[Peace-discuss] Whose life is it, anyway? (fwd)

[Ricky Baldwin]

Actually, I appreciate the reasonableness of this
argument, because it’s sometimes hard to have this
argument rationally.  But the argument is flat wrong. 
I haven’t seen Don Marquis’s original, but this
summary has some serious flaws.

Right off the bat, the argument is framed too
conveniently.  While it is true that virtually all the
anti-abortion arguments center on claims about the
fetus, the same cannot be said for abortion rights
arguments -- and in my experience (without poll data)
these aren’t the most important arguments for most
abortion rights supporters.  Assuming this summary is
accurate, Marquis completely ignores the arguments
we’ve probably heard most often: a woman has a right
to control her body, limits on reproductive freedom
make women into second class citizens, etc.  In other
words, abortion rights arguments tend to center on
claims, not about the fetus, but about the pregnant
woman.  Marquis, or at least the summary here, doesn’t
give us any reason to choose one of those starting
points over the other.  That’s a pretty serious
omission, especially if you consider that the
‘personhood’ of pregnant women is not in dispute (at
least not openly).

Related to this omission, further down, there’s a
claim that abortion is usually pretty much the same as
killing an “innocent adult human being.”  The omission
of some troublesome cases is noted.  But a crucial
difference between fetuses and adult human beings is
not mentioned, at least in this summary: total
dependence, drain on and risk to a pregnant woman.  I
would hope that I would be willing to donate a vital
organ to save one of my siblings, but am I morally
obligated to do so?  Am I guilty of murder if I don’t?
 A better analogy, from a biomedical ethics textbook,
has one adult attached to another in such a way that
the other is totally dependent for oxygen, nutrition,
and so on, which he or she drains from his or her
‘host’.  Disentangling the two would mean death for
the dependent one in this analogy.  Certainly we’d
admire anyone who is willing to support someone else
this way for months, even weeks, but is anyone morally
obligated to do so?  We might disagree about these
questions and their answers, but the difference is
serious, as is its omission.

I also think Marquis, at least as portrayed here, is a
little too quick to dismiss the arguments about
‘personhood’ as “too narrow.”  I think we all pretty
much operate on the assumption that there are degrees
of personhood and each degree comes with different
rights.  My two year olds cannot vote, for example,
and I don’t let them drive a car or cook their own
meals.  Treating most adults that way would be a
serious infringement on their rights.

At any rate, the crux of the argument comes at the
end: it’s the idea that killing someone (assumed to
include a fetus) is wrong because it deprives them of
“all the value of [his or her] future.”  The summary
says Marquis doesn’t rely on an “unanalyzed notion of
‘potential person,’” but in fact he only redirects his
“unanalysis” a bit, we might say (at least, if this
summary is any indication): from “potential person” to
“future”.  Is it okay, then, to go around killing just
anybody who is about to die?  Can we solve our suicide
problem by shooting people off high-rise ledges?

What does it mean to deprive someone of the value of
his or her future, anyway?  When someone has to choose
one career path instead of another, isn’t that person
“deprived of the value” of one future?  What about
moving to one location as opposed to another?  Hanging
out with one group of friends as opposed to another? 
Going to see one movie as opposed to another, or
something completely different?  Unfortunately, people
aren’t able to exercise free choice very much of the
time, but are all the limits on our freedoms morally
equivalent to murder?  I doubt that many people think
so, but where is Marquis’s answer?

This summary points out that one implication of this
“value of my future” argument is that “some animals
might be sufficiently like us that it is wrong as
things stand to kill them”.  But why assume they need
to be “like us”?  Where is that in Marquis’s argument?
 Don’t dandelions have futures (albeit short ones)? 
E. coli?  Are their futures, um, less valuable?  

Is “value of [one’s] future” the criterion we want to
use, say, when one future is incompatible with
another?  (Maybe there can even be degrees of
incompatibility?)  Or weren’t we better off with the
‘personhood’ debate?

