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Lousy Arguments for Abortion
Some arguments for the moral permissibility of abortion are pretty lousy. I’m talking about the interesting arguments from analogy that purport to establish the moral permissibility of all abortions even if an unborn baby really is a human being. Arguments from analogy employ a certain form, or pattern of reasoning along the following lines:
- A is like B in that both have property X;
- A has property Y; so
- B also has property Y.
There are various ways to evaluate an argument from analogy, but here are the three big ones:
- What are the relevant known similarities (i.e., X) of A and B?
- How relevant are the similarities?
- What are the relevant dissimilarities?
(For more on this, I recommend you consult my own sources: The Power of Logic and Introduction to Logic. Hint: You can buy older editions on Amazon for a zillionth of the price, and the older editions are about 99% as good.)
The Violinist Analogy: Argument
You may already be familiar with the infamous violinist argument from Judith Jarvis Thomson:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”
To cut to the chase, the argument from analogy is this:
- Unplugging yourself from the violinist is like abortion in that both lead to the death of an innocent person;
- Unplugging yourself from the violinist is morally permissible;
- Therefore, abortion is also morally permissible.
The Violinist Analogy: Evaluation
What are the relevant known similarities?
- Both liberate an innocent person from the encumbering life-support system of another innocent person;
- The encumbering life-support system encumbers the first innocent person for about nine months; and
- Both lead to the death of that other innocent person.
How relevant are the similarities?
- They’re pretty relevant.
What are the relevant dissimilarities?
- Abortion terminates a natural process, not a radical medical procedure.
- In almost all cases, pregnant women are not nearly as as encumbered as the person in the violinist story.
- Unplugging yourself from the violinist does not kill an innocent human being; it only allows him to die. But the act of abortion kills an innocent human being.
- The violinist story presumes kidnapping, but most pregnancies are the result of free choice, if not free choice to become pregnant then at least free choice to engage in the sort of behavior that has the same result. (This difference doesn’t work in the minority of pregnancies resulting from rape.)
And the verdict is: As an argument for the permissibility of all abortions, this argument is terrible. (It might have some strength for abortion in the case of rape, mitigated somewhat by the other differences.)
The Zombie Analogy: Argument
One of my students who is involved with debating told me that the argument won a big debating competition. (I think it was the student debating competition: the big international one.) Here’s my attempt to reconstruct the argument based on what what he told me:
Killing a brain-eating zombie is like abortion in that both acts involve the killing of a parasitic human being.
Killing a zombie is morally permissible.
So abortion is also morally permissible
The Zombie Analogy: Evaluation
What are the relevant similarities?
- In both cases, a human is killed.
- In both cases, the human lives off of another human being’s body.
- In both cases, the behavior of the human is morally innocent, acting on biological necessity rather than free choice.
How relevant are the similarities?
- Very!
What are the relevant dissimilarities?
- A zombie is not a normal human being. It’s probably not actually a human being at all. Assuming it’s even a living thing, it might be better thought of as a different species.
- A zombie, even if we consider it to be human, is an unnatural and severely malfunctioning one. But an unborn baby behaves in the way natural and proper for a human infant at that stage of life.
- An unborn baby lives off its mother without hurting her. Zombies kill you and eat your brains. (A difference not applicable to situations where the life of the mother is threatened, such as ectopic pregnancies.)
And the verdict is: This argument is terrible! It might have some strength with respect to abortions to save the life of the mother. (And if you replace the zombie with a blood-sucking but non-lethal vampire, the argument might have some strength with respect to abortions to preserve the health of the mother.)
But as an argument for the moral permissibility of all abortions, the argument depends on ignoring enormous relevant differences between babies and zombies.
Published in General
Nature kills full grown adults of its own accord quite frequently.
It is human in the sense that it has DNA which marks it as such.
Nobody denies this.
What we are discussing here is the relevant moral boundary between possessing simple human-ness and conflating such human-ness (at the most basic level of genetic ID) with investing any organism that happens to have human DNA with the same level of rights that we associate with people.
