Abortion, infanticide, and the asymmetric value of human life

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 181-200

  Reiman, Jeffrey ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ANALYTICAL APPROACH; ARTICLE; BEGINNING OF HUMAN LIFE; CHILD; DEATH AND EUTHANASIA; EMBRYO; ETHICS; FEMALE; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION; HOMICIDE; HUMAN; INDUCED ABORTION; INFANTICIDE; LOVE; MORALITY; NEWBORN; PERSONHOOD; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH; PHILOSOPHY; PREGNANCY; SOCIOECONOMICS;

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; DEATH AND EUTHANASIA; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH;

ABORTION, INDUCED; ADULT; BEGINNING OF HUMAN LIFE; CHILD; EMBRYO; FEMALE; HOMICIDE; HUMANS; INFANT, NEWBORN; INFANTICIDE; LOVE; MORAL OBLIGATIONS; PERSONHOOD; PHILOSOPHY; PREGNANCY; VALUE OF LIFE;

EID: 2342470764     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.1996.tb00260.x     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. A few words about terminology are in order: "Pro-life" and "pro-choice" are political labels, not technically accurate philosophical terms. I use them because of their familiarity, not because I think that only pro-lifers are pro-life or that only pro-choicers are pro-choice. Further, I use the term "murder" in its moral sense, meaning any killing that is bad for the same reasons it is bad to kill children and adults; and when Ispeakofit being bad or wrong to kill children or adults, I mean killing that takes place voluntarily and in the absence of such conditions as mental illness or duress that would normally block the imputation of wrongdoing. For the purpose of simplicity, I normally omit these necessary qualifications, and assume that the reader will fill them in where needed. Finally, I join in the widespread though technically incorrect practice of using the term "fetus" to refer to the being that develops in a pregnant woman from the moment of conception to the moment of birth. Speaking strictly, the single cell resulting from the fertilization of the egg is a zygote; shortly thereafter, when it becomes somewhat more complex, it is a blastocyst; when it implants in the uterine wall about six days after fertilization it is a called an embryo. It is only technically a fetus at about sixty days after conception. See Harold J. Morowitz and James S. Trefil, The Facts of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 46.
2. This mistake is all too prevalent in the literature on the abortion question, although, in a recent article, James Q. Wilson makes the mistake in reverse. He distinguishes the rights-based approach to abortion from the moral approach. Apparently, he's never heard of moral rights. I shall try to steer clear of both errors. See James Q. Wilson, "On Abortion," Commentary 27, no. 1 Jan. 1994), pp. 21-29.
3. Arguments which focus on the fact that the fetus is a potential human being or person make such a claim, but they are widely thought to fail because having the potential to realize a status does not entail having the rights that come with the actual status. (That newborn babies are potentially 18-year-olds doesn't give them the right to vote now.) Perhaps those pro-lifers who exhibit pictures of fetuses to show that they look like babies are making an argument of this sort, since being a baby is a property that adult humans don't have. But, being a baby is something that fetuses share with animals widely thought acceptable to kill. It's that fetuses look like baby humans that is thought to make them special, and their membership in the human species is something that fetuses share with adult humans. In any event, the positive emotional response that most people will have to pictures of babylike fetuses cannot decide their moral status, contrary to a claim recently made by James Q. Wilson. He proposes that we show people films of fetuses at different stages of gestation, and that we outlaw abortion at the point at which the fetus looks like a baby to most people, and, so to speak, engages their moral sentiments in its favor. If this really were a moral test, one wonders why Wilson doesn't also recommend that we show people films of women at different stages of legally enforced involuntary pregnancy, and that we permit abortion from the point at which the woman looks like a human being to most people and engages their moral sentiments in her favor. But, of course, it is not a moral test. Our emotional responses to what things look like is, at best, a hint about what they really are and really are entitled to. To determine that, we must use our reason. Mere feelings will not do. See Wilson, "On Abortion"
4. and my "The Impotency of the Potentiality Argument for Fetal Rights: Reply to Wilkins," Journal of Social Philosophy 24, no. 3 (Winter 1993), pp. 170-76.
5. For example, Judith Thomson argues that, even if the fetus is already a person with a right to life (like a normal human adult), at least in most pregnancies and at least prior to viability, a woman has a right to abortion because a (fetus's) right to life doesn't entail a right to use another's resources (such as her uterus). Consequently, a woman has the right to expel the unwanted fetus, but only to kill it if that is the only way to expel it. Thomson's view might be thought to vindicate the idea, which I rejected above, that a woman's right to control her body suffices to establish her right to an abortion. However, Thomson's argument only works against the idea that the fetus has a right to life. It won't work if the fetus has some other special moral status which requires us to save it rather than merely not to kill it unjustly. (Suppose you found an abandoned baby on your doorstep and had no means of bringing it to other shelter. Would you have no duty to take it in, even if it had no right to use your resources?) It will still be necessary to determine the moral status of the fetus. See Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971), pp. 47-66. Cf.
6. Nancy Davis, "Abortion and Self-Defense," Philosophy and Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (1984), pp. 175-207.
