What is Wrong with Abortion?

Is it immoral to deliberately end the life of a fetus? This is a philosophical question that tackles the ethics of abortion. This philosophical question demands philosophical answer(s). Before I attempt to answer this question, another basic question that is behind this question must also be answered; what exactly makes it immoral to kill one of us on most occasions? From such explorations I presented three philosophical arguments explaining why I believe abortion, on most occasions, is immoral.

This short essay presented three brief explanations on what makes killing one of us wrong. Those explanations, I will argue, are equally applicable to the killing of fetuses. In this essay I assumed that my readers agree that killing of a suicidal teenager or a revisable comatose patient is wrong. Thus, though a suicidal teenager may currently have no strong desire to live, or a revisable comatose patient may at a certain period be totally unconscious of both her inner self and her outside surroundings, it is immoral to deliberately and unjustifiably end their lives.

An adequate explanation for what exactly makes it immoral to kill one of us, thus, must cover the killing of those who currently have no strong desire to live and also those who are temporary unconscious. The following three explanations cover such cases.

Euthyphro: A Dilemma or Disjunction?

“Is that which is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”(10a), is probably Socrates’ most famous question in the whole Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue. Socrates’ question was set to challenge Euthyphro’s definition of τὸ ὅσιον (pious or holy), namely pious is what all the gods love (9e).

Euthyphro’s definition could be outline as follows:

[D] Necessary: for every x, x is pious iff x is loved by all gods.

Socrates believed that [D], or in Euthyphro’s own words, “what all the gods love is holy and, on the other hand, what they all hate is unholy”(9e), is mere wind-egg. This article argued that Socrates’ challenge should be understood as a disjunction and not a dilemma.

After assenting to a revised definition that pious is that which is loved by all the gods, Euthyphro found himself cornered by Socrates with the following choices to make: (a) do all the gods love pious because pious is pious, or (b) is pious pious because all the gods loves it?

Richard Joyce correctly pointed out that,

That Socrates presents Euthyphro with a disjunctive choice is not to say that he presents him with a dilemma. An argument by dilemma would proceed as follows: “Assume the first disjunct. This leads to unacceptable consequence X. Now assume the second disjunct. This leads to unacceptable consequence Y. Therefore whatever presupposition led us to the disjunction must be false.” The so-called “Euthyphro Dilemma” is often presented in just such a way (as we will see later), but it is not how Socrates proceeds. Rather, Socrates quickly gets Euthyphro to assent to one disjunct, then reasons from there. After a few leading questions, he is satisfied that he has overthrown Euthyphro’s initial claim, and the other disjunct receives no further consideration.(Joyce 2002, 50)

Moreover Euthyphro could have hold both (a) and (b) without there being any really inconsistency. The sense to which Socrates used “because”, as Sir Antony Kenny rightly showed, in (a) is different from the sense he used it in (b). Stating that pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, shows gods’ motive while pious is pious because it is loved by the gods “recalls our stipulation about meaning”. Kenny offered a parallel example of (a) and (b), namely (c): “A judge judges because he is a judge (i.e. he does it because it is his job)” and (d): “A judge is a judge because he judges (that is why he is called a judge)” (Kenny 2004, 292) to show that like (c) and (d),  (a) and (b) could both be true.

Since (a) and (b) are not mutually exclusive, Euthyphro does not have to choice either (a) or (b). He could agree with both (a) and (b) without there being any contradiction.

Further more, Euthyphro could simply rejected both (a) and (b) and present Socrates with another possible choice (e) by revising (a) to the idea that all the gods love pious because pious exemplifies  their essential nature, thus bringing in another option, which he could defend, to choose from. Euthyphro’s possible revised (a), (e) could be outline as follows:

[EN] Necessary: for every x, x is pious iff x exemplifies all the gods essential nature.

These reasons led me to conclude that Socrates  offered Euthyphro with a disjunction and not a dilemma. The next article in this series examined Socrates’ rebuttal of Euthyphro’s revised definition.