It seems far too arbitrary to me to simply say “this has human DNA: protect it at all costs.” It’s the flip side of Peter Singer’s argument which is also far too arbitrary in the sense that he’s arguing for a strictly utilitarian approach to reproduction and reproductive rights, up to and including infanticide.
It is equally morally permissible to prevent such pregnancies from occurring in the first place via contraception – and I would argue, even entirely permissible to use the “Plan B” morning after pill.
Far less morally defensible is Kermit Gosnell, for obvious reasons.
You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m just laying the ethical foundation of my argument in a way we can all agree is objectively true.
Your position can be perfectly coherent, I am simply pointing out that you are engaging in the exact error that Augustine pointed out in his post.
Arguments from analogy are best made with clear limits and distinctions.
Ultimately, how these values manifest themselves is in the policies they generate. If you think that human life – no matter the form – is sacred then no policy other than a ban on abortion will be acceptable.
I concede the objective truth that a fertilized human egg has human DNA and is human.
It is also objectively true that this:
≠
Human life can be sacred without it meaning that human life can never be taken. See my post on the stupidity of Christian pacifism.
For example, I am a Christian, and I am in favor of exceptions to abortion bans when the health of the mother is at risk. Though I believe the life of the child is sacred, so is the life of the mother. It is a case of conflicting rights.
Those who aren’t in favor of such an exception generally doubt that there is ever a real scenario where an abortion is needed to save the life of a mother. Such people aren’t arguing in bad faith, and may become convinced through the presentation of evidence.
An interesting angle to take, as atheists generally have a terrible track record when arguing what level of human is enough to entitle you to life.
To which atheists are you referring? Unless you’re alleging that the 90% abortion rate of Down’s Syndrome fetuses is solely to be laid at the feet of 7% of the population.
That’s ridiculous on its face. Catholics, Evangelicals, Lutherans and people of every faith persuasion are free to lie to pollsters all day long, but when the rubber hits the road, they’re doing something which is outside of their stated values – again, unless you think that Down’s disproportionately strikes liberals/atheists or selects for ideology somehow.
What I do know is this: I’m not smart enough to tell parents what they should or shouldn’t do in regard to planning and creating their own families.
I think I’ve argued effectively that parents are subjecting these children to a form of market test – and that they are failing that test.
Do you propose to gainsay their judgment, and on what basis?
I am glad that I haven’t been faced with such a moral quandary and think that people should be encouraged to make decisions within the context of “personal responsibility.” It’s one thing if they have a child with Down’s Syndrome and send that child to a private school which they pay for, privately funded doctors that they pay for and so on.
That is definitely not what happens in most cases. In most cases, children with Down’s Syndrome become wards of the state.
It would be nice if an insurance market existed which could help defray people’s costs against having a child with Down’s Syndrome or other expensive birth defects, but the Government is the de facto insurer in these situations, so parents don’t have to worry about it. There’s a perverse incentive if that you can have other people subsidize your child.
Certainly, I don’t view that as being the preferred conservative policy prescription.
We are arguing about which idealogy is superior. Countering that people are bad at following the superior one is not a tremendous argument.
Are you smart enough to tell people not to murder? Are you smart enough to tell them not to steal?
What’s obvious about it? If it’s okay to kill the fetus (it’s not like it has a name yet), who cares if it’s at 3 weeks or 8.5 months, or how it’s done?
People lying to themselves and engaging in hypocrisy are somehow superior?
I don’t have to. They apparently do that quite well on their own with somewhat rare exceptions.
This is the fallacy of presuming that the existence of a law somehow transfers the moral lesson which premises that law to the population. It puts the cart before the horse – do laws prevent theft and murder, or do laws reflect the underlying morality of the vast majority of the population?
Of course it’s the latter and not the former. No laws could prevent society from collapsing into barbarism and chaos if its members weren’t at least nominally moral to begin with.
Though poorly framed in the above sentence, yes, it’s superior to nihilism.
Flatly wrong. Very common and notable exceptions exist, and have always existed.
