It Matters If Abortion Is Murder

Contra Hanania on abortion

Richard Hanania has a recent piece that strikes me as quite mistaken in several ways. Richard’s an interesting guy, with thought-provoking views on a lot of topics, yet when he talks about abortion, he always talks exclusively about the political issue, as if that settled the moral question, rather than talking about the moral question. In a recent post, he explains why.

In this article, I’m going to go to bat for pro-lifers, even though I’m pro-choice, at least in the early stages. I think much of our dialogue on the topic is confused precisely because we treat it only as a political issue—abortion is a moral issue, and a difficult one at that. One can’t approach it merely by analyzing the political contours of it or its inconvenience to already-born people—they have to analyze the question of whether it kills a person. Hanania, while always interesting, represents, I think, the pinnacle of getting this topic wrong.

In regards to Hanania’s piece, first, a very small nit to pick, Hanania says that in constructing rules we “Decide what conduct is bad, based on utilitarian and moral considerations.” Utilitarian considerations are moral considerations! Utilitarianism is a moral theory. You should help out other people and avert their harm, on moral grounds. This is a bit like saying that cookbooks come in two categories: teaching people to cook and teaching them to make peace cobbler.

I’m harping on this because it’s a pretty widespread mistake that people make. Lots of theists seem to think that utilitarianism is the natural atheist morality because it’s, in some sense, what you get when you don’t have objective morality. Lots of atheists seem to think that positing that the moral facts are utilitarian is in some way less mysterious than positing that they are not. Of course, one should be a utilitarian because utilitarianism is true, but it’s not in a different category from other moral views.

Anyways, aside from that, Hanania’s main point is that the endless discussion of whether abortion is murder misses the point. Imagine people are discussing how we should treat philosophical zombies—replicas of humans that aren’t conscious. It might be that in a purely linguistic sense, killing zombies is murder—intentionally killing a human being. But it’s not wrong because it doesn’t have any of the things about murder that make murder wrong—namely, snuffing out a conscious being!

Or suppose we’re arguing about whether one should abuse their spouse to save the world. Rather than arguing semantically about whether it’s abuse—which is basically always bad—it would make sense to just argue substantively about whether it’s a good idea. Arguments of the form “X is in category Y composed mostly of bad things, so it must be bad,” are dumb, because good things can be in generally bad categories. Hanania writes:

Once we’ve considered all relevant factors, we construct definitions that the law then applies to. To reiterate, the order goes like this.

1. Decide what conduct is bad, based on utilitarian and moral considerations.

2. Construct definitions that separate stuff that’s really bad (1st degree murder), stuff that’s less bad (2nd degree murder, manslaughter, etc.), and things that superficially resemble the bad thing but are different and we don’t want to punish at all (self-defense).

3. Apply those definitions to the real world.

The definitions themselves are not the point. They’re tools we use to classify different kinds of behavior and have workable rules that lead to a just and better society.

Hanania is right that it’s not productive to argue that things are bad because they’re in some generally bad-sounding category. The desperate contortions by many on the far left when they try to explain why it would be deeply racist for someone, impressed by the eloquence of a black person, to comment favorably on his eloquence, but it wouldn’t be racist for the black person to kill the person in response, on the grounds that he’s a white person carrying out a microaggression, are caused by people wanting a bizarrely distorted definition of racism so that they can smear mud on people strategically. But sometimes, it makes sense to ask whether something is in some category because things in the category share some crucial property.

For example, here’s a perfectly good argument: you shouldn’t cause others extreme suffering for the sake of minute personal pleasure, but eating meat does that, so you shouldn’t eat meat. The claim that you shouldn’t cause others extreme suffering for small benefit isn’t believed because lots of obviously wrong actions are in the category—it’s believed because it’s obviously true.

So it can be useful to put things in categories if you are then going to argue that the things that make it wrong are the things that make the other things in the categories wrong. But that’s what pro-life people do! They argue that abortion kills an innocent person, and that one shouldn’t kill innocent people absent an absurdly strong reason.

Lots of people believe in these things called rights. They think that people have them and they make it so that you shouldn’t harm or kill those people absent a really strong reason, even if it made sense to do so on utilitarian grounds. If one believes that, it makes sense to figure out if abortion is murder—if it kills a person—because if so, then it’s involves a serious wrong. If abortion has the same wrong-making feature as shooting random people, on account of its violating rights, then abortion would be wrong.

Hanania argues against this whole idea, writing:

I think we can draw the line at the moment of birth for when life begins, if this question is even meaningful, on the grounds that once a child has taken its first breath, and has interactions with people other than its mother, it becomes a member of the community. A person “losing a pregnancy” versus “losing a child” is a distinction that just about everyone makes. You can see a child in a public place and pat her on the head. If you tried to do that to a fetus you would have to get through some wet material first and be arrested for sexually assaulting the mother. The cleaner the line is, the less you have to worry about a slippery slope.

