Abortion and justice
Apr 14 '05 (Updated Apr 19 '05)
The Bottom Line Abortion may be expedient, but it is never just.
The only point of discussing the subject of abortion is to come to a conclusion about its permissibility in society. We can only come to come to such an agreement if we start off from agreed premises, and agreed methods of argument. If we do not concur in these matters we cannot come to agreement about the ethical status of abortion except by coincidence.If we do not agree on premises rational discussion is impossible: all we can do is to resolve our differences of opinion as religious controversies have always been resolved, by force.
As anybody who is sufficiently curious to explore the evidence is forced to, I am forced to conclude that it is impossible for Jesus Christ to have existed as a god incarnated as a human being (See for example
http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/AgeOfReason.htm)
and that the concept of the soul, and ideas about our duties to God, are entirely void of content. This means the arguments based on such premises will not convince me. Whether or not christians oppose abortion is irrelevant to me, because their arguments may be based on axioms that are incredible.
It is important to recognize that an argument can be logically valid yet lead to an untrue conclusion. For example, Roman Catholics believe that Jesus Christ was immune from Original Sin. They also believe that the nature of Christ was the same as the nature of a human man (For a discussion of the iota controversy, homoousion, homoiousion, Jesus having the same nature, or similar nature, see Russell (1946)). Human men and women, they believe, inherit Original Sin from their parents. Jesus Christ did not inherit Original Sin from his parents, which were the Holy Ghost, who is not human, and is unfallen, and the Virgin Mary. Therefore the Virgin Mary must have been immune from Original Sin. All perfectly logical, and more than that, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary is promulgated Ex Cathedra, and is therefore infallible doctrine. The faithful are required to believe it, irrespective of the validity of the arguments in support of the concept.
The method of drawing the conclusion is entirely logical, but the premises from which the argument depends are questionable, even false: There is no evidence that Original Sin applies to anything in the real world, and consequently arguments about the susceptibility to or immunity from Original Sin are simply void of content. Likewise evidence for the existence of the soul is likewise missing, and therefore to involve the concept of the soul with arguments about the ethics of abortion, is as sensible as involving the concept of the unicorn with the detection of virginity.
What is true of christianity is true of every religion: religion is an intellectual aberration that deprives people of the capacity of forming rational judgements. Notice the distinction between logically valid and rational judgements: if Original Sin existed, and if it was transmitted by the parents, and if Jesus Christ existed, had the same nature as a man, and was immune from Original Sin, then the conclusion that his mother must have been immune from it too, is a perfectly logical argument, but is irrational because there is no such thing as Original Sin, there never was a Virgin Mary and there never was a Jesus Christ.
We all agree about how to conduct of logical arguments, and we should all recognize that logical arguments depend on axioms that are ultimately defined either by circular argument or by infinite regression. Until we can all agree on a choice of axioms, we cannot all (except by coincidence) come to an agreement through the exercise of logic.
We can take the discussion a stage further: What is this primacy of logic? Why should logic be enshrined as being in some way a superior method of arguing to a method based on natural feeling? Different people disagree about the axioms upon which they base their arguments about the ethics of an action, should they not be equally free to disagree about the proper steps in the development of an argument?
Without an agreement on axioms and an agreement on the proper conduct of argument no point of view can be shown to be sounder, better, than any other. The only resolution to controversy without such agreement is force. We all know that this is true: this is why some fundamentalist christians kill abortionists.
We have to eschew arguments about the soul, because there is no evidence that souls exist. We have to eschew arguments about what god wants, because there is no evidence that god exists. To be sure, there is plenty of testimony of belief, but belief alone has been shown to be a misleading guide in all milieus where belief has been empirically testable. The old Stoic view that if everybody believes it it must be true has been disconfirmed empirically every time it has been tested. There is no reason concur with the view that general belief is a guarantee of truth in matters that are not amenable to empirical inquiry.