Or maybe, as I suspect, all this analysis of the fetus
is doomed to absurdity, because it is improperly
narrow.  It is deprived of its most immediate and most
certain context.  It omits, prejudicially, one whose
personhood is not in doubt (at least not openly).  It
ignores the woman, who may or may not have much of a
choice.  It turns a blind eye to the psychological,
social and economic pressures on her.  It doesn’t ask
by what authority someone can intervene to block her
decision -- to have an abortion, to have a baby, to
get pregnant in the first place, or to avoid
pregnancy.  Such pressures and such authority are not
to be assumed lightly, I think, but questioned closely
before they are allowed to persist.  Abortion -- or
reproductive freedom, as we say -- is certainly not
the only area where such things come into play, but it
can’t be understood without them.

That’s enough from me for now.

Ricky

--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
wrote:
> [At tonight's meeting, Lisa took exception to my not
> mentioning the "March
> For Women's Lives" in my notes on this week's "War
> on Terrorism."  She and
> I would probably disagree on how they're related, so
> to keep the ball
> rolling I include here a (slightly hostile) summary
> of a a famous article
> on the subject, Don Marquis' (U. of Kansas) "Why
> Abortion is Immoral,"
> Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86 (1989).  These are
> selections from notes on
> that article prepared by one Allen Stairs and
> copyright to him, but they
> make the argument (one I agree with) fairly clearly,
> I think.  --CGE]
> 
> 
> The debate about abortion often centers around
> premises about the nature
> and moral status of the fetus. This can lead to
> enormous frustration and
> seemingly irresolvable disagreement. For some
> people, it is obvious that
> the fetus is a full-fledged human being, in the
> richest moral sense, from
> the moment of conception. For others this is more or
> less unintelligible;
> that is, for some people, the idea that a newly
> conceived embryo is a
> person makes no sense at all.
> 
> Don Marquis makes a very distinctive contribution to
> the abortion debate.
> He argues for a strong pro-life position without
> appeal to the notion of
> personhood. And he also does without appeal to
> religious premises.
> 
> Marquis makes a very strong claim: "abortion is,
> except possibly in rare
> cases, seriously immoral ... it is in the same moral
> category as killing
> an innocent adult human being."
> 
> This is not to say that abortion is always wrong;
> Marquis simply sets
> certain hard cases to one side. He does not discuss
> abortion before
> implantation, abortion to save mother's life,
> abortion in case of rape.
> 
> In spite of the fact that Marquis does not rely on
> the notion of
> personhood, he shares a major assumption with those
> who do: whether or not
> abortion is wrong, in his view, depends on something
> about the fetus; it
> depends on "whether a fetus is the sort of being
> whose life it is
> seriously wrong to end." He believes the fetus is
> such a being, and he
> offers an analysis of why.
> 
> Framed in its usual terms, Marquis believes that the
> abortion debate
> results in a stand-off between the two sides. In
> section I, he attempts to
> demonstrate this by reviewing certain typical
> features of the debate. At
> the most general level:
> 
>       Pro-lifers point to facts that seem to count
> in favor of the
> humanity of the fetus. Then they conclude that
> abortion is not acceptable.
> 
>       Pro-choicers point to facts that seem to count
> in favor of the
> non-personhood of the fetus, and go on to conclude
> that abortion is
> acceptable.
> 
> As Marquis points out, neither side can rest on such
> facts alone. Moral
> conclusions require moral premises. And indeed, each
> side can add
> plausible sounding premises.
> 
> Pro-lifers offer: it is always prima facie wrong to
> take a human life.
> 
> Pro-choicers offer: personhood is what matters for
> moral worth; killing a
> person is what's prima facie wrong.
> 
> Each side misses the mark. The pro-life principle is
> too broad. It might
> well show that killing a cancer-cell culture is
> immoral, or so Marquis
> claims. (Here we might note: the pro-lifer means
> that it is wrong to kill
> a human being; not a human cell. But if a
> newly-fertilized ovum counts as
> a human being, then the distinction is not so clear
> after all.) On the
> other hand, the pro-choice argument is too narrow.
> It doesn't show that
> killing infants or retarded individuals is wrong.
> 
> Again, each side can add to its position. The
> pro-lifer can shift to talk
> of human beings. But then it isn't clear that a
> fetus is a human being;
> "human being" doesn't mean "is human and is alive."
> "Human being" means
> something like "full-fledged human person." But then
> the pro-lifer is
> begging the question -- is assuming a premise that
> the pro-choicer would
> simply deny.
> 
> Pro-choicers, on the other hand, have to find a way
> of broadening their
> conclusion to deal with the cases of infants,
