The question of whether or not abortion should be legal is, in fact, the question of whether or not a fetus is a human, and entitled to the legal protections of a human being. The argument is not whether or not women should be forced to be incubators—we’ve already answered the question in court of whether or not we can be forced to act in a child’s best interest against our will, as failing to protect a newborn infant from the elements is wrong. Starting from that premise, there is just one question. “Is this fetus entitled to the legal protections of a human being?”
Does the fetus have human value?
I argue that all human lives have moral value, and that therefore abortion is wrong, and should be prohibited as murder.
Note that “should abortion be illegal” != “is abortion immoral”. There are plenty of people who think abortion is wrong and would never abort their own children, but are opposed to legally forbidding abortion because they realize that would just mean people who want to abort will get clandestine abortions which are much less safe, and hence such a prohibition would be a net negative.
Indeed, that’s a very general thing to remember. Forbidding something is always a double-sided sword. It’ll make that thing less frequent. But it’ll also made the remaining cases of that thing to be done in much worse conditions. It applies to abortion, prostitution, drugs, …
So we have to make a very careful analysis, when suggesting to ban something, not just if that thing is moral or not, but also if the effects of the ban will be more of “that immoral thing will be done less” or more of “that immoral thing will still be done by in worse conditions”.
That’s the reasoning that makes me favour the legalisation of drugs, and oppose bans on tobacco, while I do consider it is immoral to make widely available something that ends up torturing to death millions of persons, I do realize that a ban will lead to even more trouble (black market, organised crime, traffic, no control over quality, …).
But on some other cases, I estimate the ban to be more efficient than costly, like I’m very glad that guns are forbidden (well, strictly controlled) in France where I live.
I am pretty sure that, in practice, this does not actually apply to drugs. A couple of references indicate that criminalization does not decrease and decriminalization does not increase drug abuse. I don’t have the time/resources/expertise to search through academic articles for explicit numbers, if someone else wanted to give more thorough summaries I would be much obliged.
Right, but don’t you think that position is suspiciously convenient? I used to believe something along those lines myself, but then I realised I was just rationalising for social applause.
If you genuinely think that abortion is immoral but that illegality is counterproductive, then you should support, say, punitive taxes on it. Yet that suggestion will win you no plaudits with the “immoral but not illegal” crowd. We must draw our conclusions accordingly.
There appear to be plenty of people with that position (at least where I am) even looking at revealed preferences. (Specifically: the number of sexually active girls I know in my home town who have had a child in their teens isn’t much smaller than a Fermi estimate of the number of them who would have gotten pregnant at some point (ETA: based on what I know about the failure rates of contraception), so there’s a sizeable fraction of people who decide not to abort their own children. OTOH I can’t see many people doing anything to try to make abortion illegal. Now, it could be that those girls for some reason are less likely to abort than the general population, but “high-school students, often politically left-wing” is about the last demographic for which I’d expect that to be the case.)
EDIT: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Italy, “[a] proposal to repeal the law [allowing abortion] was considered in a 1981 national referendum, but was rejected by nearly 68% of voters” (and given the fact that the quorum for referendums to be valid in Italy is the majority of people eligible to vote, lots of the people who want to keep the status quo will usually just stay home and not vote), but “[i]n 1993, the abortion ratio in Italy was 9.8 per 1,000 live births”. Now stuff might have changed in those 12 years, but still… (Nice that wild-ass estimates I got from just looking around aren’t way far off.)
EDIT: I know there likely are lots of clandestine abortions going on in certain parts of Italy, but even if the statistic of 9.8/1,000 was off by a factor of—say-- 3, my point would still hold.)
Forgive me if I have misunderstood you, but you appear to be saying:
In your home town, most girls who got pregnant as teens kept the baby.
These girls are no less likely to abort than the general population.
Neither these girls nor anyone else is trying to make abortion illegal.
Therefore
Judging by revealed preference, there are lots of people who think that abortion is immoral but should not be illegal.
I do not see how (4) follows from (1), (2) and (3). Firstly, getting pregnant is a benefit as well as a cost—being pro-choice doesn’t mean you will have an abortion even if you want the baby. Secondly, political activism is a niche activity, and “teenage single mum” is not exactly the most represented demographic among political activists. You don’t distinguish among the groups:
Thinks abortion is immoral, and should be illegal, but not politically active.
Thinks abortion is morally permissible, and should not be illegal, but wanted to keep the baby.
Genuinely thinks abortion is morally permissible and should not be illegal.
Does not have deeply considered moral views on the matter. If asked, the response will be very sensitive to the wording of the question. Not politically active.
IMO groups (1), (2) and especially (4) have many more members than (3).
I do not understand your point about Italy at all. Could you perhaps clarify?
Since you say “political activism is a niche activity” I think you had in mind bigger things than I was thinking. When I said anything (emphasis in the original), I meant anything. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Facebook post proposing to stop abortion (whereas I see such posts about—say—vivisection all the time). And
Firstly, getting pregnant is a benefit as well as a cost—being pro-choice doesn’t mean you will have an abortion even if you want the baby.
Well, if you want a baby you don’t use contraception (not even coitus interruptus) in the first place. If you do, but it fails and you get pregnant anyway, and you still don’t abort...Since you say “political activism is a niche activity” I think you had in mind bigger things than I was thinking. When I said anything (emphasis in the original), I meant anything. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Facebook post about abortion.
Well, if you want a baby you don’t use contraception (not even coitus interruptus) in the first place. If you do, but it fails and you get pregnant anyway, and you still don’t abort...
With respect, I think this is far too simplistic an analysis. I too know teenage single mums who got pregnant by accident, but they didn’t talk about the morality of abortion as a factor in their decision.
Because they can be set at a level high enough to discourage the action somewhat, but low enough that clandestine abortions are not chosen instead.
