1. If abortion is usually utility-maximizing, then it seems like infanticide would be as well. The only relevant difference in utility between ending the existence of the unborn and the born seems to be the disutility of pregnancy, but usually pregnancy is not so bad as to make the difference in outweighing the net utility of a fetus' life. So, if it is usually utility-maximizing to abort the fetus, it will be because of utility unrelated to pregnancy that would usually also justify infanticide.
2. Your counter-argument here seems to fail against the famous violinist case which is one of the main motivations for the bodily autonomy justification for abortion. If we imagine a violinist who needs to be plugging into to you in order to prevent their arm from falling off, it still seems permissible to unplug the violinist and leave them to their fate. This suggests that you are making the same mistake that bodily autonomy proponents think all pro-lifers make: you are implicitly assumimg that the violinist and the fetus have some right to use the woman's body, when our intuitions suggest that they don't.
Since fetuses are future people, all of these views would imply that fetuses are persons in a highly relevant sense.
Responses to potential counterpoints:
- "Not every fetus is a counterfactual future person, since having an abortion doesn't necessarily change the amount of children a person is going to have". For starters, this justifies infanticide, so long as you make sure to have another child for every infant you kill. Secondly, this still doesn't justify abortion, because the child can be given up for adoption, and the mother can still have however many children she would have had.
- "I still think making abortion illegal would be bad for other reasons, such as farmed animal welfare, x-risk reduction, etc." Sure, that's valid, but you'd still have to concede that fetuses _are_ persons in the relevant sense. You'd have to argue that killing fetuses (or infants or young children, since there's little moral difference if you reject person-affecting views) is a positive good, because it helps farmed animals / reduce x-risk.
- "The 'relevant sense' in this case is the sense of 'person' which should be adhered to in legal/social situations, which should be _distinct_ from the sense of moral patient". This objection works, but if that is your objection, I'd be quite interested in reading a post from you which describes this demarcation and why you adhere to it.
I agree that #3 is impermissible. But I’d like to hear your reasons for arguing that the fetus is not a person. Does passage through the vaginal canal impart personhood? If not, then how do you know when personhood is imparted? It seems strange that on one side of a hospital we can be killing fetuses at 24 weeks, and on the other side at NICU, we can be desperately trying to help them live. The only difference is the will of the parent. Do I, as a mother, have the power to impart personhood?
Excellent point, and convincing. I now see that proponents of the bodily autonomy argument are just smuggling the not-a-person conclusion in through the backdoor. Thus: preventing something that is not a person from becoming a person harms no persons; harming something that does become a person eventually harms a (now one-armed) person. Changing the frame to maiming rather than killing shows that the bodily autonomy argument only works if we're already secretly agreeing with the not-a-person argument.
A more direct argument can be given for why abortions should be legal even if they leave the fetus permanently crippled. I can't tell whether you think the forced blood/organ donation cases are analogous to forced pregnancy (such that if the former should be illegal then so should the latter). But if you think they are relevantly analogous when the victim is at risk of death, then you should also think they are analogous when the victim is at the risk of being crippled. It seems that individuals should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from being permanently crippled. Thus, for the very same reason, individuals should not be forced to deliver a pregnancy to save a fetus from being permanently crippled.
The basic argument is this:
1. People should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying.
2. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying, then they should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled.
3. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled, then they should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
4. Therefore, people should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
There are a few possible responses:
* Deny (1). I'm assuming no one denies this, so I'll skip it.
* Deny (2). This would assume that we have stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent deaths. Even if this is true, this view would undermine the argument you provided in your OP. In your OP, you claimed "And so if you can kill a person who is dependent on your body to end their dependence, then surely you can slice off their arm". But if there is stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent to prevent deaths, then your claim would be false. A pro-choicer could maintain that abortions should be legal if they cause the death of the fetus, but not if they cause the crippling of the fetus (just as the one who denies (2) maintains that withholding blood/organ donation should be legal if they cause the death of the victim, but not if the cause the crippling of the victim).
* Deny (3). This would assume that forced blood/organ donations are not analogous to forced pregnancy. Now, I happen to think they are relevantly analogous, but this would just rehash the same dialectic in every abortion debate that I'm sure you're familiar with. The important thing to note here is that the dialectic does not meaningfully change if we talk about cripplings rather than deaths. Whether or not forced pregnancies are analogous to forced blood/organ donations is independent of whether the victim will die or become crippled.