With these limitations are there any axioms that the atheistic moral philosopher can share with the theistic moral philosopher? As most of the philosophical ideas that are relevant to a discussion about abortion were derived from Greek philosophy, much without direct reference to any religion, I believe that we can make a degree of progress because we are concerned with the concept of justice, and the application of the principle of justice in connexion with the permissibility of abortion. The question that I propose is Is the abortion of a foetus a just or an unjust act?
I shall take is as axiomatic that logical arguments are superior to assertions based simply on feeling and hope to establish axioms so generally acceptable that we can all agree about the conclusions of the arguments that depend on them.
I oppose the killing of people. I am prepared to defend myself and those I have responsibility for to the extent that I would use whatever means available to protect them. If an attacking person were killed I would be sorry. I might mistake the seriousness of the attack, and kill an attacker who had no lethal intentions, and I should be sorry. 'But suppose somebody raped, tortured, and murdered your wife. How would you feel then?' I don't know, perhaps I would feel murderous, perhaps, given the opportunity I would kill the attacker. On reflection, though, I believe that however angry, distressed, sad, bereft I felt, it would be wrong for me to follow my emotional inclinations if they led me to kill somebody else. If the attacker is immoral, to treat the attacker as he has treated other people is equally immoral.
I believe that we should be able to distinguish between what is expedient, for example self-defence that leads to the death of an attacker, and what is ethical. I also believe that what one feels driven to do in particular circumstances might not be what one might feel, after calm disinterested contemplation, to be right.
I believe that killing people is almost always wrong. I oppose judicial killing, the death penalty, even when it is applied to murderers. If it is wrong for the murderer to kill somebody, it is wrong for somebody else, even acting as an agent for society, to kill the murderer.
I suppose that underlying this idea is an axiom of consistency which states as a given, a self-evident fact, that each person, acting singly or as a member of a group, is entitled to the same moral environment as everybody else: what is moral behaviour for one person is moral behaviour for another, and for others associated into a group, and what is immoral for one person is immoral for other people.
Underlying the arguments that follow is the axiom, the self-evident truth asserted in the masterpiece of the Enlightenment that begins
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
To address these issues clearly I believe that we ought to subdivide members of the species Homo sapiens, people, into those who are persons, and those who are not. What constitutes a person?
For me, life seems to have started in about 1948. I was born in 1944, and remember glimpses from 1947, the year my sister was born, but I don't remember that momentous event. I started infant school in 1948 and my coherent memories really begin with the beautiful Miss MacNeil, who had shoulder length blond hair, and Mrs Lowry who were my first teachers, in the idyllic school that began my education. At about that time my memory became
continuous and I acquired an identity that I can recognize as me. Before then there was nothing I can get access to. It was at this time that I became a person; before that, in my opinion, I was
not. I know now, of course, that there was a baby, and a little child. I have seen the photographs. People I trust have told me that the child in the photograph was me, and there is sufficient continuity in the photographs to persuade me that the resemblance of photograph to me as I am today increases as the distance in time between its taking and the present decreases. As I look back now I see a person I remember from the inside, but never really knew. I look back at the photographs of twenty years ago and wonder 'Was I ever really so handsome?' and I wonder, regretfully, why I never realised it. This is the history of a person,
from its start to the present.
A friend of mine is experiencing the reverse process: suffering from a variety of dementia, she is gradually simplifying, losing her grasp of self and the world: she can no longer count her change, no longer drive a car. Her confusion varies from time to time but the trend is towards more confusion, less lucidity, and from time to time she is beset with menacing hallucinatory visitors who stare at her but never say anything. If her body survives physically, the prognosis is complete withdrawal of personality. She is still a person, but gradually the friend I am fond of will be gone, and, for me, when that has happened, preserving the physical remainder, would be no more worthwhile than preserving a dead cat by taxidermy: all that would be left would be a memento, a souvenir, of no inherent value to her, or to me. Marion's* mind and body are deteriorating at a similar rate, but if her mind is completely extinguished before the dissolution of her body, I believe that it would be ethical to terminate her life painlessly.
