DanielCC wrote:

Well the key thing here that the child will die anyway i.e. that there is no way in which it can be brought to full term and birthed naturally. The operation isn't doing anything which would not in the natural course of events anyway. 

I agree that taking into account whether or not the baby is doomed is crucial in determining whether an abortion would be necessary. But from my understanding, the very hard line position is that this is completely irrelevant. It's the actual action that they are against.

"The problem of course is capturing this pathological casual connection in such a way as it couldn't be used to legitimate tactical airstrikes on remote West African villages in the interest of preventing Ebola outbreaks or other actions of that type."

I think there needs to be arguments made which point to the uniqueness of pregnancy.There really don't anything else like it. I'm not sure how that argument may go.

Mattman wrote:

Understood. But I think if I had the option of destroying a two day old embryo that would die in two days in order to save a ten year olds life or not killing it and letting the kid die, I would kill it. Do you think this has any relevance?

In cases like this we might be able to appeal to extrinsic 'prudential/consequential' factors to decide our act, since intrinsically if one can only save innocent A or innocent B then one choice is as good as another.

ok, this seems to mean that you can do one evil- killing one for the avoidance of another evil.

And to take the discussion in a direction other than specifically talking about human value. What do you guys think of this post from a blogger. (I'm having some issues with the responsibility issue).


The meaning of sex
"Whenever I discuss Judith Thomson's defense of abortion with students the discussion always comes around to the question of the meaning of sex. Someone always wants to claim that simply by having sex people (especially women) are asking for, or consenting to, pregnancy. (Usually they try to argue from here that abortion is wrong, but that's not the part that interests me right now.) A version of this argument has been put forward by Laura Wadell Ekstrom. She presented her ideas at the Virginia Philosophical Association in 2002 and I responded. I'm going to put my response below, for what it's worth, although I don't agree with it all any more (which might simply be a matter of how I would express myself now, but might be deeper than that). I was reminded of it by this essay of Michael Pollan's.

Pollan talks about natural law and the naturalistic fallacy in ways that strike me as not quite right. Although I'm basically on his side, I think he is too dismissive of the natural law view of sex. The idea is not that whatever happens in nature is necessarily "moral and ethical," so that if we find animals engaging in polygamy or rape then those things must be OK for us to engage in. It's more that there is some sort of potential coherence in human life that we ought to try to find and live by. It's probably easier to believe that this coherence is there to be found if you believe that God created human life, but the attempt to live coherently seems worthwhile to me independent of the question of God's existence. And, it seems to me, this attempt involves working out or getting clear about the meaning of, for instance, sex, where by 'meaning' I mean the proper place it has in our lives.

The word 'proper' might well sound puritanical, but I mean the place that belongs to it, the most consistent part it can play in our lives. I disagree with the Catholic Church's conclusions about what is and is not OK, but at least it asks good questions. If we celebrate life as a miracle, what sense does it make to use contraception? If we regard all rape as a terrible crime, how can we not regard sex as a big deal? These probably sound like rhetorical questions inviting the kind of answer a Catholic might give, but that's not my point. My thought is more that if we want to reject the traditional Catholic answers (as, to repeat, I do) then we ought to work out better answers than are widely circulated at the moment. The prevailing liberal view seems to be that individual choice is all, so that, roughly, everything consensual is fine and everything non-consensual is bad. But this seems pretty weak to me. Admittedly I am not up-to-date on the philosophy of sex, but I suspect there is work to be done in this area. The discussion here suggests that this is the case.

Anyway, here's my response to Ekstrom:

Making Sex Inviting: A Reply to Laura Waddell Ekstrom

Judith Thomson's aim in her famous defense of abortion is not to defend abortion from all attacks or criticism but to defend it from a specific charge of being unjust.  This I think she does well, meaning that opponents of abortion should try to find other grounds on which to attack it.  They might follow Thomson's own admission that abortion can be selfish, indecent, or callous, and that these charges are no less grave than the charge of injustice.  Professor Ekstrom, though, focuses on the question of justice, arguing that abortion is wrong because it is unjust and that it is unjust because it violates the rights of the fetus.  The right in question is the right to the use of the pregnant woman's body, which the fetus supposedly has because it was granted by the woman's conscious and willing act of heterosexual sexual intercourse (with or without contraception or a desire to become pregnant).  This act of sex, Professor Ekstrom argues, constitutes an invitation to the fetus to occupy the woman's body and use it as it needs.