Question: given utilitarianism, why does it matter whether the fetus is a person? Surely the utility implications of abortion don't change once the fetus acquires personhood. For illustration, suppose you think that the unborn become persons one-hundred days into pregnancy. It seems very weird to think that the utility of abortion is x on day 99, but y (where y is some value vastly lower than x) on day 100. It seems like the only way to make personhood relevant to abortion is to bring in some non-utilitarian considerations (e.g. rights).
(I should note that the above is a purely rhetorical question, since the unborn are persons from conception and utilitarianism is false.)
Cutting of arms only seems "obviously" wrong to me in a sense that this would create a class of highly visible abortion victims, which would then lead to much lower approval towards abortion. It reminds me of the idea that we would have done something against CO2 emissions a long time ago if it gave the sky a brown tint, simply because then it wouldn't be invisible anymore.
Why is it “obviously wrong” to cut off a fetus arm to end a pregnancy? If the argument is that bringing someone who is crippled into the world costs more in medical and social costs then they are worth, then the argument you are making falls flat. After all, killing someone would *not* be categorically worse than crippling them. It’s a bit like saying that death must always be worse than torture, and then calling someone absurd for not wanting to subject someone to infinite torture. Your prior assumption is flawed.
If we are approaching this from a rights perspective, then I don’t see why it’s “obviously” wrong that lopping off an arm is bad. It’s a less restrictive means of asserting the right to choose, and the fetus can’t exactly make a choice of its own here. The nonarbitrary justification would be “rights”.
It seems obvious to me that cutting off the fetus' arm is *worse* than killing it. If you cut off the fetus' arm, then the fetus will be born and develop a large number of desires in the course of its life that will be thwarted at various points by the resultant disability. But if you kill the fetus, no desires will develop in the first place to be thwarted at any point. Of course, the fetus will "lose out" on a valuable future, but I don't think there's any convincing reason to think that "losing out" is worse than the "losing out" that occurs whenever a woman simply avoids getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course, some people will probably say this misses the point because we're supposed to assume the fetus is a person for sake of the argument. But it's unclear to me if that means we're supposed to assume the fetus has desires and interests or if we're supposed to assume there's some inherent moral value the fetus has apart from those things. If it's the former, then I would say that assumption just doesn't reflect reality, because (at least for 95%+ of all abortions) the fetus in question uncontroversially lacks those features. But if it's the latter, then I would say that's just an incoherent view of personhood that no pro-abortion person should be expected to consider.
This is why I think it's ultimately impossible to separate discussions about abortion into "bodily autonomy" questions and "personhood" questions - unless your conception of personhood is totally unmoored from any sort of actual quality in the world, then it's just not possible to assume a being is a person without shifting some concrete facts about the situation. It's like asking "Would the death penalty for jaywalking be acceptable if jaywalking was the greatest imaginable evil?" In order for jaywalking to be the greatest imaginable evil, then it would have to have some non-moral features (causing horrendous suffering, involving extreme cruelty, etc) that it doesn't actually have. But if you're just asking me to imagine extreme moral evil magically associating with jaywalking for some unspecified metaphysical reason, then it's hard to understand what possible insight that could provide into the actual reality of the situation.
"If abortions left fetuses alive but permanently, harmfully crippled, they would seem to be impermissible......But surely if it’s permissible to kill the fetus in order to end a pregnancy, then it’s permissible to chop off it’s arm to end the pregnancy."
Don't you think that we can build an ethical model by synthesising different principles, even if there is somewhat friction between them? So, a pro-choicer might say, the bodily autonomy principle should be implemented until it begins producing externalities. If one defines externalities as pain experienced by conscious entities, then pro-choice can conceivably get around this.
Jess Flanigan makes your argument here
https://brill.com/view/journals/jmp/aop/article-10.1163-17455243-BJA10059/article-10.1163-17455243-BJA10059.xml?language=en
Two Objections to your Views:
1. If abortion is usually utility-maximizing, then it seems like infanticide would be as well. The only relevant difference in utility between ending the existence of the unborn and the born seems to be the disutility of pregnancy, but usually pregnancy is not so bad as to make the difference in outweighing the net utility of a fetus' life. So, if it is usually utility-maximizing to abort the fetus, it will be because of utility unrelated to pregnancy that would usually also justify infanticide.