For example, where I live cigarettes are taxed at punitive rates (to the right of the Laffer maximum) in order to discourage smoking. It is theoretically possible to evade these taxes, e.g. by growing your own tobacco or smuggling, but taxes are not so high that this is an appealing alternative, given the risks and penalties for breaking the law. So we get less smoking than otherwise, and revenue for the Exchequer, but we do not have smokers turning to dangerous contraband cigarettes instead. It is possible to mess this up; some years ago, cigarette taxes were too high, and we had a problem with smuggling. But I think the principle is clear.
The same logic applies to a tax on abortions. Suppose that the risks and dangers of an illegal abortion are worth -$5000 to the pregnant woman. Then if we forbid abortions, any woman who values an abortion at over $5000 will have one in a clandestine manner. But if instead we put a $3000 tax on abortions, then the pregnant woman who values the abortion at over $3000 will have one legally and safely, and the pregnant woman who values the abortion at less than $3000 will not have an abortion at all.
(Numbers are for illustrative purposes only).
Now, no-one is proposing a tax on abortions. I can see why you would oppose the tax if you are stringently pro-life, as you would see it as facilitating murder. I can see why you would oppose the tax if you are stringently pro-choice, as you might see it as an impermissible restriction on personal freedom. But consider the group who think that abortion is immoral, and thus presumably ought to be discouraged, but claim that their objection to a ban is that such a law would have bad practical effects. Surely then they should be searching high and low for ideas for other laws which would discourage abortion with better practical effects—like a tax. But instead people advance the argument that banning abortion would be counterproductive—and then leave it there.
My conclusion is that this argument an example of status quo bias, and fallacy of the excluded middle. I think it is popular because it allows the arguer to seem “onside” to both pro-life and pro-choice interlocutors.
But if instead we put a $3000 tax on abortions, then the pregnant woman who values the abortion at over $3000 will have one legally and safely, and the pregnant woman who values the abortion at less than $3000 will not have an abortion at all.
You assume that a woman unwilling or unable to pay $3000 would just not have an abortion. Why not assume that she would instead have a cheap, illegal, unsafe abortion—just like some women do when abortions are illegal outright?
Another argument against taxing abortion is that it’s discriminates against the poor, causing them to have fewer abortions, more unplanned children, which reinforces their families’ poverty. It is also an inducement to go into debt to afford an abortion.
However, the market will eventually adjust to your tax by providing abortion insurance, thus spreading out the cost of the tax to people who don’t actually have abortions.
However, the market will eventually adjust to your tax by providing abortion insurance, thus spreading out the cost of the tax to people who don’t actually have abortions.
Not sure about that—for an insurance company to offer such a policy would likely be very bad publicity for a certain part of the population. Given charities have refused donations to avoid bad publicity...
For a target market of roughly half of all women (going by age of fertility) - a quarter of a population—who might consider buying such an insurance policy, an insurance company could probably afford to ignore everyone else. New companies could be started with no affiliation with ones that sells other kinds of insurance if necessary.
Of course, someone who legislated a tax on abortion would probably also legislate forbidding to insure against abortion.
New companies could be started with no affiliation with ones that sells other kinds of insurance if necessary.
Yes, I hadn’t thought about that.
Of course, someone who legislated a tax on abortion would probably also legislate forbidding to insure against abortion.
Well, if they really wanted to they’d probably find a way around that. For example, they could call it an insurance on pregnancy (and claim they don’t require the pregnancy to be successful because a pregnancy ending in miscarriage also costs several months of your life, or stuff like that).
Wow, now that I think about this, such an insurance policy makes sense even if people aren’t going to abort. (Though being given $3000 una tantum doesn’t solve all the problems in the world for someone very poor who wants to raise a child.)
Wow, now that I think about this, such an insurance policy makes sense even if people aren’t going to abort.
I’m not sure I understand. Are you suggesting an insurance policy that pays out if you get pregnant or give birth?
Normally insurance policies are taken against unwanted events. If you have a policy that pays out in case of abortion, that makes sense to the insurance company because if you’re willing to abort, you probably tried to avoid the pregnancy by e.g. using contraceptives.
But if you have a policy that pays out in case of something that is generally wanted (ETA: by those doing it) - giving birth—then people would take out the policy only if they do want to give birth. Then the percentage of people with the policy who get paid would be near 100%, and the insurance company would make a loss on the policy, so they wouldn’t offer it.
Yes, I hadn’t thought about that. (And there’s no obvious way of proving that you’re using contraception to the insurance company, so you can’t even have a policy that pays only if you are.)
(Not sure about “generally wanted”, though: I guess that, among the people who are having sex today (in the developed world at least) the fraction who are trying to have a baby is much less than 1.)
EDIT: Maybe it could work if restricted to demographics who wouldn’t normally want a child (say, unmarried, below a certain age, and with income below a certain threshold) -- though the premiums mustn’t be so large that people would want to get pregnant only for the money.
Not sure about “generally wanted”, though: I guess that, among the people who are having sex today (in the developed world at least) the fraction who are trying to have a baby is much less than 1.)
Poor phrasing on my part, will fix. I meant that people who get pregnant and give birth (while having the options to use contraceptives and to abort) generally want to raise a child. Not that people in general want to raise one.
Maybe it could work if restricted to demographics who wouldn’t normally want a child
This depends on the availability, cost and effectiveness of preventatives and abortions: if they’re good enough, you don’t need to pay for pregnancy insurance, since they will prevent or abort the pregnancy.
In practice, since I haven’t heard of such insurance policies, I expect that they are indeed cheap and effective enough.
(Apart from the fact that taxing abortions would discourage poor people from aborting more than it would rich people, which is not exactly what most people would want—unless the tax scales with the woman’s income, but that would just give Yet Another incentive for people to underreport their incomes) maybe that just doesn’t occur to people? Seriously, some of these homo hypocritus discussions badly fail Hanlon’s Razor (i.e. forget that 84% of the population has IQs below 115, or forget the way people with IQs below 115 think). My grandpa complains if I keep too many lights on when I’m at his place, but he has incandescent bulbs rather than fluorescent ones; does this mean he’s lying about his concern about how much he spends on electricity? Maybe Hanson would say he is and could concoct some explanation of why he would he want do that, but I honestly can’t.
