lost, and nothing we do can bring it back.
If we lived in an alternate reality in which brain-dead people could be brought back to life, then yes, that would radically alter the moral equation. Because then they’re not really brain-dead; they’re just in a temporary coma. In that scenario, murdering them would not be different from murdering any other person. They are a person who, last time we heard from them, had a (expressed or assumed) preference to keep on existing.
I don’t understand why you think a person can exist without any ability to have a “self,” to have experiences, to have consciousness. If the ability to think isn’t relevant, then why ISN’T a living kidney in a jar a person?
Earlier you addressed this by saying a kidney is not a “whole” human being, but wholeness would be a terrible standard, because people who are missing limbs or organs are still fully and wholly people. Even if, as in the sci-fi movie “The Man With Two Brains,” we had a conscious, living brain in a jar, that brain would still be a person.
What other human part can you say would be a person if separated from the rest of the body? A hand? A kidney? A nose? There isn’t one.
And if you can’t name a part other than the brain, then what, if not consciousness, makes the brain so special?
Sam, McFall versus Shimp is the case that established bodily autonomy over need of the recipient.
SamC:
This is the significant factor for me. There is no objectively moral place to draw the line. There are only arbitrary amoral places to draw the line. If you believe in any form of liberty, then forcing someone’s arbitrary amoral line onto another would be a distinctly immoral act. Ergo, pro-choice.
Sam C:
Given people cannot inherently observe a zygote or DNA, or even when given the technological means to observe them would inherently perceive their significance without training, any moral assertions made about them would by necessity be based on social/cultural conditioning and not some sort of moral intuition innate to human beings. While I think it’s important to respect peoples social/cultural backgrounds, I don’t think such assertions are a sound basis for cross-cultural moral reasoning about contentious issues.
The visceral negative reaction to seeing a young child killed is a reaction shared by the vast majority of humans across all cultures, and as such can be reasonably assumed to be an innately human moral intuition and form an assumption for moral reasoning.
Harlequin:
I thought it would have been obvious that ‘you’ (the conscious trapped person making a life&death choice about another person) was the pregnant one and the unconscious person involuntarily interfering with ‘your’ autonomy was the embryo/foetus.
I wouldn’t call the decision of a judge an “accident”, but let’s just say it was for the moment. Is the precedent wrong? Would you rather that the conflict be resolved by changing the law so that people are forced to donate blood, tissue, or organs? If not, then why do you see this precedent as wrong or random?
Yes, it is wrong. And if they do it anyway and I survive I’m going to sue the heck out of whoever attached me to an unwilling person. Convenient for me =/= right.
If self growth and human DNA are all that’s required to make a person, then cancer cells are people: they have human DNA and they definitely grow. Independent of much support, even. For that matter, what about normal liver, intestines, bone marrow, etc? Human DNA, mitosis, even the capability (in principle) to produce a new unique organism. Yet more people. And I’ll bet half of you are busy offing them every Saturday night. At least the liver-people. Tsk.
Helios, you said
You are making the assumption that a mother-child bond exists as soon as a pregnant woman becomes aware she is pregnant. I don’t think this is a valid assumption for everyone. Form my own experience (fortunately with planned, hoped for pregnancies), I didn’t really feel any sort of bond at all until pretty late into the pregnancy. I would imagine that someone experiencing an unwanted pregnancy early on (when most abortions are performed) would not feel anything either.
SamC:
It is your opinion that a collection of cells growing inside a person with different DNA from the host is a separate human life. I don’t share this opinion. I also don’t see why you should get to enforce your opinion on anyone else. I don’t know of anyone who really acts as if abortion is the same thing as murder, so I conclude that most people don’t really believe that, regardless of what they say. I do think it would be a good thing if most pregnancies were desired ones, and that abortion was rare, and I support these goals through supporting better access to reproductive health care. If everyone who claims to be pro-life did the same thing, we would not be having this debate because unplanned pregnancies would be the exception rather than the norm.
I do value human life, but I define it like Amp does, as requiring consciousness. I think that until a fetus comes close to viability, a dispute between the rights of a pregnant person and the rights of any potential human inside the uterus should be decided in favor of the person who already exists (i.e. the pregnant person). After viability, more weight should be given to the fetus, since at that point, it could survive on its own.
That said, the vast majority of late abortions (near viability) are for medical reasons, so we are mostly talking about embryos or nowhere near viable fetuses vs. living, breathing, conscious people. And pregnancy is hardly impact free, and some of those impacts are lifelong, and include medical, social, and economic consequences a pregnant person may not be willing to pay.