2. Your counter-argument here seems to fail against the famous violinist case which is one of the main motivations for the bodily autonomy justification for abortion. If we imagine a violinist who needs to be plugging into to you in order to prevent their arm from falling off, it still seems permissible to unplug the violinist and leave them to their fate. This suggests that you are making the same mistake that bodily autonomy proponents think all pro-lifers make: you are implicitly assumimg that the violinist and the fetus have some right to use the woman's body, when our intuitions suggest that they don't.
I'm surprised that you "think a fetus is probably not a person in the relevant sense". Don't you:
- Reject person-affecting views: https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-new-utterly-decisive-argument-against
- Reject the procreation asymmetry: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-worlds-most-dangerous-population
- Explicitly believe that future people's happiness is worth the same as an equal amount of present people's suffering: https://benthams.substack.com/p/deducing-a-radical-utilitarian-conclusion
Since fetuses are future people, all of these views would imply that fetuses are persons in a highly relevant sense.
Responses to potential counterpoints:
- "Not every fetus is a counterfactual future person, since having an abortion doesn't necessarily change the amount of children a person is going to have". For starters, this justifies infanticide, so long as you make sure to have another child for every infant you kill. Secondly, this still doesn't justify abortion, because the child can be given up for adoption, and the mother can still have however many children she would have had.
- "I still think making abortion illegal would be bad for other reasons, such as farmed animal welfare, x-risk reduction, etc." Sure, that's valid, but you'd still have to concede that fetuses _are_ persons in the relevant sense. You'd have to argue that killing fetuses (or infants or young children, since there's little moral difference if you reject person-affecting views) is a positive good, because it helps farmed animals / reduce x-risk.
- "The 'relevant sense' in this case is the sense of 'person' which should be adhered to in legal/social situations, which should be _distinct_ from the sense of moral patient". This objection works, but if that is your objection, I'd be quite interested in reading a post from you which describes this demarcation and why you adhere to it.
I agree that #3 is impermissible. But I’d like to hear your reasons for arguing that the fetus is not a person. Does passage through the vaginal canal impart personhood? If not, then how do you know when personhood is imparted? It seems strange that on one side of a hospital we can be killing fetuses at 24 weeks, and on the other side at NICU, we can be desperately trying to help them live. The only difference is the will of the parent. Do I, as a mother, have the power to impart personhood?
Excellent point, and convincing. I now see that proponents of the bodily autonomy argument are just smuggling the not-a-person conclusion in through the backdoor. Thus: preventing something that is not a person from becoming a person harms no persons; harming something that does become a person eventually harms a (now one-armed) person. Changing the frame to maiming rather than killing shows that the bodily autonomy argument only works if we're already secretly agreeing with the not-a-person argument.
A more direct argument can be given for why abortions should be legal even if they leave the fetus permanently crippled. I can't tell whether you think the forced blood/organ donation cases are analogous to forced pregnancy (such that if the former should be illegal then so should the latter). But if you think they are relevantly analogous when the victim is at risk of death, then you should also think they are analogous when the victim is at the risk of being crippled. It seems that individuals should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from being permanently crippled. Thus, for the very same reason, individuals should not be forced to deliver a pregnancy to save a fetus from being permanently crippled.
The basic argument is this:
1. People should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying.
2. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from dying, then they should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled.
3. If people should not be forced to donate blood/organs to save someone from becoming permanently crippled, then they should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
4. Therefore, people should not be forced to delivery pregnancies to save the fetus from becoming permanently crippled.
There are a few possible responses:
* Deny (1). I'm assuming no one denies this, so I'll skip it.
* Deny (2). This would assume that we have stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent deaths. Even if this is true, this view would undermine the argument you provided in your OP. In your OP, you claimed "And so if you can kill a person who is dependent on your body to end their dependence, then surely you can slice off their arm". But if there is stronger reason to prevent cripplings than to prevent to prevent deaths, then your claim would be false. A pro-choicer could maintain that abortions should be legal if they cause the death of the fetus, but not if they cause the crippling of the fetus (just as the one who denies (2) maintains that withholding blood/organ donation should be legal if they cause the death of the victim, but not if the cause the crippling of the victim).