Bibliography:

Joyce, Richard (2002) “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” in Journal of Religious Ethics Vol. 30.1:49-75

Kenny, Antony (2004) Ancient Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy Vol.1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Examining Plato’s Euthyphro Dialogue

Standing in the porch of the King Archon are two friends Socrates and Euthyphro.  Prosecuted by Meletus for corrupting the minds of Meletus’ young friends, Socrates came to defend himself from these charges.  Euthyphro, on the other hand, came to prosecute his own father for murder (Plat. Euthyph. 2a-4a¹).

Although his father and family were angry with him for this, Euthyphro, contrary to his family, judged his act as τὸ ὅσιον (pious, or holy), a righteous thing to do. His family, according to Euthyphro, did know little about the divine law in regard to piety and impiety (4e). Since Socrates was under a similar charge of impiousness, namely corrupting the minds of Meletus’ young friends, this was a perfect moment for him to learn from the well-learned Athenian Euthyphro the nature of piety and impiety (5a-d). What is piety and what is impiety?

Plato’s Euthyphro explores the nature of piety and impiety. This series of articles aimed to examine the Euthyphro and Socrates dialogue, focusing on Euthyphro 9d-llb, which is often misunderstood as a dilemma. I argued that Socrates does not present a dilemma but a disjunction. On behalf of Euthyphro, I showed that Socrates’ argument is invalid. I also examined the so-called “Euthyphro dilemma” showing that (a) it does not spring forth from Plato’s dialogue and (b) none of its conclusions drawn follows.

Euthyphro Under Fire & The Nature of τὸ ὅσιον

“[P]ious is to do what I am doing now,” answered Euthyphro, “to prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone else; not to prosecute is impious.” (5d-e) Though Euthyphro’s particular act is supposedly an example of pious and impious, it does not explain what pious and impious are. Socrates thus correctly remind Euthyphro that he was not asking for examples but the definition of pious and impious (6d-e).

“Well then, what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious” (7a) answered Euthyphro.  This was what Socrates was asking for. Euthyphro second attempt is indeed a definition. The problem is, according to Socrates, there could be an act X that is pious to one god and impious to another.  Example, Euthyphro’s prosecuting his own father could be pious to Zeus but impious to Cronus and Uranus pointed Socrates (7b-9b). Thus X could be, in that definition, absurdly pious and impious.

Avoiding this contradiction, Socrates assisted Euthyphro to revise his definition (9c-d) to “what all the gods love is pious and, on the other hand, what they all hate is impious”(9e). Euthyphro definition of pious is thus:

Necessary: for every x, x is pious iff x is loved by all gods.

Next article in this series examined whether Socrates’ challenge is a dilemma or a disjunction.

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¹With a minor substitution of holy/unholy with piety/impiety, and holiness with pious, I followed Plato. Euthyphro in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921

Mackie’s Error Theory

“There are no objective values.”  So starts the first chapter of J.L. Mackie’s book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, where he argues that there are no objective, universally prescriptive moral facts.

His view is a cognitivist view, which means that our moral judgments express believes that have truth-value, but it is not an example of moral realism.  Mackie argued that all of our moral judgments and beliefs are false.  This is why it is called “Error Theory.”  How does he argue for this position?

His argument combines a conceptual claim about our moral judgments and an ontological claim about the existence of moral facts.

1) Conceptual claim: Our moral concepts are concepts of universally prescriptive, categorical facts in the world.

2) Ontological claim: There are no such facts in the world.

Since there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our beliefs about moral facts, our moral beliefs and claims are all false.  That is why Mackie’s view is called Error Theory, because we are literally in error.