Right, and then you imported a giant unwarranted assumption about the connection between “ontological change” and physiological change that ruled out the possibility of slow change over time leading to significant moral change.
I’ve repeatedly pointed out that gametes are 1) objectively human, and 2) objectively alive, therefore 3) objectively human life. What I’m questioning is why you DON’T believe that gametes are human life subject to a strong a priori moral intuition that they have moral value. It appears that you are using “human life” as some weird term of art that has meaning beyond the conjunction of “human” and “alive.” Which is fine, except it literally just disproved your claim to have a strong a priori belief that human life has value because now you are distinguishing between “human life” and “life which is both human and alive” based on some other criteria, which itself must be morally relevant, and it is on THESE criteria, not the alleged a priori belief, that your argument must stand.
So out with a priori beliefs in the value of human life. That’s no longer part of the conversation. We can just substitute in specifics and see whether your argument still sounds compelling.
You’ve subsequently offered things like “acts autonomously,” and more specifically since I presume you realized that sperm cells act autonomously, you’ve added that it acts autonomously to grow into human life.
Except it doesn’t, actually. Fertilized eggs don’t get very far without a womb. And if needing a womb doesn’t count, why does needing an egg count? Sperm cells undoubtedly act autonomously, and the aim of their acts is to grow into a mature human. Why does the fact that they need an egg to get anywhere constitute a morally salient difference from the fact that the fertilized egg needs a womb?
And if you switch to genetic distinctiveness, or the fact that it has a full set of DNA, well, guess what, now that’s your real criteria. And THAT’s got some interesting consequences to deal with as well.
Plus this all commits you to the “failed implantation is a moral concern” position.
And Pruss is awful, for the record. His argument on the nature of death is bad, his argument on twinning is bad. He’s just generally bad.
“Convenient for you =/= right” is probably what the family of the deceased would say to you after you ripped out the tubes and he died, when a nine second delay could have saved him.
I didn’t call it “random,” I called it an “accident of history.” We have non compulsory organ donation because of path dependence, not reasoned discourse leading to a moral consensus.
Look at Eron Gjoni’s appeal of his restraining order. His arguments are probably right in a certain sense- there’s little or no history of using restraining orders in the way his was used, and some history saying that shouldn’t happen. But that’s largely because the issue almost never comes up, so there’s virtually no case law history at all. It’s not because widespread reasoned debate occurred, taking into account the modern internet, and leading to not just a legal but also popular moral consensus.
This is similar. Bodily autonomy issues come up virtually never. The vast majority of cases where they come up are abortion cases, which are highly contested. Compulsory organ donation is a blip on the radar at best. Ampersand wants to presume that this reflects a society wide consensus on bodily autonomy that somehow is being inconsistently applied in abortion cases. This is not justified. There are other reasons why compulsory organ donation isn’t a political issue that have nothing to do with reasoned philosophical analysis about bodily autonomy on the part of the public.
So let me ask you again, then: Do you think the current consensus is wrong? Should a person have the right to legally force another to donate tissue or organs to them if they need it? Should the judge in the McFall versus Shimp decision have ordered Shimp to donate marrow?
Compulsory organ donation isn’t a political issue? Seriously? If compulsory organ donation were proposed, the bill would slip through Congress with little debate because no one cares about it? Debating the issue would bore everyone to tears? The idea of being forced to donate organs or tissue would upset no one? Are you sure?
I meant that it wasn’t a political issue in the sense ampersand meant. No one is debating it. You know, the sense that’s compatible with all the stuff I just said about us being a democratic society in which organ donation scares a lot of people, and not directly contradictory.
No one is debating forced organ donation for much the same reason that no one is debating forced puppy eating: the idea is repugnant to the vast majority of people in our society. Except in the context of pregnancy. In pregnancy, quite a number of people, mostly men but sometimes women, are happy as can be to force organ donation on pregnant people. Why is that?
I also notice that you’re ignoring my question: Is the McFall versus Shimp decision wrong? Should forced organ donation be allowed and possibly required?
Right.
This fact does not entitle you to presume that the reason is a broad based consensus around a right to bodily autonomy that outweighs all rights to life in even the most negligible of circumstances.
Loads of reasons.
Many people think about the relationship between parents and children in terms of duty based ethics. Most people would find your perspective, which treats the relationship between mother and unborn child as not meaningfully different from two strangers, to be alien and repugnant in this regard. (Ever wonder why the obligation to support your children isn’t considered slavery? This is why. Though I could certainly invent a Violinist argument here as well. Which is again why the violinist argument sucks.)