* Deny (3). This would assume that forced blood/organ donations are not analogous to forced pregnancy. Now, I happen to think they are relevantly analogous, but this would just rehash the same dialectic in every abortion debate that I'm sure you're familiar with. The important thing to note here is that the dialectic does not meaningfully change if we talk about cripplings rather than deaths. Whether or not forced pregnancies are analogous to forced blood/organ donations is independent of whether the victim will die or become crippled.
Question: given utilitarianism, why does it matter whether the fetus is a person? Surely the utility implications of abortion don't change once the fetus acquires personhood. For illustration, suppose you think that the unborn become persons one-hundred days into pregnancy. It seems very weird to think that the utility of abortion is x on day 99, but y (where y is some value vastly lower than x) on day 100. It seems like the only way to make personhood relevant to abortion is to bring in some non-utilitarian considerations (e.g. rights).
(I should note that the above is a purely rhetorical question, since the unborn are persons from conception and utilitarianism is false.)
Cutting of arms only seems "obviously" wrong to me in a sense that this would create a class of highly visible abortion victims, which would then lead to much lower approval towards abortion. It reminds me of the idea that we would have done something against CO2 emissions a long time ago if it gave the sky a brown tint, simply because then it wouldn't be invisible anymore.
Why is it “obviously wrong” to cut off a fetus arm to end a pregnancy? If the argument is that bringing someone who is crippled into the world costs more in medical and social costs then they are worth, then the argument you are making falls flat. After all, killing someone would *not* be categorically worse than crippling them. It’s a bit like saying that death must always be worse than torture, and then calling someone absurd for not wanting to subject someone to infinite torture. Your prior assumption is flawed.
If we are approaching this from a rights perspective, then I don’t see why it’s “obviously” wrong that lopping off an arm is bad. It’s a less restrictive means of asserting the right to choose, and the fetus can’t exactly make a choice of its own here. The nonarbitrary justification would be “rights”.
My favorite reply to the violinist argument is to ask why Rothbard is wrong in applying it to fully born children (see The Ethics of Liberty p. 100).
Interesting take!
FYI I've written a response here.
https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/bodily-autonomy-arguments-are-clearly
It seems obvious to me that cutting off the fetus' arm is *worse* than killing it. If you cut off the fetus' arm, then the fetus will be born and develop a large number of desires in the course of its life that will be thwarted at various points by the resultant disability. But if you kill the fetus, no desires will develop in the first place to be thwarted at any point. Of course, the fetus will "lose out" on a valuable future, but I don't think there's any convincing reason to think that "losing out" is worse than the "losing out" that occurs whenever a woman simply avoids getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course, some people will probably say this misses the point because we're supposed to assume the fetus is a person for sake of the argument. But it's unclear to me if that means we're supposed to assume the fetus has desires and interests or if we're supposed to assume there's some inherent moral value the fetus has apart from those things. If it's the former, then I would say that assumption just doesn't reflect reality, because (at least for 95%+ of all abortions) the fetus in question uncontroversially lacks those features. But if it's the latter, then I would say that's just an incoherent view of personhood that no pro-abortion person should be expected to consider.
This is why I think it's ultimately impossible to separate discussions about abortion into "bodily autonomy" questions and "personhood" questions - unless your conception of personhood is totally unmoored from any sort of actual quality in the world, then it's just not possible to assume a being is a person without shifting some concrete facts about the situation. It's like asking "Would the death penalty for jaywalking be acceptable if jaywalking was the greatest imaginable evil?" In order for jaywalking to be the greatest imaginable evil, then it would have to have some non-moral features (causing horrendous suffering, involving extreme cruelty, etc) that it doesn't actually have. But if you're just asking me to imagine extreme moral evil magically associating with jaywalking for some unspecified metaphysical reason, then it's hard to understand what possible insight that could provide into the actual reality of the situation.
"If abortions left fetuses alive but permanently, harmfully crippled, they would seem to be impermissible......But surely if it’s permissible to kill the fetus in order to end a pregnancy, then it’s permissible to chop off it’s arm to end the pregnancy."
Don't you think that we can build an ethical model by synthesising different principles, even if there is somewhat friction between them? So, a pro-choicer might say, the bodily autonomy principle should be implemented until it begins producing externalities. If one defines externalities as pain experienced by conscious entities, then pro-choice can conceivably get around this.