I have three main objections to this line of argument.  The first concerns the invitation, the second concerns the sexual act, and the third concerns the fetus.  Ekstrom rightly points out that "Lack of invitation to a particular fetus does not entail lack of invitation."  Invitations to yard sales and office hours can be quite open and still are invitations.  But they are invitations made to the general public, which consists of actually existing people.  Ekstrom's invitation is made to something that has only potential existence.  Perhaps my fear of metaphysical murk is irrational, but I would hesitate to class potential existence as a kind of existence.  And an invitation to something that does not exist is no invitation in my book.  Especially when the invitation in question is neither written nor verbal but supposedly implicit.

Secondly there is Ekstrom's insistence that engaging in heterosexual genital sex is inviting a potential fetus into being.  I would insist here that everything is what it is and not another thing.  Sex is sex.  It can be thought of as invitation, but it can equally be thought of as hosting a mixer.  If a partnership arises as a result of a mixer that I threw, do I therefore have a special obligation to refrain from breaking up that partnership?  Not particularly, surely.  It all depends on the nature of the partnership.  If it is a criminal conspiracy then I should break it up.  If it is a true love match then I should not.  My role in bringing it into being is neither here nor there.

Ekstrom says that the pregnant woman and her partner "caused [the fetus] to be present inside the woman's body, and they caused it to be dependent upon her for its continued life."  The first part of this claim is true but the second is false.  It is nature that caused fetuses in wombs to be dependent on the women whose wombs these are for their continued life.

In Ekstrom's view the following argument "has a great deal of plausibility":

"(1) If one person depends on the continued use of another person's body in order to survive, and (2) if the second person acted in a manner that brought about this state of affairs, (3) then the second person has thereby granted the right to the use of his or her body to the dependent person and would be wrong to deny the dependent person that use."

So imagine a plane crash on an icy mountain.  The only food available to the passenger is the body of the pilot, who is still alive.  Condition 1 is met and so is condition 2 if we assume that the crash was a result of pilot error.  Is it plausible that it would be wrong for the pilot to object, perhaps on religious grounds, to being cannibalized?  Surely not.  One might argue that the pilot did not bring about the iciness of the mountain, but then the woman did not bring about the inability of fetuses to survive without maternal sustenance.  I think this argument is in fact not plausible at all.

But of course there is much more to Ekstrom's argument than this.  She agues that sex is an invitation to a fetus because pregnancy is a result of sex that is possible, non-negligible, natural, and foreseeable.  By 'natural' I take it she means 'not requiring artificial help' rather than 'according to God's plan' or anything like that.  All this boils down to the fact that pregnancy is a foreseeable result of heterosexual genital sex (which I will simply call sex from now on) just as getting wet is a foreseeable result of going out in the rain.  Indeed this is the only natural way to get wet with rain water.  Does this mean somehow that one is inviting rain-wetness if one goes out in the rain?  Yes of course, but only in a metaphorical sense.  And of course it is not thereby wrong to remove the unwanted water upon coming back inside.

Ekstrom's final attempt to make sex inviting (i.e. to recast the act of sex as an act of invitation) involves an analogy with starting a race by waving a flag.  In the case of the race, though, there is a social convention that makes flag-waving race-starting.  There is no such convention in the case of sex.  For one thing, the fetus does not even exist yet and so is not part of society.  For another, the only consensus about sex is that it is sex.  Pro-life people might share an intuition that sex is fetal-invitation, but this intuition is not universal and cannot ground a pro-life position.

Finally I said I would say something about the fetus itself.  Let us grant Ekstrom's contention that a fetal invitation has been issued.  Do invitees just as such have a right to whatever they were invited to?  Even Ekstrom admits that they do not.  It all depends on what is at stake.  So the whole argument for sex as invitation starts to look like a red herring.  The real issue is whether the life of the fetus is enough to make abortion (withdrawing the invitation) unjust.  Here Ekstrom relies on a well-known argument from Don Marquis.

