This podcast got me thinking about abortion today.
What I see in the debate is a spectrum. On one end is the seed and the other is the born baby. Different people set markers between those two points to determine when the organism is worthy of normal human rights, human dignity, or whatever you want to call it.
Both sides try to set their markers so that they can’t be reduced to a violation of common-sense reality or morality, but the other side is very good at picking out scenarios where they can in fact be reduced to a violation of common-sense reality or morality. The cells lost by scratching your arm is theoretically cloneable into what everyone considers a human being, so the fact that a cell or a clump of cells which came about at conception will one day become what everyone considers a human being does not set a consistent marker. Likewise, if viability outside the womb is our marker, then it should also be morally permissible for me to kill someone who is on their death bed. We also have to ask the question, how viable is viable and given what technology?
Both sides are really good at reducing each other’s claims to violations of common-sense, but neither side is very good at actually justifying their markers. It is not enough to just set a marker (life begins at 10,000+ cells but not 9,999), but to set up a marker that has justification based on how we define humanity and how we define morality. As far as I can tell, both sides just sets their markers at what feels right to them. The crux of what we’re dealing with though, is what it means to be human, and why killing other humans is wrong. Our feelings about things are often wrong.
I don’t think that scientific labels help the situation at all. Science chops up their categories in ways that are useful, but the categories themselves aren’t true. The whole universe can be chopped up into homo-Sapiens and non homo-Sapiens, but it can also be chopped up in such a way as to move the boundaries of what it currently means to be a homo-sapiens to include more or less, and that category doesn’t become less or more true. Whether we call a clump of cells or a fetus a “person” is a semantic dispute. If we redefine something, that doesn’t mean anything for morality.
While resolution is unlikely any time soon, I think it is possible to follow a sound path to much more common ground than we have, even with how differently the two views see morality and anthropology (which are really the two relevant fields). Two simple principles I think all people should respect: morally speaking we should err on the side of life and legally speaking we should err on the side of choice.
For an abortion to be morally permissible, you don’t need absolute certainty that your not committing something like murder, but you need to be close. “Pretty sure” is not good enough. “I come down on the side of” is not good enough. You need to be as pro life as you can be without venturing into radical improbability. For some people that will be conception, and for others that will be well after conception. It is not okay to exterminate your fetus because you were pretty sure it wasn’t akin to murder.
Start before conception when it is probably absolutely clear to you that the organism has no rights. Now mentally venture down the spectrum, at each successive point ask whether it is still absolutely clear that the organism has no rights, or if it has become pretty clear. At the point where it becomes pretty clear, go back little bit, and that’s when you should act like the organism has rights.
For the second principle, I would say that you don’t need to be absolutely certain that someone is committing a terrible act before you charge them with infanticide, but you need to be close. You need to be as pro-choice as you can be without venturing into radical improbability. “I think” is not good enough. “probably” is not good enough. You have to be able to say, “It is totally improbable that that woman did something horrible to someone else”, before you write it into law, particularly if the law is going to have any teethe. It is not okay to prosecute a woman because you were pretty sure she committed an offense akin to murder.
Start after birth when it is probably absolutely clear to you that the organism has rights. Now mentally venture up the spectrum, at each successive point ask whether it is still absolutely clear that the organism has no rights, or if it has become pretty clear. At the point where it becomes pretty clear, go back a little bit, and that’s when you should act like the organism has rights, and legislate accordingly.
What is consistent in both of these principles is to err on the side of caution. When you deal with the possibility of committing a heinous moral act like killing a baby or prosecuting an innocent woman, you need to be cautious. There is a moral cliff you’re heading toward when you have an abortion or legislate against it, and it is really steep.
Under these principles, I suspect that there are too many abortions in the world and there are too many laws against abortion.
Unfortunately, the discussion is so dogmatic that either side will convince themselves that the marker they argue for now is absolutely certain, and the principles I put forward should be a warning largely to the other side. I don’t think that’s true.