Many people think about ethics in terms of natural law, which speaks to organ donation differently than it speaks to pregnancy.
Many people think of abortion in terms of conflicting rights or interests that must be balanced rather than absolute deontological declarations.
All of these things are constantly discussed in our society and continually feature in the abortion debate. All feature vastly more often than deontological commitments to bodily autonomy.
desipis:
I thought the analogy was inapt either way, so I wanted to be sure that I was criticizing the correct kind of inaptness; I thought that reading was more likely, but not so much more likely that it wasn’t worth asking.
I find it inapt because freedom of movement is not necessarily the same as bodily autonomy. You can imprison people for crimes; you can’t, generally, force them to take medication as punishment for a crime, although you can offer it as an option instead of prison. Closed country borders are seen as rights issues, but not rights issues of bodily autonomy in my experience, though they do also prevent freedom of movement. It is, at best, a weaker example of bodily autonomy issues than literally having another person inside your body, and so my calculus of the balance of rights would also necessarily change.
Also, when talking about abortion, the remedy necessarily involves the death of the embryo or fetus under our current technology. Your analogy, on the other hand, does not. (Try to use the axe as a lever; bang it on something metal to make a loud noise and summon help; wait a few minutes and see if the other person wakes up. As a side note, it’s really hard to dismember someone with an axe, so I’m not sure that’s a viable solution in any case.)
Anyway, I’m not sure exactly where you were going with that, but: nope, I don’t think you have a right to dismember that person, if that needed to be said?
I do agree with your point about moral and amoral line-drawing; thanks for that.
As Ben Lehman pointed out above—though I think he meant to write “observant Christians” instead of “observant Jews”—this debate is rooted in a specifically Christian worldview, since it is essentially about when “ensoulment” occurs. People are just using terms like “when life/personhood/etc. begins” instead of the more religious term.
I would like to pose, to hear people’s responses to, the thought experiment used in the Talmud’s discussion of whether or not abortion is murder—meaning the taking of a human life—and therefore prohibited on those grounds. (For clarity and context’s sake, let me also point out that, according to Jewish law, the fetus is absolutely a living thing with a claim on life, in that one is not simply allowed, one is required to violate the Sabbath in order to save a fetus that would otherwise die.)
So here’s the question: A woman who has been sentenced to death is pregnant. Does the state wait to carry out her sentence till after she gives birth, or does it carry out the sentence in a more timely manner, which of course means killing the fetus as well?
Since I don’t want any discussion of this to be sidetracked by discussions about the whether there should even be a death penalty, please note that I am not asking you about what you would do if you had the power. I am asking what you think state policy should be in a state where the death penalty exists and is carried out and where, therefore, this decision has to be made as a practical matter, if nothing else. Also, for the sake of argument, please assume that there is no doubt about the woman’s guilt.
Patrick,
Now you’re just being pedantic and obtuse. What if you were discussing “gay marriage,” and I said, “Well, what about a gay man married to a lesbian? That’s objectively a marriage, and that’s objectively between two gay people. Therefore, that is objectively ‘gay marriage.'” You would probably (rightly) just roll your eyes.
“Human life” does not mean “life of or pertaining to human beings.” It means an “living organism that is human.” Have you ever heard anyone refer to a kidney or blood as “a human life” except in a conversation like this in order to make a point?
I thought your response to the article was hilarious.
Amp,
I really, really wish I had time to respond to your points, because they are very interesting to me (and I think you’re wrong, haha). I’m tempted to respond a little bit, but I will resist that temptation, since I think that would be an unfair attempt to get in the last word. But I really want to continue the conversation, because I feel like you treat your debate partners with genuine class. At this point, though, I need to stop the homework hiatus.
There’s nothing pedantic or obtuse. If you tell me that you have a belief that gay people shouldn’t marry, asking about a gay man and lesbian woman would be completely appropriate because it would, hopefully, get you to clarify that it is not the partners sexual orientation that is the issue, but the same sex nature of the union. That’s literally an entirely different moral commitment.
The “human life” status of a fertilized egg or blastocyst is not uncontroversial. Most pro lifers don’t even treat these as human lives on a consistent basis (implantation failure issue, the fact that Pruss doesn’t tell parents with twins to bury a little tiny empty coffin and mourn their dead child). More importantly, ann undifferentiated mass of human cells has numerous attributes that a “human life” in most people’s minds do not. Like, I can chop the cell ball into pieces and just get more cell ball. This doesn’t work on adult humans. I can squash a second cell ball into the first and they’ll just grow together. Again, doesn’t work on humans. The cell ball lacks the ability to feed or metabolize, except in a manner similar to that of other cellular structures that are not considered independent life. I could go on.