I agree that a tax doesn’t occur to most people. Nor does any other solution. That’s exactly what I’m saying is suspicious—it looks very much like motivated stopping. And more than that—if you do propose a tax on abortion, or public shaming for those who commit abortion, or any other intermediate step, these people concoct special pleading reasons to be against it.
If you claim to believe that something is immoral, but you are not interested in preventing it and react against any proposal that might, then I think the simplest conclusion is that you don’t really think it’s immoral.
I should point out, for the record, that I am not actually proposing a tax on abortions, or that people having abortions be publicly shamed, etc. I am merely pointing out that these are logical steps if you think it’s “immoral but shouldn’t be illegal.”
So does the fact that my grandpa hasn’t looked for ways to save on his electricity bill (at least, not hard enough for him to buy fluorescence lightbulbs) also look like motivated stopping? Motivated by what? (My model of people like him also says that telling him about fluorescence lightbulbs wouldn’t be enough to make him buy some.)
I imagine his stopping is motivated partly by laziness/habit. Yet I’m sure he’d switch if you were able to convince him that fluorescent lightbulbs would save him (say) $1000 a month. So it’s also a question of cost/benefit.
But while I don’t think he’s lying, I do imagine that there’s more to his reaction to leaving the lightbulb on than the mere cost. It is also the fact that it is wasteful. Leaving a lightbulb on in a room you’re not in feels profligate, and wrong, in a way that failing to buy the most energy-efficient lightbulb does not.
I imagine his stopping is motivated partly by laziness/habit.
Couldn’t the reason why people don’t think about ways to discourage abortions also be laziness? “Humans are cognitive misers” an’ all that. (Especially in the case of people who have never had an undesired pregnancy themselves.)
The question of whether or not abortion should be legal is, in fact, the question of whether or not a fetus is a human...
This is the fundamental mistake in moral philosophy—to feel compelled to value according to your categories, instead of categorizing according to your values.
How can you define your values without using categories? I don’t think you can. How can you say that Clippy values making paperclips without referring to a ‘paperclip’ category?
You can’t, because you define words, not values, or tastes, or smells, or sights, or sounds.
Clippy can have pattern matching algorithms without any verbal content. Then he might attempt to identify his values using words, but values can exist without words.
There’s some semantic confusion going on here with the word ‘define’. By ‘define your values’ I meant something like ‘state your values explicitly’.
Clippy’s pattern matching algorithm itself defines (or constructs, if you prefer) a category that can be explicitly stated. It seems natural to say that Clippy values according to its paperclip category.
The argument that abortion should be illegal goes:
A fetus is a person.
Killing a person is bad.
Therefore, killing a fetus is bad.
I believe that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing thing. A newborn baby is most likely a significant fraction of a person. Certainly enough to be important. A fetus early in development is not-a-person enough to ignore. Also, I don’t believe that killing a person is bad, at least not intrinsically. It’s bad because someone who is dead can’t be happy, but preventing abortion is not the best way to increase the population. Getting pregnant and getting an abortion is morally about the same as never getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course, just because death is morally neutral doesn’t mean birth is. Is there any way to tell how unborn babies feel? If the last trimester is basically keeping the baby in solitary confinement for three months, then you shouldn’t stay pregnant that long unless you plan on letting the fetus be born and have a life worth living.
I argue that all human lives have moral value
Taboo human. Do you mean self-aware entity? Entity capable of feeling emotion? Entity containing a large number of copies of a double helix structure that contains a very long and specific series of nucleotides?
Now: here’s the thing about this game. It’s easy. It’s easy because neither of us is wedded in identity or ego to the outcome. It is merely an exercise in evaluated argument schema. I didn’t even take a position on the issue here, I simply responded to invalidity issues in your argument. This is nothing like politics as it really happens. The arguments aren’t soldiers. I’m not trying to win. We haven’t taken sides. So our minds will be fine. But it won’t prove anything.
we’ve already answered the question in court
We’ve also already answered the abortion question in court (I assume the context is the American legal system...) if that criteria is sufficient to establish one of your premises it should be sufficient to establish the issue in it’s entirety. Conversely, if the abortion question is up for debate, so too is the sheltering newborns from the elements questions.
of whether or not we can be forced to act in a child’s best interest against our will
The government can legally force me to pay income taxes against my will. That does not settle the question of whether or not the government can legally force me to do anything against my will. For instance, most people do not believe it is legal for the government to secretly lock me up and torture me without due process. Similarly, there being an obligation to shelter newborn infants does not settle the question of the extent of the sacrifices a government can require of parents for their children. Presumably there are some sacrifices you would find onerous.
I argue that all human lives have moral value,
Your terms are ambiguous and the substance of the issue lies in their definitions. In particular, you appear to beg the question about when in fact human life begins. Those who support a legal right to abortion often deny that human life begins at conception and have various reasons for this view.
In conclusion 1) the argument you use for one of your premises also argues for the inverse of your conclusion, 2) your subconclusion that women can be forced to be incubators if fetuses are humans does not follow from your premise and 3) you provide no argument for the claim that fetuses are human lives
[META] I’m not trying to win for a reason; it would be improper for me, a person who loves to argue about politics, to create a “test” in which I conveniently get to argue about politics with a community which has a prohibition against arguing about politics; I felt that there would be an implicit ethical violation there. I chose that argument specifically so I wouldn’t get sucked in. Yeah, the axiom I chose was kind of poor; it’s not a position I regularly argue from. Fortunately, even faulty arguments are good for this test. (And holy crap staying uninvolved is going to be hard. I had to erase my counterarguments four times while writing this.) [/META]
we’ve already answered the question in court of whether or not we can be forced to act in a child’s best interest against our will
I don’t think we have answered the question, in court, of whether or not we can force parents to donate organs. I would expect the courts to say No, the right to bodily autonomy (and the right to choose medical risks) outweighs the benefit to the child of guaranteed organs.