7. The question about the baby at the doorstep is raised by John Arthur, The Unfinished Constitution: Philosophy and Constitutional Practice (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), pp. 198-200.
8. The question is from Voltaire's article, "The Whys," A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 10, in The Works of Voltaire, trans. W. F. Fleming (Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901), vol. XIV, p. 214. I make no claim about what Voltaire actually meant by this question.
9. "When I observe the duty of respect," writes Kant, "I.keep myself within my own bounds in order not to deprive another of any of the value which he as a human being is entitled to put upon himself." Immanuel Kant, "The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue," Part 2 of The Metaphysics of Morals, in Ethical Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), p. 114;
10. see also Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), pp. 35-37. While I think my account of respect is in line with Kant's, I do not put it forth as a gloss on Kant's.
11. In Life's Dominion, Ronald Dworkin maintains that we regard human life as sacred: "The hallmark of the sacred as distinct from the incrementally valuable is that the sacred is intrinsically valuable because-and therefore only once-it exists" (my emphasis). Dworkin gives two examples of things we value as sacred, works of great art and distinct animal species. What our valuation of these shares, and which Dworkin calls "the nerve of the sacred," is that we value the process that has brought them into existence. Individual human life is, for Dworkin, all the more eligible for sacredness than works of art or nature because it is, so to speak, the product of both natural and human creative efforts. But our valuing of the natural processes and the human creative efforts that bring something into existence does not explain (much less justify) our asymmetric valuing of that thing. If it did, then we would value asymmetrically-find sacred-every product of human effort or natural process, which we obviously do not, and surely should not. See Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 73-83.
12. "'Being' is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing." Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 504.
13. Norman M. Ford, When Did I Begin? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. xvi-xviii, inter alia. I suspect that Ford is a decent fellow trying to find a little space for a woman's autonomy within an otherwise strict rendition of the Roman Catholic condemnation of abortion. Nonetheless, it is difficult to understand why it would be okay to kill something while it still might become two things that it would be wrong to kill separately.
14. Others who take some form of the metaphysical approach are: Richard Werner, "Abortion: The Moral Status of the Unborn," Social Theory and Practice 3, no. 2 (Fall 1974), pp. 201-222;
15. Jean Beer Blumenfeld, "Abortion and the Human Brain," Philosophical Studies 32, no. 3 (Oct. 1977), pp. 251-68;
16. Warren Quinn, "Abortion: Identity and Loss," Philosophy and Public Affairs 13, no. 1 (Winter 1984), pp. 24-54;
17. Michael Lockwood, "Warnock Versus Powell (and Harradine): When Does Potentiality Count?," Bioethics 2, no. 3 (1988), pp. 187-213;
18. John T. Noonan, "An Almost Absolute Value in History,"
19. Philip E. Devine, "The Scope of the Prohibition Against Killing,".
20. Norman C. Gillespie, "Abortion and Human Rights,"
21. and Joel Feinberg, "Potentiality, Development, and Rights,"
22. in Joel Feinberg, ed., The Problem of Abortion, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984), pp. 9-14,21-42,94-101, and 145-50.
23. "That term, [speciesism], coined by the Oxford psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970, has now entered the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is defined as 'discrimination against or exploitation of certain animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind's superiority'. As the term suggests, there is a parallel between our attitudes to nonhuman animals, and the attitudes of racists to those they regard as belonging to an inferior race." Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 173.
24. This is the defining property of our humanity according to Morowitz and Trefil, who then recommend that abortion be restricted from seven months on. Since this view cannot explain why it is worse to kill fetuses with functioning cerebral cortexes than to refuse to produce new ones who will have functioning cerebral cortexes, it is refuted by considerations raised in the present article. Morowitz and Trefil, The Facts of Life, pp. 17,119, inter alia.
25. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1983), p. 75.
26. Writes Sumner, "If the creatures we meet have interests and are capable of enjoyment and suffering, we must grant them some moral standing. We thereby constrain ourselves not to exploit them ruthlessly for our own advantage." On these grounds, he proposes that we treat the advent of fetal sentience (sometime in the second trimester of pregnancy) as bringing with it anentitlement to protection. L. W. Sumner, "A Third Way," in Feinberg, ed., The Problem of Abortion, pp. 71-93, esp. p. 84.
27. It isn't easy to capture the way in which staying alive becomes specially important to us once we are aware of it, though I think everyone can recognize it in his or her own experience. One writer who has given expression to part of what is at stake here is Richard Wollheim. Arguing that death is a misfortune even when life is bad, Wollheim writes, "It is not that death deprives us of some particular pleasure, or even of pleasure. What it deprives us of is something more fundamental than pleasure: it deprives us of that thing which we gain access to when, as persisting creatures, we enter into our present mental states. It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up: not even when the desire for cessation of pain, for extinction, grows stronger." Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 269. I say that this captures part of what is stake because I think that we long for more than phenomenology understood simply as perceptual experience. We would not, I think, care so much about continuing if we were and knew we were just experiencing fictional appearances, if our experience were, say, a continuing series of movies. It's because we seem to experience a real world in which people act and produce or fail to produce outcomes that matter, that we long for experience to go on. If philosophers' epistemological nightmare came true and we really were brains in vats, I think that our attachment to life would diminish.
