Paradoxes of abortion and prenatal injury

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 625-655

  McMahan, Jeff ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; BEGINNING OF HUMAN LIFE; CHILD; CHRONIC DISEASE; DECISION MAKING; ETHICS; FEMALE; FETUS; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION; HUMAN; INDUCED ABORTION; LEGAL ASPECT; LEGAL LIABILITY; MATERNAL WELFARE; MORALITY; PAIN; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH; PHILOSOPHY; PREGNANCY; PREGNANT WOMAN; PRENATAL INJURY; REVIEW; SOCIOECONOMICS;

ANALYTICAL APPROACH; GENETICS AND REPRODUCTION; PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH;

ABORTION, INDUCED; BEGINNING OF HUMAN LIFE; CHILD; CHOICE BEHAVIOR; CHRONIC DISEASE; ETHICAL ANALYSIS; FEMALE; FETUS; HUMANS; LIABILITY, LEGAL; MATERNAL WELFARE; MORAL OBLIGATIONS; PAIN; PHILOSOPHY; PREGNANCY; PREGNANT WOMEN; PRENATAL INJURIES; VALUE OF LIFE;

EID: 33749168189     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/504621     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. See Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Kitting: Problems at the Margins of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 165-85. The argument in the book invokes the technical notion of a "time-relative interest," which I think is ultimately necessary for the plausibility of the explanation I have cited. But I will omit this complication here.
2. It might be thought that our third assumption - namely, that the fetus's moral status is lower - offers a further explanation. For we might hold that the weight that should be given to an individual's interests varies with that individual's moral status. If a fetus's moral status gradually increases as it develops, its interests come to have increasing moral weight. Only when an individual ceases to be a fetus and later becomes a person do his or her interests have full moral weight. I think, however, that this view is implausible and does not support common intuitions. It implies, for example, that an animal's interest in avoiding great pain matters less than the interest of a person in avoiding the same pain. And while it offers an explanation of why the killing of a fetus is less objectionable than the killing of a person, it does not explain why the death of a fetus is less bad for the fetus than the death of a person is for the person. Yet it is this latter, less controversial assumption on which I want to base my argument about abortion and prenatal injury.
3. One exception may be when one's moral reasons to protect an individual's interests are affected by one's relations with that individual and those relations vary in strength or nature with time. See McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 284-85.
4. 2 would be to assign the interest a weight it will never have.
5. See Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1971): 47-66.
6. This is not the conclusion that Pruss draws from the Three-Option Choice. Nor does he endorse the conclusion I will defend.
7. David Wasserman argues that if the woman has culpably caused the injury, it would be ignoble, and perhaps even contemptible, for her to evade the consequences of her action at the further expense of her victim. This might be true even if it were permissible for her to have an abortion. See David Wasserman, "Prenatal Harm and Preemptive Abortion in a Two-Tiered Morality," Philosophical Books 46 (2005): 23-33.
8. The inference from the impermissibility of taking pill 1 to the moral necessity of taking pill 2 presupposes that pill 2 is not equally objectionable and therefore also impermissible. If that were the case, the Choice between Pills would be a difficult kind of moral dilemma. But in the circumstances the impermissibility of pill 1 implies that pill 2 is required because the woman must take one pill or the other and pill 2 is better for the fetus and worse for no one, and the only other possibly relevant consideration - that pill 1 might be better impersonally - is outweighed.
9. See Derek Parfit, "Future Generations: Further Problems," Philosophy & Public Affairs 11 (1982): 113-72, 130.
10. The woman's present interest in avoiding chronic pain tends, though imperfectly, to subsume her future interests in not being in chronic pain. In this respect, persons differ from fetuses, whose present interests do not subsume their future interests in the same way. For discussion, see McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, 69-82, 165-74.
11. Warren Quinn, "The Right to Threaten and the Right to Punish," Philosophy & Public Affairs 14 (1985): 327-73.
12. For a full and persuasive critique of Quinn's argument, see Daniel M. Farrell, "On Threats and Punishments," Social Theory and Practice 15 (1989): 125-54.
13. David Gauthier, "Deterrence, Maximization, and Rationality," Ethics 94 (1984): 474-95, 486.
14. Gauthier's explicit concern is with rationality rather than permissibility, but on his view this is a distinction without a difference: "Morality, in my view, follows rationality" (David Gauthier, Ethics ibid., 494).
15. There is another way in which a conception of rights might plausibly be agent-centered. It might assign the avoidance of rights violations by oneself priority over the prevention of violations by others. On such a view, it might be wrong to violate rights in order to minimize the violation of rights overall.
16. In this paragraph I have been influenced by Frances Kamm's important though unpublished work on "secondary permissibility."
17. See Judith Jarvis Thomson, "The Trolley Problem," in Rights, Restitution, and Risk, ed. William Parent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 98-99.
18. For further discussion, see F. M. Kamm, Morality, Mortality, vol. 2, Rights, Duties, and Status (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 242-43. The relevance of this kind of case to the present discussion was pointed out to me by David Wasserman.
19. Here I follow Wasserman in his "Prenatal Harm and Preemptive Abortion," 27-28.
20. I defend this view in McMahan, The Ethics of Killing. See esp. 209-28, 267-69, 302-38.
21. I am extremely grateful to André Gallois for devising this example.
22. I am most grateful to Alexander Pruss for suggesting this possibility.
23. Her reason to take the antidote after taking pill 1 might be weaker than her reason not to have an abortion after taking pill 2 if it is worse, other things being equal, to cause than to allow a fetus to die.