Infants and fetuses are not sapient. Arbitrarily privileging biological life regardless of its mental capability would set a horrible precedent. Note that there isn’t that coherent of a line between more intelligent mammals and human babies.
(Assuming we rely on sapience as the chief criterion for privileging life, as you seem to imply)
You are also not in a sapient-testable state when you’re under the effects of anesthesia, or in deep sleep.
You might object that you will be in such a state again once you wake up—in other words, that you have the future potential to be in a sapient state.
That, however, would also apply to a human baby, albeit given another time horizon, while it would not apply (to the same degree) to many other mammals, whose individual future potential is much more limited.
Why would you be worthy of protection (e.g. while in a medical coma) based on regaining testable sapience in a matter of weeks—or months—if a baby weren’t?
Our local surroundings could be made into a dense volume of self-replicating computronium hosting as many bare-minimum sapients as possible, but only a few people here would argue that it’s morally imperative to carry that out to full term.
Another difference is that the mature sapient has typically specified, or would specify, that it should be reinstated in advance, and works within the framework of society. If the baby survives any sort of abuse it undergoes until it is sapient, then it might be entitled to some damages, but until then, it lacks self-ownership and is susceptible to destruction by its possessors.
Well, in point of fact I don’t feel sure that “For The People Who Are Still Alive” works here. But if we end a consciousness that has already started, even if it’s currently paused, that certainly appears to reduce its “average lifespan”. We can infer that this decision procedure would reduce the chance of a random real human satisfying his/her desires for more life, if the argument in the linked post works at all.
Note that there isn’t that coherent of a line between more intelligent mammals and human babies.
Bet: If you give me 1,000 pictures each of fully developed chimpanzees, dolphins and some newborn babies (none of which have any birth defects) I will be able to distinguish between every one. (I will then assign moral weight consistently according to the principle “My species matters more so there!”)
Note that there isn’t that coherent of a line between more intelligent mammals and human babies.
Of course there is. The latter is human and the former (assuming you mean “more intelligent non-human mammals”) is not. It is very easy to tell the difference and there are no doubtful cases.
There are no comparably clear lines to separate human fetuses, infants, children, and adults.
It’s good to note the obvious oversight in the grandparent’s claim. That said, a charitable reading of that claim (operationalized for your convenience) is that there does not exist a prediction rule that takes a fairly detailed description of a being’s* behavior in some task requiring intelligence and outputs a high accuracy classification.
*selected from a known mutually exclusive and exhaustive list of possibilities limited to human infants and adult intelligent mammals.
there does not exist a prediction rule that takes a fairly detailed description of a being’s* behavior in some task requiring intelligence and outputs a high accuracy classification.
To look for one presumes, as does Dallas, that the division between entities with rights and entities without is to be drawn in terms of current mental capability. Someone in dreamless sleep currently has less mental capability than an awake baby, or, I guess, a soon-to-be-born one. The argument for turning off Terri Schiavo’s life support was that she had no possibility of regaining any mental function, not that she currently had none.
Why are you replying to me instead of Dallas? I’m not defending the argument. I just noticed that more than one person was distracted by the obvious oversight, so I zombified Dallas’s claim as best as I was able.
Society has de facto decided that lives have different levels of moral value, and that it is ok to kill in some contexts. If you feel a fetus is not human, this averts the question, but even if a fetus is human you still can and should decide to whether they are moral to kill separately.
Personally, I don’t think humans without subjective experience or memories are innately valuable, so I’m fine with killing them for convenience.
There is not one “question of whether abortion should be legal”. There are several, presented in different contexts.
For instance, one of the arguments used within theocratic groups against abortion, is that legalization of abortion allows sexually promiscuous women to escape the just consequences of their sinful choices. This is analogous to the argument made regarding vaccination against sexually transmitted diseases such as HPV: that by reducing the possible “punishment” for sexual promiscuity, vaccination promotes promiscuity. Since theocrats consider sexual promiscuity to be inherently wrong, reducing its possible negative consequences is evil.
However, this argument is not usually used between theocrats and others in society, because most others do not accept the premises, and many consider such an anti-consequentialist argument to be villainy (or at least bigotry) in itself.
You will notice that this is a divine-command argument, not a consequentialist argument. The argument is not even “sexual promiscuity will send you to hell; we should discourage you from going to hell.” It is, rather, “we are commanded by God to prevent sinners from escaping punishment.”
The last sentence was a clumsy attempt at an axiom and a conclusion; I was rushing when I wrote this so the comment would be there when somebody got to the end of the post. (In retrospect, I really should have written this -before- I posted the article.) Indeed, everything except the last sentence I ended up copying from my blog, because I realized it would be faster than trying to rewrite the logic from scratch. I omitted several pieces of logic that the blog contained in my haste, however, including the conditional that the current state of legal affairs about leaving infants exposed to the elements is desirable.
This is actually a good argument that, predictably, most people are ignoring (since the weak premise is such a tempting target). But it’s not airtight.
I am under no legal obligation to go out of my way to save random children. People are only under legal obligation to sacrifice their own interests to keep children alive, after they have taken on the legal responsibility to care for that child, by becoming the child’s legal guardian. It’s true that we, as a society, make sure that all children have legal guardians, and that those guardians take care of the child. In contrast fetuses have no legal guardians. That doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t treating them as people, it just means we aren’t treating them as children. Adults also have no legal guardians.
But even if we insist that fetuses must have legal guardians, there is still a loophole. Suppose mother A gives up her unborn fetus for adoption. Mother B adopts, and A removes the fetus since she is no longer under any obligation to care for it. Then B, fulfilling her obligation as a guardian, does everything in her power to keep the fetus alive, but of course it dies anyway. This is an absurd example, but it illustrates how we may be able to kill fetuses, not because they entitled to fewer human rights, but merely because they are in such a unique position as humans.
