Thank you so much for this post! When I saw "abortion" in the title, I was ready to unfollow this blog immediately if it was another lame attempt to justify abortion. I was pleasantly surprised to find that although you might be pro-choice, you understand the pro-life position, and you are encouraging others to respond to our concern about the mass murder of babies. THANK YOU!
I find it hard to try to convince people to be pro-choice though if the only thing separating our opinions is when the fetus counts as a baby. It reminds me of the struggles I've had in the past with debating people who think using tampons makes someone lose their virginity... But maybe that's different because virginity is an even more arbitrary concept than when a baby becomes a baby.
I do think that many abortions are significantly morally wrong. I'm politically pro-choice because criminalization isn't a magic wand that makes Bad Thing disappear, but rather requires empowering cops and prosecutors (with their highly perverse incentives), black markets and organized crime, and worst of all, a serious risk of civil war.
I like to start discussions of abortions by describing some other things I think are very morally wrong, but should also remain legal. For example, I strongly agree with Richard Dawkins that raising children to believe in Hell (where even good people of the wrong faith will go) is child abuse on a level worse than being sexually fondled. The political arguments good enough to justify keeping such religious teachings legal are good enough to keep abortion legal.
If pro-lifers are correct, then abortion is murder. There is no parallel between "we should allow parents to pass their religious beliefs on to their children" and "we should allow the murder of small children." Even if criminalizing abortion didn't reduce its occurrence (which the evidence from Dobbs suggests that it does), the state would plausibly have a duty to outlaw the killing of its most vulnerable citizens (see e.g. https://philpapers.org/rec/HARTDT-2).
Also: I'm a universalist, but the claim that raising children to believe in an eternal hell is somehow equivalent to sexual abuse is inane nonsense. For one thing, there's decent evidence that being raised in a religious home (where one is more likely to exposed to the idea of hell) is associated with improved mental health outcomes (e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2695329). Even those studies which find a neutral or negative effect (which are a small minority) do not find anything like the catastrophic damage inflicted on children by sexual abuse.
I don't think that you, or anyone else, actually believes what Dawkins says about this. A simple test: would you rather have a child be adopted by a small-town Baptist minister, or a convicted sex offender who happens to be an atheist?
Well, for one thing, Dawkins's claim was a *self-report* of the relative trauma he experienced as a victim of both, at around the same age. Granted, that's a sample size of one, but my intuition as a victim of neither (with heavy signaling influence upon my answer, to boot) is a sample size of zero.
The effects of various factors upon children can be empirically measured. We know what conservative religious upbringing does to people, and we know what child sex abuse does to people. The former very possibly benefits their mental health, while the latter is devastating and can take decades to fully recover from. This is an incredibly foolish and downright offensive comparison, and the fact that Dawkins himself doesn't feel the need to condemn the the teacher who molested him and his classmates (source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dawkins-under-attack-for-his-lenient-view-of-mild-sex-abuse-kfmjx85nd9z) is irrelevant.
Could you point me to evidence that literal belief in Hell may promote positive psychological outcomes, as opposed to factors like community responsibility and sexual modesty? You seem to taking my moral claim about the Hell concept with a claim about religion or social conservatism in general, with no basis.
In the process, you pass right over my purpose for the example, which is to argue that judgments of immorality ought not directly dictate criminal law. Which means we could simply reverse it to the claim that high-neuroticism, explicitly atheist parenting styles should not be criminalized despite tending to harm children, and my argumentt would be the same.
People raised in religious homes are obviously much more likely than those not so raised to be acquire a belief in hell. If those people have comparable or better mental health outcomes when compared to those not raised in religious homes, then this indicates that the belief in hell is not having the sort of negative effect that child abuse has. To illustrate, a person raised with a sense of "community responsibility and sexual modesty," but who is also sexually abused, will (on average) have substantially worse mental health outcomes.
Also, I addressed your primary point in my initial comment: there is no comparison between "people should be allowed to teach their children ideas I don't like" and "people should be allowed to commit murder" (which is what pro-lifers believe abortion is).