Mackie argues for (1) by showing that many philosophers in the Western tradition have defended objective moral values.  While acknowledging that many thinkers are moral subjectivists he says “the main tradition of European moral philosophy includes the contrary claim, that there are objective values of just the sort I have denied,” (p. 30).  He cites philosophers like Plato, Kant, Sidgwick, Aristotle, Samuel Clarke, Hutcheson, Richard Price, and says Hume noticed the prevalence of the objectivist tradition as well.  He also argues that the objectivist tradition has a firm basis in ordinary thought.  When many people ask if a certain action is wrong, they are not asking what they feel about the action or what benefit they think it will give them, they are asking if the action itself is wrong.  Mackie also claims that existentialism and its influence on people shows that people tend to objectify their concerns.  People who cease to believe that objective moral facts or values exist tend to begin believing that nothing matters at all; that life has no purpose.  This suggests that those people were objectifying their moral judgments so that they were something external to them, not just aspects of their own ideas, thoughts, and desires (p. 34).

Mackie argues for (2) in a few different ways, but the argument I will focus on here is the argument from queerness.

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.  Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty or moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. (p. 38)

In order to argue that moral facts do not exist, Mackie combines a metaphysical argument with an epistemological argument.  The metaphysical argument is that moral facts would be very “queer” properties unlike any other kinds of properties we know.  Moral facts are the kinds of things that have a demand for an action built into them.  They are prescriptive facts telling us how we ought to act.  The facts that we are all acquainted with, however, are prescriptively inert.  The facts or properties that we are all familiar with, physical properties, do not have demands for certain actions built into them.  They do not tell us how things ought to be, they just tell us how things are.  They are descriptive rather than prescriptive. These physical properties, which are descriptive properties that tell us how things are, are the kinds of properties that we are very well acquainted with and they are explicable on naturalism.  Moral properties, which are prescriptive properties that tell us how things ought to be, are strange and not easily explainable on naturalism, since the moral properties themselves would not be natural.

The epistemological argument is that we would need a special faculty that was able to detect these moral properties.  We have different faculties for detecting things in the world, and these faculties are how we gain knowledge about the world.  For example, our eyes pick up light and allow us to see, our noses detect scents in the air and allow us to smell, our ears detect the vibrations in the air and allow us to hear sound.  Through these different faculties we detect different things in the world and learn about them.  But what kind of faculty would we need to have in order to detect non-physical, universally prescriptive moral facts?  It is not clear what on earth this faculty could be or how we can gain knowledge of moral facts through it.  So Mackie concludes from this that we have good reason to reject the actual existence of moral facts.

To sum up, Mackie claims that our moral concepts are concepts of universally prescriptive facts, but these facts do not exist in the world, so our moral concepts are literally false.  He argues against their existence by showing that such facts would be metaphysically “queer” on naturalism and it is not clear how we would even know their existence.

I think Mackie’s moral theory is likely to be true if naturalism is true.  If someone is a naturalist, he would have to deny moral facts because they are not the kinds of things that would be natural.  If someone thinks that moral facts do exist, then he has reason to reject naturalism.

Resources

(1) Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Middelessex: Penguin, 1990. Print.

(2) Miller, Alexander. An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003. Print.

About Guest Contributor

Kyle Hendricks is a blogger of  Into the Harvest, a blog that reflects his thoughts on Philosophy of Religion and Theology.

Kyle is an awesomely gifted and careful Christian thinker. He graduated from The University of Missouri-Columbia with a B.A. in philosophy and is doing his M.A. program in philosophy at Biola University. Kyle works part-time for Stand to Reason.

Is Abortion Women’s Right To Control Their Bodies?

Do women’s rights, which include their right to health and to make fully informed decisions regarding their bodies, extend to other beings with future of values like ours inside them? Is it true that the right of women to decide what they can and cannot do with their bodies extend to foetuses existing inside their bodies? Does women’s rights to control their own reproduction include induced abortion?

Granting the notion that our bodies are our own properties; does it follow that women can choose to kill their foetuses inside them because foetuses are also their own properties? Or if we grant that foetuses are separate individuals with future of values like ours, does it follow that women can choose to kill these trespassers?