Finally, It seems this argument was designed with the Violinist thought experiment) in mind. But does it really change things? Are you required to make organ donations to your children, if they need it? (hat tip to hairyfigment)
I think it really is a matter of whether or not women should be forced to be incubators. Even if we decide that fetuses should have full human rights, we would need to find a way to balance the rights of mother and fetus. And that balance would at least sometimes allow abortion. For example, we certainly wouldn’t force a women to carry a fetus to term, if there were a 50% chance they would both die in childbirth.
The question of whether or not abortion should be legal is, in fact, the question of whether or not a fetus is a human, and entitled to the legal protections of a human being. The argument is not whether or not women should be forced to be incubators—we’ve already answered the question in court of whether or not we can be forced to act in a child’s best interest against our will, as failing to protect a newborn infant from the elements is wrong. Starting from that premise, there is just one question. “Is this fetus entitled to the legal protections of a human being?”
Does the fetus have human value?
I argue that all human lives have moral value, and that therefore abortion is wrong, and should be prohibited as murder.
Note that “should abortion be illegal” != “is abortion immoral”. There are plenty of people who think abortion is wrong and would never abort their own children, but are opposed to legally forbidding abortion because they realize that would just mean people who want to abort will get clandestine abortions which are much less safe, and hence such a prohibition would be a net negative.
Indeed, that’s a very general thing to remember. Forbidding something is always a double-sided sword. It’ll make that thing less frequent. But it’ll also made the remaining cases of that thing to be done in much worse conditions. It applies to abortion, prostitution, drugs, …
So we have to make a very careful analysis, when suggesting to ban something, not just if that thing is moral or not, but also if the effects of the ban will be more of “that immoral thing will be done less” or more of “that immoral thing will still be done by in worse conditions”.
That’s the reasoning that makes me favour the legalisation of drugs, and oppose bans on tobacco, while I do consider it is immoral to make widely available something that ends up torturing to death millions of persons, I do realize that a ban will lead to even more trouble (black market, organised crime, traffic, no control over quality, …).
But on some other cases, I estimate the ban to be more efficient than costly, like I’m very glad that guns are forbidden (well, strictly controlled) in France where I live.
I am pretty sure that, in practice, this does not actually apply to drugs. A couple of references indicate that criminalization does not decrease and decriminalization does not increase drug abuse. I don’t have the time/resources/expertise to search through academic articles for explicit numbers, if someone else wanted to give more thorough summaries I would be much obliged.
Right, but don’t you think that position is suspiciously convenient? I used to believe something along those lines myself, but then I realised I was just rationalising for social applause.
If you genuinely think that abortion is immoral but that illegality is counterproductive, then you should support, say, punitive taxes on it. Yet that suggestion will win you no plaudits with the “immoral but not illegal” crowd. We must draw our conclusions accordingly.
There appear to be plenty of people with that position (at least where I am) even looking at revealed preferences. (Specifically: the number of sexually active girls I know in my home town who have had a child in their teens isn’t much smaller than a Fermi estimate of the number of them who would have gotten pregnant at some point (ETA: based on what I know about the failure rates of contraception), so there’s a sizeable fraction of people who decide not to abort their own children. OTOH I can’t see many people doing anything to try to make abortion illegal. Now, it could be that those girls for some reason are less likely to abort than the general population, but “high-school students, often politically left-wing” is about the last demographic for which I’d expect that to be the case.)
EDIT: According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Italy, “[a] proposal to repeal the law [allowing abortion] was considered in a 1981 national referendum, but was rejected by nearly 68% of voters” (and given the fact that the quorum for referendums to be valid in Italy is the majority of people eligible to vote, lots of the people who want to keep the status quo will usually just stay home and not vote), but “[i]n 1993, the abortion ratio in Italy was 9.8 per 1,000 live births”. Now stuff might have changed in those 12 years, but still… (Nice that wild-ass estimates I got from just looking around aren’t way far off.)
EDIT: I know there likely are lots of clandestine abortions going on in certain parts of Italy, but even if the statistic of 9.8/1,000 was off by a factor of—say-- 3, my point would still hold.)
Forgive me if I have misunderstood you, but you appear to be saying:
In your home town, most girls who got pregnant as teens kept the baby.
These girls are no less likely to abort than the general population.
Neither these girls nor anyone else is trying to make abortion illegal. Therefore
Judging by revealed preference, there are lots of people who think that abortion is immoral but should not be illegal.
I do not see how (4) follows from (1), (2) and (3). Firstly, getting pregnant is a benefit as well as a cost—being pro-choice doesn’t mean you will have an abortion even if you want the baby. Secondly, political activism is a niche activity, and “teenage single mum” is not exactly the most represented demographic among political activists. You don’t distinguish among the groups:
Thinks abortion is immoral, and should be illegal, but not politically active.
Thinks abortion is morally permissible, and should not be illegal, but wanted to keep the baby.
Genuinely thinks abortion is morally permissible and should not be illegal.
Does not have deeply considered moral views on the matter. If asked, the response will be very sensitive to the wording of the question. Not politically active.
IMO groups (1), (2) and especially (4) have many more members than (3).
I do not understand your point about Italy at all. Could you perhaps clarify?
Since you say “political activism is a niche activity” I think you had in mind bigger things than I was thinking. When I said anything (emphasis in the original), I meant anything. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Facebook post proposing to stop abortion (whereas I see such posts about—say—vivisection all the time). And
Well, if you want a baby you don’t use contraception (not even coitus interruptus) in the first place. If you do, but it fails and you get pregnant anyway, and you still don’t abort...Since you say “political activism is a niche activity” I think you had in mind bigger things than I was thinking. When I said anything (emphasis in the original), I meant anything. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Facebook post about abortion.
With respect, I think this is far too simplistic an analysis. I too know teenage single mums who got pregnant by accident, but they didn’t talk about the morality of abortion as a factor in their decision.
