I’m going to try to communicate my view on abortion in this post. I think it’s one of the most firm and original beliefs that I have. It doesn’t answer all the questions people debate about abortion, honestly it answers few of them. But what is great about it is that it’s a framework that creates a lot more common ground, which in turn should influence decision making and policy.
Lets do some epistemological hovering first. What’s the debate even about anyway?
So we have this moral rule everyone agrees to, I think it goes something like the don’t kill babies rule. Er… maybe we shouldn’t call it a rule. After all most people kill a baby if he’s about to hit the blow-up-the-world-button. It’s the don’t kill babies standard. We usually talk about the rights of the baby, or maybe the dignity of the baby, in order to justify not killing people, babies especially. This kind of talk is usually foundationless however. People just utter the word, “rights” or “dignity” in a way that sounds good to their conscience, inspire a handful of head nods, and they think they’ve made a competent argument. And anyone who disagrees must be either ignorant or evil. They must either not be listening to their conscience (ignorant) or have starved it to death (evil). They almost always put people inside their social circles but have different views in the ignorant group. They almost always put people outside their social circles but have different views in the evil group. But they rarely consider how gullible conscience is to framing effects. They never think that maybe these other people just heard other words in a way that sounds good to their conscience.
Wait, that’s not what I’m talking about.
What’s important here is that there is common ground in the don’t kill babies standard. There is also common ground in believing that women have choice. Nobody is anti-life and nobody is anti-choice, to think so is to severely fail the intellectual empathy test (and indeed the ideological turing test). One more area of common ground: life trumps choice. I choose what I can do in my home sans murder my children. If my baby sticks his arm in my mouth I should not bite down on it. This is not a point for pro-life, but a point that the pro-choice label that emerged is a rhetorically effective team name, but one that misses the point.
When is life?
Somewhere within the gestation period a being inherits rights or dignity or whatever, and people disagree on exactly when that happens. Whether you’re a dualist should be relevant. If you think there’s a point when a body is infused with a soul then that’s just one more possible point earlier when the fetus becomes a rights/dignity owner. Dualism also allows for the point to be very very early, like at conception. Maybe that fertilized egg has an invisible spirit in it. If there are no spirits, then it can’t, and life would begin that much later.
I never hear an abortion debate transform into a dualism debate even though it should. Different sets of assumptions lead to different conclusions. How can reason be constructive when we don’t deal with the more basic before the less basic?
Now here’s the point where these cocksure people are going to challenge me; there exists a broad spectrum of unclarity concerning when dignity/rights having life begins. People involved in the debate have given up reason in order to wholly commit to their ideology. And while it’s impossible to get through to them, more sensible people should be able to admit that a young fetus might not be a person, and an old one might be.
At the tails of the spectrum it is clear that the fetus has or does not have dignity/rights, but in the middle we should be less certain. Key idea: anywhere in the middle, that is most of the spectrum where we don’t have clarity (very high level of certainty), we can say two thing: it is morally impermissible to have an abortion and to prosecute people who have abortions.
Why? Because before we do something that might be absolutely horrible, we should have very high confidence that we’re not.
It is absolutely horrible to abort a fetus which is morally equivalent to a baby. It is not different from murdering your child. An abortion condoning society is one which permits an unrecognized holocaust. It is not enough to “believe” or be “pretty sure” that the fetus “probably” isn’t a baby. We need clarity. Since we don’t have genuine clarity within the spectrum of uncertainty, we should err on the side of life.
So why not incite legal means to prevent this potential mass murder? Because we’d be sprinting toward another massive moral cliff because we “believe”, or are “pretty sure” that the fetus “probably” is a baby. If laws are going to prevent abortion they will need teethe, and they will chew up a lot of women who may well be innocent. It is the moral equivalent of taking anyone suspected of murder and turning their benefit of the doubt into a presumption of guilt. We don’t know if these abortions are really wrong, and we’re going to start imprisoning people for them? Since we don’t have clarity, we should give people the opportunity to decide.
Where the spectrum of uncertainty begins and ends will be different for each person, and I’m sorry to say that people who talk about abortion will pretend like it doesn’t exist. But it does exist. We have this miraculous thing where a non-person becomes a person, and it is grey when precisely that happens. Sometimes things that look like people aren’t people. Sometimes things that don’t look like people are people. I think there is clarity before conception and after a baby has been born. Somewhere down the line, that clarity becomes sufficiently vague that we should not have abortions or use legal coercion against people who do.
1. Nobody believes in killing babies. The don’t kill babies standard.
2. Everybody believes that women should have choice. But not to kill babies.
3. People should admit that it is a range of unclarity concerning whether a fetus is a baby or not.
4. The range of unclarity should be pretty broad, but won’t be the same for everybody.
5. Where there is unclarity, we should not kill something that might be a baby.
6. Where there is unclarity, we should not use legal coercion against those who might have killed a baby.