Notice how, in order to come up with an argument for continuity of being through early gestation, Pruss has to gesture vaguely at philosophical claims about amoebas, then shy back really fast before accidentally undermining his own argument by considering WHY those philosophers have argued what they did and what further implications that might have, so he can just focus on the fact that something was said without considering it’s warrants? He wouldn’t have had to do all that if this was obvious and questioning it was pedantry.
So I ask what it is about the cell ball that makes you consider it a “human life.” And when you answer I’ll apply that to other things, and see if the results it generates are consistent.
If you admire the article you linked, I’m pessimistic.
I never once claimed that it had been was a “political issue” in the sense that someone “is debating it.” I’ve explicitly denied that’s what I meant.
Please don’t claim I “meant” something that I never said and don’t mean.
You’re conflating two different things.
He doesn’t tell them to mourn, because the morality of taking life does not depend on the emotional reaction to losing life. Right this second, I know that someone somewhere is dying. I don’t think I should be sad about this or go out of my way out of my way to prevent it (I don’t think the right to medical intervention, if there is one, is anywhere near as strong as the right not to be deprived of life).
Why should they hold a funeral for someone they don’t know, have never met, and do not yet have an emotional connection to? That was one point of my “killing an unknown person you don’t like” example.
I don’t want to get too personal, but a lot of people would, in fact, mourn for a child who died at 20 weeks (before most scientists believe consciousness begins, as far as I can tell; correct me if I’m wrong.). This fact, though, is irrelevant to the moral question.
(This is my last response, though. I’ll let you have the last word if you want it. I am falling behind on homework, so I have to cut it off somewhere. Thanks for the discussion.)
Ampersand, I meant that it wasn’t a political issue in the sense that you meant it wasn’t a political issue. You pointed out that compulsory organ donation wasn’t a live political controversy, in the sense that no one was pushing for it. In response, I wrote something which also said that compulsory organ donation wasn’t a political issue, essentially acknowledging and agreeing with that portion of your point. Diane called me out and claimed that it WAS a political issue, on the grounds if someone DID push for it, it would be controversial. I wrote that in response.
SamC- You are dodging. Pruss has very clearly taken the position that a blastocyst splitting into two twins involves the death of the original individual he believes the blastocyst previously represents [1]. He has a pre existing moral commitment to the idea that the blastocyst it previously represented was a human life and a baby. This adds up to an ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE in how we think about human development, which he completely blows his way past as if it didn’t even happen.
[1] Technically, because he’s a bad philosopher, he doesn’t ACTUALLY commit to the idea that a blastocyst twinning constitutes the death of the individual it previously represented. He just alludes to the idea that some philosophers think that, as if this allusion were sufficient to accomplish the role he needs this philosophical position to play in his argument. It is not. I am inclined to treat him as if he believes that twinning is death, because otherwise his entire argument is a farce. This is one of those obnoxious situations where the principle of charity is little guide.
Patrick,
Oh, I see! Thanks for explaining, and sorry for misunderstanding you.
Sam,
Thanks for dropping by. Good luck with your homework. :-)
RJN, that’s interesting. I would support waiting until birth as a matter of policy; the strength of that feeling is much greater for later pregnancies than earlier ones, rather mimicking my feelings on abortion, I guess, but I would still find it a wiser and more compassionate policy to wait until after birth even for very early pregnancies.
I find abortion morally acceptable because of the conflict of rights. I don’t think an embryo is the moral or philosophical equivalent of a person, but that’s not the same as saying it has no worth. Absent the compelling counterclaim of bodily autonomy, I think it’s certainly immoral to kill a fetus; I’m less sure about embryos (I don’t have any particular moral feelings about using unimplanted embryos for medical research, for example, or discarding them). So I think the line I would draw for “okay to cause the death of a fetus or embryo by killing the pregnant person” is much more conservative on behalf of the fetus or embryo than the line I would draw for “okay to cause the death of a fetus or embryo through abortion”, though still, perhaps, not all the way at implantation.
But I am also quite anti-death penalty and see no compelling state interest in executing a person now as opposed to a year from now, except the financial.
An interesting argument asserting that the Christian tradition in fact leans more towards a pro-choice than an antiabortion position when it comes to personhood: http://www.juancole.com/2015/09/traditions-christianity-abortion.html.