These questions help us to critically examine the claim that abortion is permissible because women’s do have the right to control their own bodies, primarily the right to control their own reproduction.

Women do have the rights to control their own bodies. They do also have rights to control their own reproduction through contraception, abstinence of intercourse on dangerous days, et cetera. Do these rights extend to foetuses inside of them? I do not think so. Imagine the following:

Jane decided to chop off the legs of her foetus, at week 7. Grant that she has the right to choose what happens in and to her body, Dr. John, with help of modern technology, performed the operation and chopped Jane’s foetus legs off. In week 10, Jane decided to chop the hands of her foetus off and John performed what is reasoned to be Jane’s personal choice and right. Taking it to an extreme Jane decided to pluck her foetus’ eyes out, et cetera. Two alternative endings could be that of (i) Jane in her final trimester decided to perform prostaglandin or (ii) Jane decided to give birth to an eyeless-amputated child¹.

If it is true that women’s right to control their own bodies’ extent to their foetuses, then Jane’s moral actions are permissible.

If our moral sentiments, assuming we are not morally blind, toward Jane’s action are of not only disapproval but also of condemning Jane’s actions as inhumane, then it is clear that Jane’s right to choose what happen in and to her body does not extend to her foetus. Jane’s moral actions are not permissible. Therefore it is not true that women’s right to control their own bodies’ extent to their foetuses inside them.

This is the reason I think it is not true that induced abortion is women’s rights to control their bodies. Women’s rights over their own bodies do not extend to foetuses inside them.

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[1] An eyeless-amputated child shows that Jane action where not only done to her own body but also another separate individual.

Assessing Thomson’s Defense of Abortion

Does the personhood of foetuses give them right to life? Does that right to life overrides women’s rights to control what happens in and to their bodies?

In A Defense of Abortion Judith Jarvis Thomson argued that even if we grant that foetuses are persons and thus have right to life, it does not follow that they have the right to use the pregnant women’s bodies. Thomson’s case from the famous unconscious violinist analogy unfolds as follows:

Imagine you wake up in the morning kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers, and are plugged into a famous unconscious violinist who has a fatal kidney ailment. “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”(Thomson 1971, 49)

Thomson argued that even if the violinist is a person and has right to life, it does not follow that he has right to use your body, if we grant that a person can decide what happen in and to her body. It would be very nice of you to allow it, but it is morally acceptable to unplug yourself (1971, 48-49).

In both cases, killing the violinist and aborting a foetus, according to Thomson, are relevantly analogous actions because your body is being violated. If it is morally permissible to kill the violinist because your body is being violated, then it is morally permissible to abort a foetus because your body is being violated.

Exploring The Extent of Thomson’s Violinist Analogy

Mary Anne Warren pointed out that Thomson’s argument from the violinist analogy is plausible as a defense for permissibility of morally unaccountable unwanted pregnancy only, e.g. rape (Warren 1973). She argued that “[t]he crucial difference between a pregnancy due to rape and the normal case of an unwanted pregnancy is that in the normal case we cannot claim that the woman is in no way responsible for her predicament; she could have remained chaste, or taken her pills more faithfully, or abstained on dangerous days, and so on.”(1973, 49)

In morally accountable cases, the foetus, congruently argued Bonnie Steinbock, “does have a right to use the pregnant woman’s body because she is (partly) responsible for its existence.”(Steinbock 1992, 78)¹

David Boonin-Vail (1997) and Peter Singer (2011) disagreed with Warren and Steinbock. If Thomson’s argument from the violinist analogy is sound, then it could be, they argued, extended beyond morally unaccountable cases.

Boonin argued that there is a difference between “a person’s (a) voluntarily bring about a state of affairs S and (b) voluntarily doing an action A foreseeing that this may lead to a state of affairs S.”(1997, 291) Moral accountability for one’s action is plausible in only (a) but not (b). Non-rape unwanted pregnancy cases falls in (b). He explained that being morally responsible does not necessarily mean a person also agrees to a foreseeable consequence.