Many vegans, including myself, believe that paying for the body parts of a farmed animal is morally being an accessory to murder. Do you think my political position that the state shouldn't attempt to round up and imprison all meat eaters is similarly beyond the pale?
>> Lots of pro-choicers seem to think that pro-lifers are opposed to abortion because their hatred of women is so profound that they want to restrict women’s bodies (only their uterus, apparently !?) for no further reason. Lots of people seem to think that one who is pro-life must also be stupid or sexist. These people also seem not to like to not want to make friends with those who are stupid, sexist, and want to restrict the use of random female body parts.
This is a misunderstanding of the feminist view. The feminist view has never been that men simply arbitrarily wish to control women's uteruses. It's that intersexual conflict has historically raged over control of sex and reproduction (some feminists argue that there are evolutionary roots to this). Removing a woman's right to abortion reduces a woman's control over her reproductive life. See my response to Nathan Nobis for more on this.
There is a utilitarian case for being pro-life that can be made though: the positive utility of an entire life almost certainly outweighs whatever the negative utility of going through an unwanted pregnancy is. The mother doesn't need to keep the child: it can be given up for adoption. So it's 9 months of disutility, versus an entire lifetime that most likely has positive utility, making this a rather clear cut calculus.
But when you take into account the impacts on existential threats, factory farming, and wild animal suffering it gets much more complicated, and, I think, ultimately favors the pro choice view. Though that's a more complicated analysis, one that I can't undertake here, but I might write an article about it, at some point.
Seems like you’d agree that there’s no moral difference between abortion and murdering a young child secretly, then. They’d both be positive goods, since they share the same knock-on effects on animals and x-risks.
I don't see a way for a utilitarian to say that any given abortion is permissible without saying that it would be positively immoral for the parents to carry the pregnancy to term. After all, either birth would generate more utility, or abortion would, and whichever one generates less is going to be wrong (per utilitarianism). I know you favor a scalar view (so you wouldn't think of it in terms of "permissible" and "prohibited"), but it still seems very unintuitive to suppose that there are cases where it is positively immoral for parents to NOT have an abortion.
Also, for this to lend any support to generally legalized abortion, it seems like the utilitarian would have to say that it is quite common for abortion to generate more utility than live birth, which seems like a quasi-anti-natalist position.
(Of course, I think abortion is ALWAYS wrong; I'm just commenting on what strikes me as an oddity in the utilitarian view.)
That's fair. You know, ever since I saw you attack deontology, I got really curious about interviewing you on my blog, for the specific purpose of getting a tour through the utilitarian world you believe is superior to what we have now. Or perhaps you have written such an article yourself at some point? Basically, it sounds like an utilitarian planet or country would be very different from anything seen before, and I want to see how different it would be.
By this logic, we should not merely be outlawing abortion, but actually forcing women to get pregnant and give birth as much as their bodies will allow them to do so. After all, forcing women to have children will, by your logic, still raise overall utility; the net happiness of the future children will counterbalance the misery and suffering of the women forcibly impregnated. Why wouldn't having as many children as possible become obligatory?
Well, that's an interesting question for an utilitarian, which I am not. I would get out of it by invoking the principle of moderation: it just seems extreme to force women to be pregnant all the time, and so, I don't think it should be done.
That's fair if you're not a utilitarian, but I don't see how a utilitarian who accepts the reasoning stated above could consistently invoke this principle.
My argument involves appealing to various moderate premises to show the symmetry. It has the power to convince some people who didn't previously agree with it, it's not question begging. Of course, they wouldn't agree with the moral argument, and they might find it offensive, but that's not a deficit of cognitive empathy.
"So if you think that anyone who diverges from your view on a legitimately complicated issue is evil, you’ll make it so that people are terrified to share their political views around you"
I feel like you swung from doing this to complaining about others doing this.
Thank you so much for this post! When I saw "abortion" in the title, I was ready to unfollow this blog immediately if it was another lame attempt to justify abortion. I was pleasantly surprised to find that although you might be pro-choice, you understand the pro-life position, and you are encouraging others to respond to our concern about the mass murder of babies. THANK YOU!