> children and the mentally
> retarded. These beings don't count as persons by
> typical pro-choice
> criteria. The pro-choice advocate can appeal to
> considerations of the
> consequences, but this will make the argument rest
> on delicate
> calculations that might not turn out the way the
> pro-choicer thinks they
> will. Most of us who think killing infants and
> retarded people is wrong
> would still think so even if it turned out that
> there are some overall
> "benefits" to such practices.
> 
> More generally, Marquis points out, the pro-lifer
> tends to rely on a
> biological category: something like "genetically
> human" or "conceived by
> human parents." This leaves us with the problem of
> explaining the moral
> relevance of the biological facts...
> 
> The pro-choicer avoids biology and typically appeals
> to psychological
> characteristics. This, again, creates a need to
> explain why these are
> morally relevant. The philosopher Joel Feinberg
> offers an explanation. The
> psychological characteristics are what make moral
> responsibility and moral
> reasoning possible. They also explain why we can
> value certain things,
> make plans, and care about our own futures. They
> "make sense out of rights
> and duties." But Marquis points out: the
> psychological characteristics
> that pro-choicers appeal to may be necessary
> conditions for having duties;
> it is much less clear that they are necessary for
> having rights --
> especially such basic rights as the right to life.
> 
> Now a being who never will have these
> characteristics might well have no
> rights. (Thus, unconscious people get rights, since
> they once were
> conscious and may well be again.) But this won't
> help the pro-choicer,
> since the fetus typically will be conscious if it's
> allowed to develop.
> And if we insist that someone must already have had
> these characteristics
> to get rights, this may seem like a cheap trick
> tailor-made for ruling out
> fetuses.
> 
> II Marquis proposes a different way of approaching
> the problem. His
> strategy: examine what it is that makes killing
> wrong in the first place.
> Then look at abortion in light of that more general
> discussion
> 
> He begins with two wrong answers:
> 
>    1. Killing is wrong because it brutalizes the
> killer; and
>    2. Killing is wrong because of the effects on the
> people left behind.
> 
> The first answer gets things the wrong way around.
> People who kill are
> brutes because killing is a terrible thing. The
> second doesn't deal with
> the case of people who live in isolation or whose
> friends are superficial
> and won't miss them. It is still wrong to kill such
> people. A better
> answer is this: killing is wrong because it deprives
> the victim of all
> possible future experience. "When I die," says
> Marquis, "I am deprived of
> all the value of my future."
> 
> Marquis offers two bits of intuitive evidence for
> this:
> 
>    1. It explains why we regard killing as an
> especially evil crime: it
> deprives the victim of more than virtually any other
> crime.
>    2. It explains the regret and sense of loss felt
> by people who know
> they are dying.
> 
> He also points to four implications of this analysis
> that help make it
> plausible.
> 
>    1. It allows that other -- even alien --
> creatures may have a right to
> life as strong as ours; it doesn't rest on a merely
> biological basis.
>    2. It doesn't prejudge the animal rights debate;
> some animals might be
> sufficiently like us that it is wrong as things
> stand to kill them.
>    3. It doesn't prejudge the euthanasia debate; it
> allows that for some
> people, death may not be an evil compared to
> continued life.
>    4. It straightforwardly deals with the case of
> infants and children.
> 
> Notice that potential personhood isn't the issue. A
> fetus is the sort of
> being whose life it is normally wrong to end. But
> the reason for this is
> that it has the capacity for a valuable future like
> ours. If this amounts
> to saying it is a potential person, so be it. The
> point is that Marquis
> does not rely on an unanalyzed notion of "potential
> person." He spells out
> exactly what it is about the being that is morally
> relevant.
> 
> Marquis uses another case as a sort of test for this
> general approach. We
> believe it is wrong to inflict pain on other people
> wantonly. He suggests
> that there are strong parallels between what he --
> and, he thinks, we --
> would say about this and what he has to say about
> abortion. We believe it
> is wrong not because of some extrinsic
> considerations, such as what it
> does to the character of the person inflicting the
> pain, but because of
> its effects on the victim -- because the suffering
> of the victim is an
> evil. This is like what he has to say about killing;
> killing is wrong not
> because of its effects on the killer, but because of
> its effects on the
> victim -- the loss of all potential for value in his
> or her future...
> 
> 
> 	***
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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