You seem to draw no distinction between laws and morals. Perhaps you believe there is no useful distinction? I might infer from your words that you believe we are born moral, and debate is worthless. The obvious problem being that people’s throughout the world clearly hold very different frameworks of morality.
Deciding which is best would seem to be of significant importance.
Did everyone here read my post from a year ago?
Are you saying that I’m a nihilist? I’m unclear. Who are these straw man nihilists and what is the nothing that they’ve proposed? Did Nietzsche enter the conversation while I wasn’t looking?
I’m curious to know what they are, being as they aren’t immediately leaping to mind.
Oh, I very much do believe there is a distinction – there can be moral and immoral law and morally neutral law. Morality can sometimes lead you to places where laws have no real say. The vast majority of life is like that.
Of course. Would you concede that perhaps an analysis which centered on the tradeoffs involved might be warranted, or are there no tradeoffs to be considered? At least, none so lofty as the “superior” position might have us believe.
I don’t think it’s an accident that we ended up with the society that we have and the consequent body of laws. There’s an element of emergent order to it which has some value, even if it doesn’t reflect the moral preferences of Christians with complete clarity.
The nice thing about it is that we can modify it if we find that conditions change.
Objectively true only if nature or man intervenes to stop its development. But, this is jumping ahead in the case I’m making.
We’ve agreed that a human is a living creature with a complete, unique human genome.
Next question. Is there something about innocent humans that “merits uncompromising special protections, which does not allow for exceptions?” — Robert Spitzer, Ten Universal Principals
This is the question of transcendence. The very fact that we’re having this conversation would seem to suggest, “yes.”
I believe you were indeed misinterpreting. Being an individual organism with human DNA is a sufficient condition for being a human being.
That alone does not guaranty rights.
To conclude that the unborn child has rights you need the additional premise that all human beings have rights. That’s the premise you should be focusing on.
And you should never suggest that the embryo isn’t human. It muddies the waters.
More importantly, when you suggest that the reason an embryo lacks rights is that it’s not human, it entails or at least suggests that all humans do have rights.
Yes, thank you.
You should never have said in # 45 that “the fetus has superficial characteristics that appear human” and that “the thing that makes us human in my opinion is” more than the fetus has. Your view is that not all human beings have rights–not that the unborn child is at any stage or other a non-human.
I can only think of one myself, but in any case the point to be made here is that the aforementioned remark of yours was still irrelevant.
Did you mean “health” of the mother, or “life” of the mother, Frank? “Health” can be very loosely interpreted to include “mental health.”
BTW, even the Catholic Church would agree with you in the case of “life of the mother.” The ethical reasoning to resolve this conflict of rights is to save the mother by removing the child, without the express intent of killing the child. This is what happens in the case of ectopic pregnancy, for example. These surgeries are 100% permissible at Catholic hospitals.
Abortion demands dead babies. The fatality of the child in this case is not an exception to the immorality of abortion. It is an accident of saving the mother’s life.
How precisely this is meant to support the conclusion that killing humans is morally permissible (in situations other than those in which killing one saves another) is still a mystery to me.
You should stick to your point: that not all humans have rights.
No. Metaphysics suggests precisely what you conceded in # 66: The unborn organism is, from conception, human.
If you want to talk about metaphysics, you might start by telling us what you think a person is exactly, or why you think only persons have rights.
Neither I nor any of hundreds of pro-lifers I’ve ever met neglects the personhood of those people.
No, it’s not the only test. But some of us think it’s a sufficient condition for personhood.
For my part, I don’t much care about personhood when it comes to discussing ethics. I simply happen to believe that all human beings have rights.
What sort of rights do you think they have, and how do we discover them in nature?
Yes, she is. (See your own remarks in # 66.)
In later paragraphs (cleaning up your logic a bit) you suggest that there are three markers of personhood which a fetus lacks: having a name, having a unique genetic signature (in the case of clones), and having caring social relations.
I don’t think you’re going to say that each of these is a necessary condition for personhood. (And you apparently deny as much with respect to the first marker in # 56.)