I find it hard to try to convince people to be pro-choice though if the only thing separating our opinions is when the fetus counts as a baby. It reminds me of the struggles I've had in the past with debating people who think using tampons makes someone lose their virginity... But maybe that's different because virginity is an even more arbitrary concept than when a baby becomes a baby.
When one becomes wrong to kill seems non-arbitrary.
Genuinely curious - are there other things that can separate your opinion from another's that makes it easier to convince him?
I do think that many abortions are significantly morally wrong. I'm politically pro-choice because criminalization isn't a magic wand that makes Bad Thing disappear, but rather requires empowering cops and prosecutors (with their highly perverse incentives), black markets and organized crime, and worst of all, a serious risk of civil war.
I like to start discussions of abortions by describing some other things I think are very morally wrong, but should also remain legal. For example, I strongly agree with Richard Dawkins that raising children to believe in Hell (where even good people of the wrong faith will go) is child abuse on a level worse than being sexually fondled. The political arguments good enough to justify keeping such religious teachings legal are good enough to keep abortion legal.
If pro-lifers are correct, then abortion is murder. There is no parallel between "we should allow parents to pass their religious beliefs on to their children" and "we should allow the murder of small children." Even if criminalizing abortion didn't reduce its occurrence (which the evidence from Dobbs suggests that it does), the state would plausibly have a duty to outlaw the killing of its most vulnerable citizens (see e.g. https://philpapers.org/rec/HARTDT-2).
Also: I'm a universalist, but the claim that raising children to believe in an eternal hell is somehow equivalent to sexual abuse is inane nonsense. For one thing, there's decent evidence that being raised in a religious home (where one is more likely to exposed to the idea of hell) is associated with improved mental health outcomes (e.g. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2695329). Even those studies which find a neutral or negative effect (which are a small minority) do not find anything like the catastrophic damage inflicted on children by sexual abuse.
I don't think that you, or anyone else, actually believes what Dawkins says about this. A simple test: would you rather have a child be adopted by a small-town Baptist minister, or a convicted sex offender who happens to be an atheist?
Well, for one thing, Dawkins's claim was a *self-report* of the relative trauma he experienced as a victim of both, at around the same age. Granted, that's a sample size of one, but my intuition as a victim of neither (with heavy signaling influence upon my answer, to boot) is a sample size of zero.
The effects of various factors upon children can be empirically measured. We know what conservative religious upbringing does to people, and we know what child sex abuse does to people. The former very possibly benefits their mental health, while the latter is devastating and can take decades to fully recover from. This is an incredibly foolish and downright offensive comparison, and the fact that Dawkins himself doesn't feel the need to condemn the the teacher who molested him and his classmates (source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dawkins-under-attack-for-his-lenient-view-of-mild-sex-abuse-kfmjx85nd9z) is irrelevant.
Could you point me to evidence that literal belief in Hell may promote positive psychological outcomes, as opposed to factors like community responsibility and sexual modesty? You seem to taking my moral claim about the Hell concept with a claim about religion or social conservatism in general, with no basis.
In the process, you pass right over my purpose for the example, which is to argue that judgments of immorality ought not directly dictate criminal law. Which means we could simply reverse it to the claim that high-neuroticism, explicitly atheist parenting styles should not be criminalized despite tending to harm children, and my argumentt would be the same.
People raised in religious homes are obviously much more likely than those not so raised to be acquire a belief in hell. If those people have comparable or better mental health outcomes when compared to those not raised in religious homes, then this indicates that the belief in hell is not having the sort of negative effect that child abuse has. To illustrate, a person raised with a sense of "community responsibility and sexual modesty," but who is also sexually abused, will (on average) have substantially worse mental health outcomes.
Also, I addressed your primary point in my initial comment: there is no comparison between "people should be allowed to teach their children ideas I don't like" and "people should be allowed to commit murder" (which is what pro-lifers believe abortion is).
Many vegans, including myself, believe that paying for the body parts of a farmed animal is morally being an accessory to murder. Do you think my political position that the state shouldn't attempt to round up and imprison all meat eaters is similarly beyond the pale?