That’s why I said I was talking about revealed preferences.
Why would punitive taxes have a result different in kind from outright prohibition?
Because they can be set at a level high enough to discourage the action somewhat, but low enough that clandestine abortions are not chosen instead.
For example, where I live cigarettes are taxed at punitive rates (to the right of the Laffer maximum) in order to discourage smoking. It is theoretically possible to evade these taxes, e.g. by growing your own tobacco or smuggling, but taxes are not so high that this is an appealing alternative, given the risks and penalties for breaking the law. So we get less smoking than otherwise, and revenue for the Exchequer, but we do not have smokers turning to dangerous contraband cigarettes instead. It is possible to mess this up; some years ago, cigarette taxes were too high, and we had a problem with smuggling. But I think the principle is clear.
The same logic applies to a tax on abortions. Suppose that the risks and dangers of an illegal abortion are worth -$5000 to the pregnant woman. Then if we forbid abortions, any woman who values an abortion at over $5000 will have one in a clandestine manner. But if instead we put a $3000 tax on abortions, then the pregnant woman who values the abortion at over $3000 will have one legally and safely, and the pregnant woman who values the abortion at less than $3000 will not have an abortion at all.
(Numbers are for illustrative purposes only).
Now, no-one is proposing a tax on abortions. I can see why you would oppose the tax if you are stringently pro-life, as you would see it as facilitating murder. I can see why you would oppose the tax if you are stringently pro-choice, as you might see it as an impermissible restriction on personal freedom. But consider the group who think that abortion is immoral, and thus presumably ought to be discouraged, but claim that their objection to a ban is that such a law would have bad practical effects. Surely then they should be searching high and low for ideas for other laws which would discourage abortion with better practical effects—like a tax. But instead people advance the argument that banning abortion would be counterproductive—and then leave it there.
My conclusion is that this argument an example of status quo bias, and fallacy of the excluded middle. I think it is popular because it allows the arguer to seem “onside” to both pro-life and pro-choice interlocutors.
You assume that a woman unwilling or unable to pay $3000 would just not have an abortion. Why not assume that she would instead have a cheap, illegal, unsafe abortion—just like some women do when abortions are illegal outright?
Another argument against taxing abortion is that it’s discriminates against the poor, causing them to have fewer abortions, more unplanned children, which reinforces their families’ poverty. It is also an inducement to go into debt to afford an abortion.
However, the market will eventually adjust to your tax by providing abortion insurance, thus spreading out the cost of the tax to people who don’t actually have abortions.
Not sure about that—for an insurance company to offer such a policy would likely be very bad publicity for a certain part of the population. Given charities have refused donations to avoid bad publicity...
For a target market of roughly half of all women (going by age of fertility) - a quarter of a population—who might consider buying such an insurance policy, an insurance company could probably afford to ignore everyone else. New companies could be started with no affiliation with ones that sells other kinds of insurance if necessary.
Of course, someone who legislated a tax on abortion would probably also legislate forbidding to insure against abortion.
Yes, I hadn’t thought about that.
Well, if they really wanted to they’d probably find a way around that. For example, they could call it an insurance on pregnancy (and claim they don’t require the pregnancy to be successful because a pregnancy ending in miscarriage also costs several months of your life, or stuff like that).
Wow, now that I think about this, such an insurance policy makes sense even if people aren’t going to abort. (Though being given $3000 una tantum doesn’t solve all the problems in the world for someone very poor who wants to raise a child.)
I’m not sure I understand. Are you suggesting an insurance policy that pays out if you get pregnant or give birth?
Normally insurance policies are taken against unwanted events. If you have a policy that pays out in case of abortion, that makes sense to the insurance company because if you’re willing to abort, you probably tried to avoid the pregnancy by e.g. using contraceptives.
But if you have a policy that pays out in case of something that is generally wanted (ETA: by those doing it) - giving birth—then people would take out the policy only if they do want to give birth. Then the percentage of people with the policy who get paid would be near 100%, and the insurance company would make a loss on the policy, so they wouldn’t offer it.
Yes, I hadn’t thought about that. (And there’s no obvious way of proving that you’re using contraception to the insurance company, so you can’t even have a policy that pays only if you are.)
(Not sure about “generally wanted”, though: I guess that, among the people who are having sex today (in the developed world at least) the fraction who are trying to have a baby is much less than 1.)
EDIT: Maybe it could work if restricted to demographics who wouldn’t normally want a child (say, unmarried, below a certain age, and with income below a certain threshold) -- though the premiums mustn’t be so large that people would want to get pregnant only for the money.
Poor phrasing on my part, will fix. I meant that people who get pregnant and give birth (while having the options to use contraceptives and to abort) generally want to raise a child. Not that people in general want to raise one.
This depends on the availability, cost and effectiveness of preventatives and abortions: if they’re good enough, you don’t need to pay for pregnancy insurance, since they will prevent or abort the pregnancy.
In practice, since I haven’t heard of such insurance policies, I expect that they are indeed cheap and effective enough.
(Apart from the fact that taxing abortions would discourage poor people from aborting more than it would rich people, which is not exactly what most people would want—unless the tax scales with the woman’s income, but that would just give Yet Another incentive for people to underreport their incomes) maybe that just doesn’t occur to people? Seriously, some of these homo hypocritus discussions badly fail Hanlon’s Razor (i.e. forget that 84% of the population has IQs below 115, or forget the way people with IQs below 115 think). My grandpa complains if I keep too many lights on when I’m at his place, but he has incandescent bulbs rather than fluorescent ones; does this mean he’s lying about his concern about how much he spends on electricity? Maybe Hanson would say he is and could concoct some explanation of why he would he want do that, but I honestly can’t.
I agree that a tax doesn’t occur to most people. Nor does any other solution. That’s exactly what I’m saying is suspicious—it looks very much like motivated stopping. And more than that—if you do propose a tax on abortion, or public shaming for those who commit abortion, or any other intermediate step, these people concoct special pleading reasons to be against it.