Maybe you don’t know this, but there are millions of weeks-old embryos that have those social relations. In many cases unborn babies do have names conferred by their parents.
Anyway, I really think the more important things are these: What do you think a person is exactly, and why do you think only persons have rights?
I object.
First, what makes you think I or Western Chauvinist or anyone else who believes that all humans have rights believes it arbitrarily?
Second, it’s a common enough belief, and one you yourself seemed to believe in in # 45 and any other remarks in which you suggest that embryos lack rights because they lack humanity.
Ah, Singer. Cicero handled him two thousand years early in a single sentence: We value pleasure because we value ourselves, not vice versa.
Singer told me he doesn’t think much of Mill as a Utilitarian. I disagree. Mill’s Utilitarianism is great. I could call myself a Utilitarian when I’m thinking of Mill. (I’m not strictly a Utilitarian at any time.)
No. She’s creating spare parts for herself out of her own genetic material without any intention of creating a human being. In this particular hypothetical, I think the intent matters. Is she creating a clone of herself to be implanted in her womb, so it can develop into a fetus? Of course not. A cloned ovum could not long survive outside of a womb.
Now I feel like you’re being obtuse. I said there are a host of markers that we use to determine personhood, among them the convention of naming, the woman’s intent, the ability of the fetus to become a person, etc. Not just 3. I don’t think I have to comprehensively list them, but here are some tests that might apply:
Possessing complete and healthy DNA (in the sense that normal development in the womb is possible up to the point of existing outside of the womb sans umbilical cord)
Possessing the potential to gain sentience. (Pre-sentient infants and highly developed fetuses; not blastocysts)
Displaying sentience. (The Turing Test is a crude proxy)
Having at one point possessed sentience. (Perhaps some sentience has been lost in the case of dementia or brain damage; the severity of the damage may imply that the ability to go on living unaided by machines has ceased and the ability to communicate with others has similarly ceased; the ethics of dealing with the severely cognitively disabled or injured varies from culture to culture but seems to improve with increased access to resources.)
I could go on. The point is that there are a lot of things that go into this, and it may be easier to define the boundary conditions than it is to completely fill out its contents.
Being as I have 3 children, yes I do.
We can’t grant rights to things that we don’t know exist and only people can have rights (in this context.)
In the case of the earliest stages of pregnancy, we can’t reliably locate such organisms in order to protect their rights. It’s a matter of practicality.
I always find this line of reasoning disturbing. I know you’re talking about a cloned ovum (a complete outlier in this attempt to reason through the abortion argument). Maybe you’re not saying this, but plenty of people will use it as an argument to abort right up to the due date.
From an ethical, moral standpoint, the value inherent in a human simply cannot depend on what another human’s intent is toward him. That just gets scary — fast.
This is a straw man. No one is arguing we should track down all unborn children in order to grant them their rights. Pro-lifers are arguing against sanctioning abortion. Big difference.
I refer you to your own remark in # 66: “I concede the objective truth that a fertilized human egg has human DNA and is human.” Thus you contradict yourself.
Your intent is relevant to your own words. Reading your intent charitably, I suppose you’re trying to carve out an exception to that objective truth. An exception based on intent.
But intent is not relevant to that objective truth, and doesn’t carve out an exception. As you say, “a fertilized human egg has human DNA and is human;” this is a sufficient condition for humanity.
Intent might, however, be relevant to personhood. But you have yet to give a metaphysics of personhood, and I don’t know how you might work intent into the account.
You didn’t mention a host [in that comment, although I see now that you mentioned a host in a comment to someone else], but ok; so you think there’s a host of them. Jolly good.
It would still be more important to answer the questions: What do you think a person is exactly, and why do you think only persons have rights?
In any case, the first two new markers you mention are there for all embryos, and the latter two for late-stage embryos.
Jolly good show!
We don’t grant moral rights. If anyone does that, it’s God. (And we’re not talking about any other kind of rights.)
And we do know what exists, from conception: A human being.
You say “only people can have rights.” Perhaps, but why? And what exactly is a person?