First of all, I think it’s obvious that, just as a philosophical matter, this is indefensible. Imagine that fetuses, while in the womb, became very developed—they learned physics and calculus and philosophy. Surely it wouldn’t be okay to kill them simply because they haven’t exited the womb yet. But if this is true then the wrongness of abortion depends, not on whether one leaves the womb, but on some feature of their development (in my view, when the fetus becomes conscious).

Hanania justifies the distinction by saying that when one is born “it becomes a member of the community.” But ordinarily, we do not think it’s permissible to kill a person simply because they are not a member of the community yet. It’s not permissible to kill foreigners, for instance, though they’re not members of the community.

Instead, the general view is that it’s wrong to kill people because they have rights. But then it’s very important whether fetuses are the types of things that bear rights. It’s not just about slopping together some clear line—if the line is too late, then lots of people with rights will be killed unjustly. Richard continues:

But these are just practical arguments. I don’t have a religious belief in a thing called “human life” that has some kind of inherent value. This means that “when life begins” isn’t an important question to me, except for the purposes of debating slippery slopes, as discussed below. Even if fetuses are people by whatever definition we use, again, we don’t really have a blanket ban on killing people, given norms and laws surrounding the death penalty, self-defense, war, etc.

Second nitpick: life obviously begins at conception. The fetus, at conception, is alive. Now, there are lots of things that we think you can kill despite them being alive—bacteria, polyps, and so on—so this doesn’t affect the morality of abortion at all, but it’s annoying that people randomly turn biologically illiterate when talking about abortion.

Third nitpick: Hanania, when arguing against the notion that one should ban abortion to raise the birthrate, worries that this “might lead you to the repugnant conclusion.” The repugnant conclusion is the idea that a world with a ton of slightly happy people is better than one with 10 billion supremely happy people, because it contains so much more pleasure. The problem: thinking that it’s good when happy people come to exist is very different from accepting the repugnant conclusion. One can consistently think that it’s only good when people come to exist if their welfare level is above a certain threshold, but not good when just barely happy people come to exist. (Also, we should obviously accept the repugnant conclusion…)

Richard notes that we sometimes think it’s okay to kill people, but we recognize that there is a strong reason not to kill people. We don’t take killing people lightly. So if the fetus is a person, while it still could be permissible to get an abortion in certain cases, there are at least strong reasons not to do it.

Another way to go about this inquiry is to take a step back and ask what makes murder bad in the first place? Why do we make it illegal, given that public policy kills people all the time? Setting aside the “murder is just wrong” argument for the reasons already discussed, I think there are five main arguments against allowing people to kill others, one based on individual rights and four rooted in utilitarian considerations.

1. Most of us want to go on living. To take away our choice is to deprive us of that wish. (Rights-based argument)

2. We don’t want a world where we have to worry about being murdered. This would make it impossible to plan for the future and behave in pro-social ways. (utilitarian argument)

3. Once we start creating categories of people it is acceptable to kill, we worry about a slippery slope. (utilitarian argument)

4. People have friends, family, and twitter followers, who want us to continue living and will experience pain or unhappiness if we die. (utilitarian argument)

5. Most people’s lives contain more pleasure than pain, so it is good to keep living. They’re also a net benefit to society. (utilitarian argument).

Hanania goes on to note that 1-4 don’t apply and 5 isn’t anything that pro-life people are actually willing to argue for, plus there are all sorts of utilitarian arguments in the opposite direction, so abortion has none of the wrong-making features of killing. But I think he misses the point on 1—it’s not just wrong to kill people because they want to keep on living.

There’s a sense in which a baby doesn’t have a desire to keep on living. Babies have no concept of the notion of “keeping on living” and it’s hard to see how you could have a desire for something if you literally have no idea what that thing is. But nonetheless, rights-based arguments apply to killing babies. Strangely, argument 1 is a utilitarian argument—it’s about fewer people getting what they want, rather than violating their basic rights. Lots of people think that what utilitarians should maximize are people getting what they want—they’re called desire theorist utilitarians.

Instead, the correct rights-based argument would be “people have rights like not to be killed and you shouldn’t violate them absent a very good reason.” But this requires an analysis of whether the fetus is a person—whether killing them is more like getting rid of a bacteria or whether it’s more like shooting a baby. Arguing that abortion is murder isn’t committing the noncentral fallacy—it’s attempting to pinpoint murder’s wrong-making feature and argue that feature is shared by abortion.

Hanania concludes by analyzing the utilitarian argument against abortion in detail, arguing that being a utilitarian of some sort is the best way to oppose abortion because “rights-based and deontological arguments fail.” But it seems like he just failed to really analyze the rights-based opposition to abortion, which claims that a fetus is a person and you need a really good reason to kill persons.

If you’re a weird utilitarian like me and (it seems?) Hanania, then when the fetus becomes a person doesn’t matter to the permissibility of abortion. But if you have the mainstream view that people are entitled to basic rights, then you should care a great deal about when the fetus gains personhood.