I don’t know the Christian tradition well enough to argue for or against the writer’s thesis, but I know and respect him, and so I think it’s worth reading and thinking about what he has to say: http://www.juancole.com/2015/09/traditions-christianity-abortion.html
Note I’m pro-choice through a different chain of logic but I always like exploring the implications of an argument.
There’s a side implication of that argument that you may not like re late term abortions: that once a fetus is capable of surviving on it’s own you don’t have the right to kill it, only to disconnect it from the mother.
Or to continue the metaphor, if you agreed to be hooked up to this adult to support them for 9 months while you would still have the right to say “get these tubes out of me, get them out, get them out, I don’t want to do this any more” and no court could force you to continue but if it reached the 8 1/2 month mark where the other person has a decent chance of survival and you made that choice, while you get to say “get this disconnected from me, I want no part of this any more” you don’t get to say “also I insist that you stab this guy in the chest while you do it”.
It sort of implies that once a foetus is capable of independent survival that there’s some kind of moral duty to not intentionally kill it while it’s being disconnected from you.
Harlequin:
I’m curious, compassionate for whom and in what way?
Not sure if this explanation is going to be anything other than a hash, but I can try.
I think society’s generally better for not killing living things rather than killing them, if we can; or if we must, then doing it humanely. I don’t have any problem raising animals for meat and killing them, for example, but I’d rather slaughterhouse designs that don’t overly scare the animals & have quick kills than scary or inefficient slaughterhouses, just as I’d prefer we raised animals with good living conditions rather than the way some large-scale farms do things. On some level it doesn’t really matter–I mean, the animal is dead either way–but I think starting from the presumption of letting other living things lead as good a life as they can, and not killing needlessly, is the kind of mindset that hopefully bleeds into other aspects our lives, and leads to treating other people and animals as well as possible when possible. I think that’s a good end goal in itself.
So I don’t call it compassionate because it’s compassionate to a particular person. Rather, it reflects a general principle of compassion that I think makes society better. In this case, I suppose the embryo/fetus is the particular subject of that compassion (I wouldn’t consider that a “whom”, really, except towards the very end of pregnancy, but one can be compassionate to living beings which are not persons). But for me this hypothetical is more about the people being compassionate than it is about any one subject.
RJN, I would say that early enough in the pregnancy, I have no problem executing the woman while she is pregnant rather than waiting until later. I’m not sure exactly where to draw the line, but certainly at any point before the embryo/fetus’s brain starts to differentiate from the other tissue I would be OK with it.
Patrick, I wonder how much the body horror aspect was intentional on Thomson’s part, but–I think that any metaphor that didn’t include a body horror element would not be a good metaphor for pregnancy, and I personally find an unwanted pregnancy to contain more body horror than being hooked up by IV to another human being. Arguably, not only does the body horror parallel pregnancy better, it is a necessary corrective to the lack of concrete thinking about how pregnancy affects one’s body–this aspect of pregnancy seems absent or at least discounted as trivial in many of these debates, even though being connected to an IV and restricted in physical activity is, IMO, the much more trivial of the two.
Harlequin & Closetpuritan:
The conclusion in the Talmud is that forcing the woman to carry her pregnancy to term—rather than carrying out her sentence in the most timely manner possible (which is understood to be a central component of just punishment)—is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and so they rule that—since the woman is a born person, fully individuated, etc.—the woman’s rights supersede those of the embryo/fetus. Once the child begins to be born—and there is, if I remember correctly, a measure of how far the head is out of the woman’s body (which I am guessing was their measure of viability)—this principle no longer applies and you are no longer allowed to choose the mother’s rights over the child’s. The authorities would have to allow the child to be born.
(I don’t know if the rabbis contemplate a situation in which the woman wants to carry her pregnancy to term before being put to death.)
I don’t know if the rabbis contemplate a situation in which the woman wants to carry her pregnancy to term before being put to death.
I do wonder how many people would want to be put to death as soon as possible vs wait until after the baby is born because it means delaying death. When thinking of this scenario I kept thinking of Anne Bonny and Mary Read–they chose to try to delay their execution. One of them seems to have eventually left the jail, so a lot of it may depend on whether the person in question thinks there’s any chance that the delay will give them time to get the execution not to happen somehow. Then looking that up led me to this–apparently in English common law women could ‘plead the belly’, but only in late stage pregnancy.
When I was answering the question I was visualizing a situation where the prisoner wanted to carry the pregnancy to term, FWIW. If the prisoner did not want to carry the pregnancy to term, whether or not that decision had anything to do with wanting to be executed in a timely fashion, I don’t think the execution would need to be delayed.