ABORTION. Julian Sanchez replies to me and Sara Russo. It’s a sophisticated presentation of a position with which I radically disagree. But here’re my thoughts. Sorry for the length.

Julian writes, “Despite the public rhetoric associated with the debate, I think that most responsible pro-choice thinkers will grant that a fetus is biologically alive. If this were not clear, then certainly much more of the debate would be on the scientific than philosophical terrain, since most plausible ethical theories would converge on the conclusion that, if the fetus were totally internally inert, lacking both brain and organ activity until birth, it did not count as a moral person.”

Alive, OK maybe. But the rhetoric surrounding abortion (“a blob of cells”; “the products of conception”; “ending a pregnancy”) is deeply evasive even of the basic fact that a human embryo is a human life. And try asking people who support legal abortion various questions about when brain waves can first be detected, when hands and feet form, and so forth, and you’ll find out why the pro-life movement focuses so much on science rather than philosophy. Women considering abortion don’t know this stuff. It can change their minds. One of my clients at the pregnancy center said that her views on whether she should abort were strongly affected just by the basic scientific hands-feet-eyes stuff; she was still undecided, but, as she said, “I didn’t know…”

Sara was definitely discussing philosophy as well as science, of course, and I wouldn’t draw the distinction between the two as sharply as she seemed to in her initial post; Julian’s right that she is not relying solely on biology. But I think her main point was the one that Julian accepts–that in their rhetoric, the legal-abortion side has swung to notions of soul or consciousness etc., while the pro-life side has swung to ultrasound and embryology textbooks. That’s because people often don’t know what’s in the textbooks, and because most people share with pro-lifers some important premises that Julian denies.

Julian: Russo “relies on the link between biology and the other things I think are important–moral agency, rationality, a subjective ‘inner life,’ reflective consciousness, etc. If human DNA very frequently produced creatures without these features, the link would vanish.”

I’m not so sure. I’m not sure how we’d know, or how we’d think about these things, but here are two reasons to believe that Julian’s off-base here: 1) In nations and time periods where infant mortality rates are very high, “human DNA” (by which Julian means an individual, developing human, and not, say, a foot or a cancer, which also would have human DNA) very frequently doesn’t produce reflective adults, because the kids die before they attain the ability to understand language. If the link between body and human worth “vanishes” then, a mother (or father, or anybody really, unless you believe children are the parents’ property before they attain reflective consciousness, in which case only the mother or father) could kill her children because lots of other children die. What?

2) I’ll just repeat what The Rat said about this line of argument. Sorry to repeat, but I think she puts it better than I would: “Are we more and less human throughout the day as our brainwaves become more or less intense (i.e. obviously when we’re awake rather than sleeping, but also if we’re concentrating hard on Urdu poetry, or having sex, or playing a trombone)? If it’s activity that defines us, why shouldn’t the degrees of activity be accompanied also by relative degrees of ‘humanness’?”

I’m not gonna get into the Chinese room stuff because I doubt I understand it. It’s been a few years since I made myself think about mind/brain supervenience, and I don’t really think I need to do it now.

Julian: “The frozen man is a placeholder for a recoverable self, a full set of life plans and values which would be lost if the body were destroyed. The crucial difference is that in the case of the fetus, we are dealing with a person-stage which is linked to none of those. Nobody’s consciously formulated ends are frustrated by the destruction of the fetus, no prior flow of thought and desire is ended for good.”

See, I don’t get why this matters–why you need to have been reflectively conscious once before your moral worth jump-starts and people can’t kill you. I dunno, I keep returning to a basic conviction that it is wrong to kill infants, and under Julian’s philosophy it isn’t. That’s still true even when one considers his hypothetical about the cryogenically frozen guy revived as an amnesiac. (Maybe it’s because I have such a supremely lousy memory, but I really don’t see why it matters that Thawed Man wouldn’t be able to remember his previous life, would have/develop a different personality, etc. I’ve done all kinds of junk I don’t remember. It was still me who did it. I’d love to be able to say it wasn’t–ever since elementary school, people have been getting on my case because I did some lousy or dumb thing I couldn’t even recall doing–but wishing won’t make it so.) Julian’s philosophy here also relies on the fact that nobody (or, anyway, nobody who has power of life and death over the fetus) wants the fetus–nobody’s plans or hopes or wishes are disrupted when the unborn child is killed. This is an interesting account of the real meaning of the slogan, “Every child a wanted child.” The unwanted ones get snuffed. Again, as Julian notes later on in his post, there’s no rationale here for distinguishing between infants and fetuses; abortion may be child abuse, but it’s still okay. The future self of the fetus and/or infant is unimportant; only the fact that he has not yet been able to develop a past self matters. (I note that it would also be OK then to kill Mr. Frozen Amnesiac Man right after he regains consciousness–after all, you’re not killing pre-frozen Bob Johnson, you’re killing some worthless not-yet-rational blob of cells.)