Boonin offered an analogy; Bill and Ted voluntarily placing some money on the restaurant’s table. Demonstrating (a) is Bill who after finishing eating voluntarily took the money out of his wallet and placed it on the table and walked out the door. On the other hand, (b) is Ted who voluntarily took the money out of his wallet while eating because it was uncomfortable sitting with it in his pocket. He not only consciously knew that he may forget his money on the table but was also warned by a friend. He unwisely refused to listen to the advice. Ted after finishing eating carelessly left the money on the table, walked out the door, and about ten minutes after returned to collect his money (293). Though Ted is morally responsible for leaving his money on the table, it does not follow that he agreed with the foreseeable consequence of the waiter taking his money.  Following Boonin, women’s voluntary intercourse with men is more like Ted’s case.

Singer offered a different analogy:

Suppose that you found yourself connected to the violinist, not because you were kidnapped by music lovers, but because you had intended to enter the hospital to visit a sick friend; and when you got into the elevator, you carelessly pressed the wrong button and ended up in a section of the hospital normally visited only by those who have volunteered to be connected to patients who would not otherwise survive. A team of doctors, waiting for the next volunteer, assumed you were it, jabbed you with an anesthetic and connected you. If Thomson’s argument was sound in the kidnap case, it is probably sound here too, because nine months unwillingly supporting another is a high price to pay for ignorance or carelessness. (2011, 133)

Boonin’s analogy fails because moral accountability in view here is not of voluntarily placing of some money on the restaurant’s table but voluntarily leaving of the money on the table. Ted, unlike Bill, did not leave the money voluntarily. Similarly Singer’s analogy fails because it is not a voluntary carelessly pressed wrong-button action, of say Gill, which is parallel with Ted placing his money on the table, that is in view. Gill, as in the case of rape, found himself involuntarily plugged to the violinist.

Questioning the Thomson’s Violinist Analogy

Thomson’s analogy fails because in a typical case of abortion we are not merely failing to save another person’s life, by unplugging ourselves, but we are actively taking away another person’s life.

If Jeff McMahan is correct that “[t]he standard methods for performing abortions clearly involve killing the fetus: the fetus dies by being mangled or poisoned in the process of being removed from the uterus” (2002, 378) then abortion is not simply unplugging oneself from another person and letting her die but actively and intentionally killing her. The kidney donor is not only unplugging herself and passively letting a dying violinist die but unplugging herself by actively killing him².

Questioning Thomson’s Body Rights Assumption

Thomson assumed that our rights to decide what happens in and to our bodies extend to another person. This is not necessarily true. Imagine the following counterexample:

Jane decided to chop off the legs of her foetus, at week 7. Grant that she has the right to choose what happens in and to her body, Dr. John, with help of modern technology, performed the operation and chopped Jane’s foetus legs off. In week 10, Jane decided to chop the hands of her foetus off and John performed what is reasoned to be Jane’s personal choice and right. Taking it to an extreme Jane decided to pluck her foetus’ eyes out, et cetera. Two alternative endings could be that of (i) Jane in her final trimester decided to perform prostaglandin or (ii) Jane decided to give birth to an eyeless-amputated child.

If our moral sentiments, assuming we are not morally blind, toward Jane are that of not only disapproval but also of condemning Jane for her “ruthlessness” then it does not follow that Jane’s right to choose what happen in and to her body is extended to her foetus.

Questioning Thomson’s Use of “Use”

Raising a worthy exploring inquiry, Philip W. Bennett asked; “Does the foetus use the body of the woman who has it in the same way that the violinist is using the body of the unwilling kidney donor?”(Bennett 1982,142) Bennett questioned the assumption that he believed Thomson took for granted, namely the relationship between a violinist’s use of the kidney donor with that of a foetus use of the mother.