>> Lots of pro-choicers seem to think that pro-lifers are opposed to abortion because their hatred of women is so profound that they want to restrict women’s bodies (only their uterus, apparently !?) for no further reason. Lots of people seem to think that one who is pro-life must also be stupid or sexist. These people also seem not to like to not want to make friends with those who are stupid, sexist, and want to restrict the use of random female body parts.
This is a misunderstanding of the feminist view. The feminist view has never been that men simply arbitrarily wish to control women's uteruses. It's that intersexual conflict has historically raged over control of sex and reproduction (some feminists argue that there are evolutionary roots to this). Removing a woman's right to abortion reduces a woman's control over her reproductive life. See my response to Nathan Nobis for more on this.
https://defendingfeminism.com/2021/09/28/are-abortion-restrictions-about-controlling-women-a-response-to-nobis/
There is a utilitarian case for being pro-life that can be made though: the positive utility of an entire life almost certainly outweighs whatever the negative utility of going through an unwanted pregnancy is. The mother doesn't need to keep the child: it can be given up for adoption. So it's 9 months of disutility, versus an entire lifetime that most likely has positive utility, making this a rather clear cut calculus.
But when you take into account the impacts on existential threats, factory farming, and wild animal suffering it gets much more complicated, and, I think, ultimately favors the pro choice view. Though that's a more complicated analysis, one that I can't undertake here, but I might write an article about it, at some point.
Seems like you’d agree that there’s no moral difference between abortion and murdering a young child secretly, then. They’d both be positive goods, since they share the same knock-on effects on animals and x-risks.
I don't see a way for a utilitarian to say that any given abortion is permissible without saying that it would be positively immoral for the parents to carry the pregnancy to term. After all, either birth would generate more utility, or abortion would, and whichever one generates less is going to be wrong (per utilitarianism). I know you favor a scalar view (so you wouldn't think of it in terms of "permissible" and "prohibited"), but it still seems very unintuitive to suppose that there are cases where it is positively immoral for parents to NOT have an abortion.
Also, for this to lend any support to generally legalized abortion, it seems like the utilitarian would have to say that it is quite common for abortion to generate more utility than live birth, which seems like a quasi-anti-natalist position.
(Of course, I think abortion is ALWAYS wrong; I'm just commenting on what strikes me as an oddity in the utilitarian view.)
That's fair. You know, ever since I saw you attack deontology, I got really curious about interviewing you on my blog, for the specific purpose of getting a tour through the utilitarian world you believe is superior to what we have now. Or perhaps you have written such an article yourself at some point? Basically, it sounds like an utilitarian planet or country would be very different from anything seen before, and I want to see how different it would be.
Would you be down for that?
By this logic, we should not merely be outlawing abortion, but actually forcing women to get pregnant and give birth as much as their bodies will allow them to do so. After all, forcing women to have children will, by your logic, still raise overall utility; the net happiness of the future children will counterbalance the misery and suffering of the women forcibly impregnated. Why wouldn't having as many children as possible become obligatory?
Well, that's an interesting question for an utilitarian, which I am not. I would get out of it by invoking the principle of moderation: it just seems extreme to force women to be pregnant all the time, and so, I don't think it should be done.
That's fair if you're not a utilitarian, but I don't see how a utilitarian who accepts the reasoning stated above could consistently invoke this principle.
So your factory farming rhetoric is just for attention?
I did like your take here, though.
No . . . that doesn't follow at all.
If I understand correctly, this is a call for empathy... People who need to eat meat deserve empathy too.
It's a call for cognitive empathy. I think I understand why people eat meat--mostly it tastes good and they haven't thought much about the ethics.
I feel like someone who seriously compares eating meat with bestiality is not really modeling convince empathy, no?
Why?
My argument involves appealing to various moderate premises to show the symmetry. It has the power to convince some people who didn't previously agree with it, it's not question begging. Of course, they wouldn't agree with the moral argument, and they might find it offensive, but that's not a deficit of cognitive empathy.
"So if you think that anyone who diverges from your view on a legitimately complicated issue is evil, you’ll make it so that people are terrified to share their political views around you"
I feel like you swung from doing this to complaining about others doing this.