If you claim to believe that something is immoral, but you are not interested in preventing it and react against any proposal that might, then I think the simplest conclusion is that you don’t really think it’s immoral.
I should point out, for the record, that I am not actually proposing a tax on abortions, or that people having abortions be publicly shamed, etc. I am merely pointing out that these are logical steps if you think it’s “immoral but shouldn’t be illegal.”
So does the fact that my grandpa hasn’t looked for ways to save on his electricity bill (at least, not hard enough for him to buy fluorescence lightbulbs) also look like motivated stopping? Motivated by what? (My model of people like him also says that telling him about fluorescence lightbulbs wouldn’t be enough to make him buy some.)
I imagine his stopping is motivated partly by laziness/habit. Yet I’m sure he’d switch if you were able to convince him that fluorescent lightbulbs would save him (say) $1000 a month. So it’s also a question of cost/benefit.
But while I don’t think he’s lying, I do imagine that there’s more to his reaction to leaving the lightbulb on than the mere cost. It is also the fact that it is wasteful. Leaving a lightbulb on in a room you’re not in feels profligate, and wrong, in a way that failing to buy the most energy-efficient lightbulb does not.
Couldn’t the reason why people don’t think about ways to discourage abortions also be laziness? “Humans are cognitive misers” an’ all that. (Especially in the case of people who have never had an undesired pregnancy themselves.)
This is the fundamental mistake in moral philosophy—to feel compelled to value according to your categories, instead of categorizing according to your values.
Probably the reason for this mistake is that we confuse moral philosophy with legislation, where it is very important to have clear rules.
How can you define your values without using categories? I don’t think you can. How can you say that Clippy values making paperclips without referring to a ‘paperclip’ category?
You can’t, because you define words, not values, or tastes, or smells, or sights, or sounds.
Clippy can have pattern matching algorithms without any verbal content. Then he might attempt to identify his values using words, but values can exist without words.
There’s some semantic confusion going on here with the word ‘define’. By ‘define your values’ I meant something like ‘state your values explicitly’.
Clippy’s pattern matching algorithm itself defines (or constructs, if you prefer) a category that can be explicitly stated. It seems natural to say that Clippy values according to its paperclip category.
In actual fact, there’s little reason to believe that anyone in the universe can explicitly state Clippy’s values accurately.
I believe that with sufficient study and analysis, someone could. But positing that Clippy exists in no way entails that anyone can.
The argument that abortion should be illegal goes:
A fetus is a person.
Killing a person is bad.
Therefore, killing a fetus is bad.
I believe that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing thing. A newborn baby is most likely a significant fraction of a person. Certainly enough to be important. A fetus early in development is not-a-person enough to ignore. Also, I don’t believe that killing a person is bad, at least not intrinsically. It’s bad because someone who is dead can’t be happy, but preventing abortion is not the best way to increase the population. Getting pregnant and getting an abortion is morally about the same as never getting pregnant in the first place.
Of course, just because death is morally neutral doesn’t mean birth is. Is there any way to tell how unborn babies feel? If the last trimester is basically keeping the baby in solitary confinement for three months, then you shouldn’t stay pregnant that long unless you plan on letting the fetus be born and have a life worth living.
Taboo human. Do you mean self-aware entity? Entity capable of feeling emotion? Entity containing a large number of copies of a double helix structure that contains a very long and specific series of nucleotides?
Now: here’s the thing about this game. It’s easy. It’s easy because neither of us is wedded in identity or ego to the outcome. It is merely an exercise in evaluated argument schema. I didn’t even take a position on the issue here, I simply responded to invalidity issues in your argument. This is nothing like politics as it really happens. The arguments aren’t soldiers. I’m not trying to win. We haven’t taken sides. So our minds will be fine. But it won’t prove anything.
We’ve also already answered the abortion question in court (I assume the context is the American legal system...) if that criteria is sufficient to establish one of your premises it should be sufficient to establish the issue in it’s entirety. Conversely, if the abortion question is up for debate, so too is the sheltering newborns from the elements questions.
The government can legally force me to pay income taxes against my will. That does not settle the question of whether or not the government can legally force me to do anything against my will. For instance, most people do not believe it is legal for the government to secretly lock me up and torture me without due process. Similarly, there being an obligation to shelter newborn infants does not settle the question of the extent of the sacrifices a government can require of parents for their children. Presumably there are some sacrifices you would find onerous.
Your terms are ambiguous and the substance of the issue lies in their definitions. In particular, you appear to beg the question about when in fact human life begins. Those who support a legal right to abortion often deny that human life begins at conception and have various reasons for this view.
In conclusion 1) the argument you use for one of your premises also argues for the inverse of your conclusion, 2) your subconclusion that women can be forced to be incubators if fetuses are humans does not follow from your premise and 3) you provide no argument for the claim that fetuses are human lives
[META] I’m not trying to win for a reason; it would be improper for me, a person who loves to argue about politics, to create a “test” in which I conveniently get to argue about politics with a community which has a prohibition against arguing about politics; I felt that there would be an implicit ethical violation there. I chose that argument specifically so I wouldn’t get sucked in. Yeah, the axiom I chose was kind of poor; it’s not a position I regularly argue from. Fortunately, even faulty arguments are good for this test. (And holy crap staying uninvolved is going to be hard. I had to erase my counterarguments four times while writing this.) [/META]
Now this is really interesting evidence. But I’m not sure it’s unique to political issues.
I don’t think we have answered the question, in court, of whether or not we can force parents to donate organs. I would expect the courts to say No, the right to bodily autonomy (and the right to choose medical risks) outweighs the benefit to the child of guaranteed organs.
Infants and fetuses are not sapient. Arbitrarily privileging biological life regardless of its mental capability would set a horrible precedent. Note that there isn’t that coherent of a line between more intelligent mammals and human babies.