Marquis tries to analyze what it is that makes killing people in general wrong.  His conclusion is that it is primarily the fact that such killing deprives people of the future they would otherwise have enjoyed.  Since fetuses have such a future, the argument goes, abortion is wrong too.

There has been some debate about whether fetuses really do have a future like ours in this respect.  I contend that no one does.  Again we are in the realm of metaphysics, but I would say that the future does not exist.  There is no such set as the set of events that are going to take place, or that would happen if x (or if not x).  I don't think I need to appeal to quantum indeterminacy in order to make my case, but I will do if necessary.  Given that my future is not some thing that I now have, what it means to deprive me of it is something that needs some analysis.  I suspect that "depriving someone of his or her future" is in fact simply a partial euphemism for killing someone.  It will not, if I am right, do as an explanation of why killing people is wrong.  Even if I am wrong about this, no such consequentialist consideration can capture the injustice of murder.  Murder is not all right if the victim in fact has no future.  And abortion (or miscarriage) is not much worse than the murder (or sudden death) of an adult human being, even though the fetus might be expected to have more future ahead of it than the adult.  Anyone who thinks otherwise is out of step with common intuitions. So I think that Marquis's argument is not a good one to fall back on.

Finally let me make one last small argument that is rather more radically feminist than I would expect from myself.  Holly Smith has argued that if sex means giving up one's right to the exclusive use of one's body then women are effectively coerced into doing so since the cost of abstinence is extreme.  Ekstrom responds that it is not highly costly.  I can't define what is extreme or high in this matter, but I would say that the cost of sexual abstinence is high.  A government that gave the right to vote only to celibates and those prepared to have and raise more children would be rightly considered coercive in my book.  But I can't say how much cost there must be for something to count as coercion.  Suffice to say my sympathies lie more with Holly Smith on this point."

Would you kill a teenager, who had a loving family, who was to die in two days to save another?

If the teenager was never conscious, never had any relationships in this world, and was presence a main source of the danger in the  other's life (if twins are attached and one of them gets very ill and from the beginibg if his life has been unconsciousness,its bodily infection beginning to kill the other twin, yes I think perhaps it would be justiable for his twin to inject his heart with poison so his body disconnects, say, and the threat seperates possibly.)

Yes, I do not think that's out of the question to kill in certain situations like this. And sure you should try to save both mom and baby. But there's a point at which you need to make a move. Allow the infected fetal tissue to infect mom, or remover by any means necessary. Some say let it stay until the heart stops, I say don't do that.

Mattman wrote:

Would you kill a teenager, who had a loving family, who was to die in two days to save another?

If the teenager was never conscious, never had any relationships in this world, and was presence a main source of the danger in the other's life (if twins are attached and one of them gets very ill and from the beginibg if his life has been unconsciousness,its bodily infection beginning to kill the other twin, yes I think perhaps it would be justiable for his twin to inject his heart with poison so his body disconnects, say, and the threat seperates possibly.)

Yes, I do not think that's out of the question to kill in certain situations like this. And sure you should try to save both mom and baby. But there's a point at which you need to make a move. Allow the infected fetal tissue to infect mom, or remover by any means necessary. Some say let it stay until the heart stops, I say don't do that.

The way you phrase your response here, i.e. placing emphasis on having relationships or even previously having consciousness, really makes me think that you and those who hold the prolife position are not on the same page with regards to the inherent value of the unborn. Why does the fact that a being has relationships factor in at all to whether it is ok to kill it? If the unborn are actually persons of the same value as you and I, why does consciousness actually factor in at all? Why do you refer to the baby as "infected fetal tissue"? I think your concept of the unborn itself is an area of disagreement between you and the pro-life position.


 

I agree with several things you've said.

And even if it would be immoral in this case, could it be justifiable in terms of liberty?

I'm if you believe you should be able to kill a psychotic child coming at u with a knife why not a fetus who's infected body is infecting and killing you?