The mother-in-law of someone I know died in her nineties, after twenty years of demented madness. Her total apathetic withdrawal was punctuated by occasional furious outbursts when she tried to bite the people around her. Perhaps her personhood had not quite been extinguished, rather it had undergone a metamorphosis into something quite different from its state in earlier life: she had become inhuman. Eventually, she withdrew into complete immobility and silence, and at that point I believe that it would have been ethical to terminate her life painlessly. By my criteria the recent treatment of Terry Schiavo was unethical solely because of the needless delay. Personally, I feel that euthanasia by neglect should not be preferred to euthanasia by the administration of an appropriate dose of a pharmaceutical painkiller.
I believe too, that people ought to be allowed to relinquish personhood voluntarily. For most of my life I could not conceive of the circumstances where, not under terrible duress, I could contemplate suicide. As an atheist with nothing to look forward to, death always struck me as worse than any conceivable physical disaster of continuing life. Last year I had an attack of renal colic, pain and anguish more profound than anything I had imagined. I remember thinking, while I was waiting for the doctor to bring his painkillers, that if that pain were to continue indefinitely suicide would become an option. But I was lucky, there are painkillers for renal colic, and the pain lead to the discovery of the cancer in my kidney, the pain was useful in postponing my death, but I can now understand that I could, myself, seek voluntary euthanasia as the only relief from unbearable agony.
It is evident, therefore that I have no objection to euthanasia for people who have lost personhood, or for people who choose to relinquish personhood.
It is also evident that I believe that personhood arrives around the age of four years. For some it will arrive a little earlier, for others, a little later. If I argue that euthanasia is an appropriate response to the absence of personhood, can I use the same argument to justify the killing of young children?
I don't believe so, lack of personhood is a state such that those who lose it never recover it, but the very young as they grow up acquire personhood, and the acquisition continues into the twenties and thirties, and perhaps, with increasing maturity, beyond. By killing a child you prevent the acquisition of personhood. Is it wrong to deprive a child of this? I believe that it is unjust to do so.
The concept of justice that I invoke is an extension of Rawls's (1971) notion of justice as fairness. In essence Rawls argued that justice is a social construction, consensually arrived at. The fairness of Rawls's view of justice depends on discussion under the veil of ignorance. To determine how a member of society ought to be treated, say a pregnant woman desiring an abortion, the members of society should discuss matters under the veil of ignorance, in other words they should be ignorant of their own place in that society, ignorant, for example, of their own age, sex, and marital status, so that they can discuss how to arrange social matters free of self-interest, and thereby come to generally agreed conclusions about how the just society ought to be arranged. Having emerged from under the veil and discovered her place within the society no member has reason to claim that society treats her unfairly.
Rawls extends his argument further and suggests that the arguments ought to be conducted in ignorance of the temporal sequence, so the interests of individuals in our posterity should be given equal emphasis with our contemporaries. I have no time at all for sentimental category blunders like 'unborn children'. There is no such thing as an unborn child any more than there are four-sided triangles: a prerequisite of being a child is having been born, but the atemporality of justice implies that the potential for personhood should not be arbitrarily denied the foetus now because it should not be arbitrarily denied any human being.
Of course there are practical problems with Rawls's notion of the veil of ignorance, but the idea of social justice being decided by people insulated from self-interest seems to me to be a definition of social justice. In principle, under the perfect veil of ignorance, I would argue that abortion must be unjust because it is an arbitrary deprivation of personhood.
Life has to be conducted in a world that is not much concerned with justice. In society justice has to be tempered with expediency. People do not share my views about our social duties to one another, and come to a different conclusion from mine, and there are difficult cases to adjudicate on, whatever position you start from. How should we treat the twelve-year-old girl, raped, and impregnated? How should we treat the wife, pregnant, but likely to die before being delivered of her foetus? In each case justice demands that we try to balance the interests of everybody involved, and resolve the matter equitably so that the goods involved, the good of life, are equitably shared. It is essential, I believe, to recognize that there is no unique way to achieve the good life: events change our possibilities. There is no way of making the unwanted pregnancy never to have happened, no way of turning back the clock and choosing a different way round the dangerous corner that led to the impregnation, and this means that simply to try to achieve this by extirpating the foetus is to attempt an impossibility. In many, perhaps most cases, the unwanted pregnancy does not mean that the good life cannot be achieved: the good life can still be achieved, but the conduct of that life must be different from the life anticipated.