(Assuming we rely on sapience as the chief criterion for privileging life, as you seem to imply)
You are also not in a sapient-testable state when you’re under the effects of anesthesia, or in deep sleep.
You might object that you will be in such a state again once you wake up—in other words, that you have the future potential to be in a sapient state.
That, however, would also apply to a human baby, albeit given another time horizon, while it would not apply (to the same degree) to many other mammals, whose individual future potential is much more limited.
Why would you be worthy of protection (e.g. while in a medical coma) based on regaining testable sapience in a matter of weeks—or months—if a baby weren’t?
Our local surroundings could be made into a dense volume of self-replicating computronium hosting as many bare-minimum sapients as possible, but only a few people here would argue that it’s morally imperative to carry that out to full term.
Another difference is that the mature sapient has typically specified, or would specify, that it should be reinstated in advance, and works within the framework of society. If the baby survives any sort of abuse it undergoes until it is sapient, then it might be entitled to some damages, but until then, it lacks self-ownership and is susceptible to destruction by its possessors.
Well, in point of fact I don’t feel sure that “For The People Who Are Still Alive” works here. But if we end a consciousness that has already started, even if it’s currently paused, that certainly appears to reduce its “average lifespan”. We can infer that this decision procedure would reduce the chance of a random real human satisfying his/her desires for more life, if the argument in the linked post works at all.
Bet: If you give me 1,000 pictures each of fully developed chimpanzees, dolphins and some newborn babies (none of which have any birth defects) I will be able to distinguish between every one. (I will then assign moral weight consistently according to the principle “My species matters more so there!”)
RichardKennaway made a similar comment and I replied here.
Of course there is. The latter is human and the former (assuming you mean “more intelligent non-human mammals”) is not. It is very easy to tell the difference and there are no doubtful cases.
There are no comparably clear lines to separate human fetuses, infants, children, and adults.
It’s good to note the obvious oversight in the grandparent’s claim. That said, a charitable reading of that claim (operationalized for your convenience) is that there does not exist a prediction rule that takes a fairly detailed description of a being’s* behavior in some task requiring intelligence and outputs a high accuracy classification.
*selected from a known mutually exclusive and exhaustive list of possibilities limited to human infants and adult intelligent mammals.
To look for one presumes, as does Dallas, that the division between entities with rights and entities without is to be drawn in terms of current mental capability. Someone in dreamless sleep currently has less mental capability than an awake baby, or, I guess, a soon-to-be-born one. The argument for turning off Terri Schiavo’s life support was that she had no possibility of regaining any mental function, not that she currently had none.
Why are you replying to me instead of Dallas? I’m not defending the argument. I just noticed that more than one person was distracted by the obvious oversight, so I zombified Dallas’s claim as best as I was able.
Society has de facto decided that lives have different levels of moral value, and that it is ok to kill in some contexts. If you feel a fetus is not human, this averts the question, but even if a fetus is human you still can and should decide to whether they are moral to kill separately.
Personally, I don’t think humans without subjective experience or memories are innately valuable, so I’m fine with killing them for convenience.
There is not one “question of whether abortion should be legal”. There are several, presented in different contexts.
For instance, one of the arguments used within theocratic groups against abortion, is that legalization of abortion allows sexually promiscuous women to escape the just consequences of their sinful choices. This is analogous to the argument made regarding vaccination against sexually transmitted diseases such as HPV: that by reducing the possible “punishment” for sexual promiscuity, vaccination promotes promiscuity. Since theocrats consider sexual promiscuity to be inherently wrong, reducing its possible negative consequences is evil.
However, this argument is not usually used between theocrats and others in society, because most others do not accept the premises, and many consider such an anti-consequentialist argument to be villainy (or at least bigotry) in itself.
You will notice that this is a divine-command argument, not a consequentialist argument. The argument is not even “sexual promiscuity will send you to hell; we should discourage you from going to hell.” It is, rather, “we are commanded by God to prevent sinners from escaping punishment.”
I agree wholeheartedly with most of your post (in fact I make that point freqquently in other words) but the last sentence does not follow.
The last sentence was a clumsy attempt at an axiom and a conclusion; I was rushing when I wrote this so the comment would be there when somebody got to the end of the post. (In retrospect, I really should have written this -before- I posted the article.) Indeed, everything except the last sentence I ended up copying from my blog, because I realized it would be faster than trying to rewrite the logic from scratch. I omitted several pieces of logic that the blog contained in my haste, however, including the conditional that the current state of legal affairs about leaving infants exposed to the elements is desirable.
This is actually a good argument that, predictably, most people are ignoring (since the weak premise is such a tempting target). But it’s not airtight.
I am under no legal obligation to go out of my way to save random children. People are only under legal obligation to sacrifice their own interests to keep children alive, after they have taken on the legal responsibility to care for that child, by becoming the child’s legal guardian. It’s true that we, as a society, make sure that all children have legal guardians, and that those guardians take care of the child. In contrast fetuses have no legal guardians. That doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t treating them as people, it just means we aren’t treating them as children. Adults also have no legal guardians.
But even if we insist that fetuses must have legal guardians, there is still a loophole. Suppose mother A gives up her unborn fetus for adoption. Mother B adopts, and A removes the fetus since she is no longer under any obligation to care for it. Then B, fulfilling her obligation as a guardian, does everything in her power to keep the fetus alive, but of course it dies anyway. This is an absurd example, but it illustrates how we may be able to kill fetuses, not because they entitled to fewer human rights, but merely because they are in such a unique position as humans.
Finally, It seems this argument was designed with the Violinist thought experiment) in mind. But does it really change things? Are you required to make organ donations to your children, if they need it? (hat tip to hairyfigment)
I think it really is a matter of whether or not women should be forced to be incubators. Even if we decide that fetuses should have full human rights, we would need to find a way to balance the rights of mother and fetus. And that balance would at least sometimes allow abortion. For example, we certainly wouldn’t force a women to carry a fetus to term, if there were a 50% chance they would both die in childbirth.