28. See Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)
29. and S. I. Benn, Abortion, Infanticide, and Respect for Persons," in Feinberg, ed., The Problem of Abortion, 135-44
30. This is what Don Marquis overlooks in holding that "loss of a future life" is what makes killing both human adults and human fetuses equally wrong: "Since the loss of the future to a standard fetus, if killed, is, however, at least as great a loss as the loss of the future to a standard adult human being who is killed, abortion. .is presumptively very seriously wrong, where that presumption is very strong-as strong as the presumption that killing another adult human being is wrong." Don Marquis, "Why Abortion Is Immoral," Journal of Philosophy 86,4 (April 1989), pp. 183-202, the quote is from p. 194. Responding to Marquis, Peter Mclnerney lists some of the many differences in the ways fetuses and adult humans are related to their futures. He concludes: "Although there is some biological continuity between them so that there is a sense in which the later person stages 'are the future' of the fetus, the fetus is so little connected to the later personal life that it can not be deprived of that personal life. At its time the fetus does not already 'possess' that future personal life in the way that a normal adult human already 'possesses' his future personal life."
31. Peter K. Mclnerney, "Does a Fetus Already Have a Future-Like-Ours?," Journal of Philosophy 87, 5 (May 1990), pp. 266-67. While Mclnerney raises enough concerns about the difference between a fetus's relation to its future and an adult's to its to show that Marquis cannot simply assert that abortion does the same thing to a fetus that murder does to a normal adult, Mclnerney does not do enough to support his conclusion that a fetus cannot be deprived of its future personal life. Indeed, since he admits that there is at least biological continuity between the fetus and the future personal life it will have if not aborted, there remains at least some sense in which abortion does deprive the fetus of its future. The question whether the fetus's loss is enough to make killing it morally like killing an adult requires a moral comparison of the various losses, which Mclnerney doesn't undertake. Another case of failure to respect the priority of morality over metaphysics.
32. Warren, "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," in Feinberg, ed., The Problem of Abortion, pp. 110-14.
33. This fact enables Jane English to stymie Warren's attempt by claiming that, as it functions in our actual practice of recognizing some creatures as persons, the concept of a person is too indefinite to be captured in a straitjacket of necessary and/or sufficient conditions." Jane English, "Abortion and the Concept of a Person," in Feinberg, ed., The Problem of Abortion, p. 152.
34. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Routledge & Sons, 1894), bk. II, chap. 27, sec. 9, p. 246.
35. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 341.
36. One expert on infant cognitive development writes: "it is a most un-Proustian life, not thought, only lived. Sensorimotor schemata. enable a child to walk a straight line but not to think about a line in its absence, to recognize his or her mother but not to think about her when she is gone. It is a world difficult for us to conceive, accustomed as we are to spend much of our time ruminating about the past and anticipating the future. Nevertheless, this is the state that Piaget posits for the child before one-and-a-half, that is, an ability to recognize objects and events but an inability to recall them in their absence. Because of this inability.the child cannot even remember what he or she did a few minutes ago. These observations have been made by others as well, but more recently there have been occasional suggestions that recall may occur considerably earlier than Piaget believed, perhaps in the second 6 months of life." Jean M. Mandler, "Representation and Recall in Infancy," in Morris Moscovitch, ed., Infant Memory: Its Relation to Normal and Pathological Memory in Humans and Other Animals (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), pp. 75-76.
37. See, for example, Lockwood, "Warnock Versus Powell (and Harradine): When Does Potentiality Count?";
38. Werner, "Abortion: The Moral Status of the Unborn";
39. Noonan, "An Almost Absolute Value in History";
40. Devine, "The Scope of the Prohibition Against Killing";
41. Feinberg, "Potentiality, Development, and Rights"-references in note 12, above.
42. See also Loren E. Lomasky, "Being a Person-Does it Matter?," in Feinberg, ed., The Problem of Abortion, pp. 161-72.
43. "Human babies are the most helpless in the animal kingdom; they require many years of care before they can survive on their own." Mary Batten, Sexual Strategies: How Females Choose Their Mates (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1992), p. 142.
44. "When infants become attached to their mothers many language-critical processes are encouraged: the desire to engage in playful vocalization, including vocal exploration, the emergence of turn taking and dialogue structure, and the desire to imitate vocal patterns. In turn, mothers who are attached to and feeling nurturant toward their infants provide them with a number of opportunities to learn. Among the other processes encouraged by attachment are the use of eye gaze and manual gestures to signal attentional focus and convey labels, and the use of voice to designate and convey." John L. Locke, The Child's Path to Spoken Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 107. Elsewhere Locke points out that infants who do not find this emotional responsiveness in their mothers seek it elsewhere (ibid., pp. 109-110).