In some cases there can be no equitable sharing of the goods involved. Perhaps the impregnated child is simply incapable of bringing the baby to term. Perhaps the life of the baby has to be sacrificed to save the life of the mother. I don't think that these are matters that can be resolved except by social consensus. The algebra of justice in the sense I have been applying it cannot be extended indefinitely, and it is for society to determine the acceptable courses of action in these and similar cases.
I believe that it is also necessary to recognize that some such conflicts of interest are in principle not amenable to a just solution.
As a man, I am relatively peripherally involved with the matter of pregnancy. Janet, my wife, and I are members of the first generation for whom it was easy to make the choice, and we concluded that the world was not a place we wanted to bring up children in, even then, back in the '60s when we were first married, and so we chose not to have children. (Everything that has happened since has confirmed for us the wisdom of our choice.) Our choice insulates me, personally, from personal involvement with abortion, and so, perhaps, I ought simply to leave the matter to those who need to be involved with the choices, and of course, if I were personally involved my opinion about what I ought to do might alter.
I am not disposed to be prescriptive for other people. On the whole, for myself, if I were the father of a foetus that my partner wished to abort, I would argue against abortion; but I recognize that the woman's physical involvement with pregnancy is far more wide-reaching than my own, and would hope to come to an agreement with her about what to do. Other people are not as concerned as I am with the justice of our actual and potential interactions with other persons. My view is that they should think carefully about the options available and choose the options that they think are right for them.
I finish with a question: If you really feel that abortion is ethical and just, how do you persuade a sceptic like me that infanticide of children up to the age of about four is not?
I do not particularly like the conclusion I am forced to make about the justice of abortion, right there with the fundamentalists and the Roman catholics, but here I stand... Where I differ from them is in my reasons for sharing their conclusion, and the recognition that other people have the right to a different opinion from mine.
The mark of the true philosopher, the true scientist, is the willingness to make a case, and to change his opinion if his case is shown to be flawed. I could be wrong in my conclusion that abortion is always unjust, and would be happy, not to say relieved, if somebody could prove my opinion mistaken. As a liberal I know that liberals defend the woman's right to choose. I should prefer the choice of abortion to be just as well as expedient, but unless I am mistaken, it is not.
Does this conclusion mean that I believe that abortion should be illegal? No, but I would prefer it if nobody felt the need to have one. The most important way to prevent abortions is to educate children about sexual behaviour and contraception. To oppose sex-education and abortion is completely self-defeating, and only an unreflective bigot could hold those opinions simultaneously. Abortions can be sought for many reasons. A poor woman might not be able to support a child, or another child, but, if she had more money, she might love to keep her baby. If you oppose abortion then give her more money. A silly teenager might find herself inadvertently pregnant. If you oppose abortion then support her, help her to take up her responsibility as a mother: it might mean changing plans for the future, but a change of plan doesn't necessarily blight a life forever. Such support can be given at the same time as retaining the woman's right to an abortion if she wants one, but I believe that social support would reduce the demand, never, probably to the minimum cases that have no just resolution, but to far fewer, and with far less human suffering than would be produced by reverting to the legal prohibition of abortion.
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*Not her real name.
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References
Rawls, J. (1971)
A theory of justice
Oxford University Press, London.
Russell, B. (1946)
The history of western philosophy
Routledge and Kegan Paul
London
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johngo
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Member: John Ollason
Location: Scotland
Reviews written: 83
Trusted by: 61 members
About Me:
I used to work at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, a lecturer in ecology.
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