Julian: “As a sort of corollary thought experiment, imagine a world in which our brains could be scanned and stored, making it possible at any time to recreate my precise psychophysical state as of, say, three minutes ago, in the event that I were killed. Murder would still, of course, involve a repugnant failure to treat people as ends, and possibly also the infliction of pain and fear. But I wonder, would we regard it as the heinous crime we now do? Or would we come to regard killers as, to be sure, thugs, but also as little more than an annoyance, eliminating a kind of covering ultimately not much more important than a favorite sweater? Would you look upon your impending death in that world with trepidation, or rather nonchalantly, confident that nothing truly important would be lost?”

I wonder at Julian’s severe dissociation of mind and body. What’s up with this? My experiences, my personality, all that I know and am have been decisively shaped by the fact that I’m incarnate. Matter matters; physicality is a part (not a whole) of my identity. (Evidence for the defense: Virtually all poetry, ever. As an aside, this poem is part of why I became Christian, because it forced me to pay attention to the thingness of things, the incarnate aspect of our lives, and the meaning and importance of that incarnation. But I digress. Really almost any poetry will do, and prose fiction even more so.) After death, I will be incomplete until I am resurrected bodily. (You don’t need the theological conclusion to agree with the earlier stuff.)

I very much doubt that it would be possible, in this life, to reproduce my mind without my body (and Julian’s hypothetical assumes much of its conclusion by assuming such reproduction is possible); even if such reproduction could be done, the thief who stole my body would have committed a crime much more terrible than Julian seems to acknowledge; and I for sure don’t want to be making public policy decisions based on the hypothetical that if mind and body can be separated then we wouldn’t mind the separation too much so killing infants and the unborn, who have not yet got mental “selves,” is OK. That’s a John Rawls what-we’d-choose-behind-the-veil-of-ignorance-like hypothetical, sheltering far more assumptions than I think the argument can bear.

Re Julian’s claims about the slippery slope: He’s right that slippery-slope arguments don’t necessarily do all that much. I was writing my previous post under the assumption that he/most people considered the more accurate description of the Nazis, “They believed that some human lives were subhuman and unworthy of life,” rather than, “They believed that some lives were unworthy of life” (i.e. including bug lives, bacterial lives, tiger lives, and assorted living whatnot), or, “They believed that some humans with complex inner lives and rationality were unworthy of life.” Of course, it’s not as if everyone the Nazis killed did have complex inner lives, rational self-reflectiveness, and the ability to appreciate the poetry of T.S. Eliot; one of their target groups was the mentally retarded, some but not all of whom were presumably severely retarded enough to lack the kind of consciousness Julian seems to require here. And when moral worth and human lives hang upon whether certain unwanted and disruptive humans are sufficiently self-reflective, I think we should expect a trend to define fewer and fewer unwanted humans as worthy of life. In fact, I think we’ve seen the descent down the slippery slope, from Roe to Stenberg to, well, infanticide.

I don’t want to hammer too much on this, because I know that the Nazi analogy is not sufficient, and it doesn’t address Julian’s basic claims. I brought it up–and I defend it here–because I think it’s a salutary reminder of how careful and mindful of history we should be when we begin defining human lives as unworthy of life. Similarly I would point out, in some discussions of abortion, the terrible legal reasoning used in all the Supreme Court’s abortion cases; I know that doesn’t mean abortion is wrong, and I would not present the Court’s moral vacuity as proving that abortion is wrong, but reading the actual decisions was what made a good friend of mine begin to question his support of legal abortion. It’s a way of bringing people down to earth, so that the abstruse (necessary, but abstruse) claims about personal identity and continuity and consciousness can be approached with an appropriate degree of intensity and care. (I’m not accusing Julian of lacking this care; I wrote the earlier post not just for Julian, of course, but for anyone who reads this blog and might be struck by a point that, while not directly relevant to Julian’s post, did approach it from a side angle.) More on this down-to-earth-ness at the end of this post.

Random: The “deer in the forest” analogy was Sara’s, not mine; I don’t find it especially persuasive, basically for the reasons Julian lays out. It assumes more agnosticism or latent pro-life-ness on the subject of fetal moral worth than I had when I still supported legal abortion. For people who are more agnostic or latently pro-life than I was, the d. in the f. is relevant and compelling, but for me it’s not.

In all honesty, I don’t know that I have any responses or objections to make to an argument that accepts infanticide. I’m serious about that. There are certain points in argumentation when the premises clash too much, and all you can do is a) try to delineate what you think is going on in the arguments, and b) suggest places where the other person might experience the things that led you to accept the premises you hold. I don’t know how well I’ve done that in these posts (and in my previous stuff about abortion, links to which are in the post below). I guess the only thing I can really say, in the end, is that this issue of abortion–>infanticide is not an abstract one, to be discussed mainly in philosophy-department faculty lounges; it’s in our lives today. There’s partial-birth abortion; there’s the Born Alive Infant Protection Act; there’s the desperate, dazed teen girls who stuff their babies in dumpsters. Ideas, as somebody once said, have consequences.