Using people as means to our own ends, following Kant, is often wrong. Thomson’s violinist, or the Society of Music Lovers, according to Bennett, is, in a moral chastisement sense, using the kidney donor as a means to his or their end. In this way he or they are morally accountable. But the foetus does not uses the body of the woman in a similar way to them because foetus use its mother in a moral neutral sense. (1982, 144)

If Bennett’s distinction is correct, viz., the foetus does not indeed use the body of the pregnant woman as the violinist uses the body of the kidney donor then “the moral sentiments evoked by the violinist case, as codified in the principle that ‘ having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body …,’ have little or nothing to say about the issue of abortion and the implications of the foetus’ right to life if fetuses have such a right.”(142)

By granting, for argument sake, that foetuses are persons, Thomson did not succeed to show that it is morally permissible to actively kill them. Elsewhere³ I argued that what makes killing people generally morally wrong applies also to the killing of foetuses. That case does not assume that foetuses are persons.

Bibliography:

Bennett, Philip W. (1982) A Defence of Abortion; A Question for Judith Jarvis Thomson. Philosophical Investigations. Vol 5, Issue 2:142-145

Booni-Vail, David (1997) A Defense of “A Defense of Abortion”: On the Responsibility Objection to Thomson’s Argument. Ethics, Vol. 107, No. 2:286-313

McMahan, Jeff (2002). The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Singer, Peter (2011) Practical Ethics. 3^rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steinbock, Bonnie (1992) Life before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1971) A Defense of Abortion. Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 1:47-66

Warren, Mary Anne (1973) On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. The Monist Vol 57, No. 1: 42-61

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[1] Alan Donagan (1977), Paul D. Feinberg (1978), Robert N. Wennberg (1985), and Judith A. Boss (1993) offered similar Warren-Steinbock-types of critique.

[2] Hysterotomy and hysterectomy methods are more like unplugging in Thomson’s analogy

[3] What is Wrong With Abortion? A Philosophical Case

Classical Utilitarianism: Ends Defined Morality

Stephen King’s novels, which were turned into a movie The Green Mile, captured a story of a seven-foot, very quite, calm and achluophobia black American death-rowed inmate John Coffey at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, awaiting his execution for alleged rape and murder of two white little girls. As the story unfolds, the death-row supervisor Paul Edgecom discovered that John was innocent but could not do much to stop his execution.

Was the execution of John moral right action? Does the eudaimonistic desirability of an action that maximizes people’s happiness make an act right? Is it true that an act is right if it produces the greatest sum of satisfactions to a great number of people? This article concisely introduced and evaluated Mill’s classical utilitarianism.

“All action is for the sake of some end, and rules of action,” argued John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism, “it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient.”(Mill 2003, 182) Paul, according to Mill’s, has to take into account the whole states of affairs into consideration. John’s execution is done for the sake of some end and rules action. So far so good for Paul. Assuming that he already took into consideration the rules of action, does some end also determine the value of executing John?

Yes, would be Mill’s answer according to his understanding of utilitarianism. In What Utilitarianism Is, Mill’s apologia of utilitarianism, he argued what he deemed to be in accordance with utilitarian opinion:

[T]he end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.(2003, 190)

Utility, the Greatest Happiness Principle, states that an action is neither right nor wrong by itself, but right if it tend to promote happiness (pleasure and the absence of pain) and wrong if it tend to produce unhappiness (pain and the privation of pleasure) (2003, 186) to a great number of people.

If the execution of John did increase the sum total of happiness to a great number of people, then it was morally right. Since Paul knew John’s execution increased the sum total of happiness to a great number of people, he would be led by Mill’s utilitarianism to conclude that it was morally right to execute an innocent man.

Mill’s utilitarianism does not locate the moral value of an act in the act but the psychological end result of great number of people involved.

Mill, John Stuart (2003) Utilitarianism and On Libert. Edited by Mary Warnock . 2^nd ed. Blackwell Publishing.