Judith Jarvis/ the meaning of sex.

Skip to: New Posts  Last Post
Posted by Mattman
2/24/2016 4:50 am
#1

Hey guys so I posted this under the abortion forum but figured I'd just create a new topic as this is an extensive all by itself without me complicating the other threads layout anymore. I found the following on a blog. Where do you think the author is wrong/right?


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."

 
Posted by DanielCC
2/24/2016 6:03 am
#2

Mattman wrote:

Where do you think the author is wrong/right?
 
'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.'

 
At this point. Too many theists, NL theorists very much included, seem willing to grant their opponents the possibility of morality without God and spiritual immortality. If there is no objective transcendent meaning the eternality of which we can share in there is the phantasm of subjective meaning conjured by one's arbitrary Will - here of course one must remember that for instance Judith Thomson's subjective meaning is no more right or wrong than that of Jack the Ripper.
 
(Of course this point alone does not constitute an anti-abortion argument, only the grounds of an objective meta-ethical theory in the first place)
 
In other respects (and at this point I'll say something tremendously unpopular) the whole article is in a long line of attempts to obscure the real issue, that is that the question of at what point it is moral to terminate a developing embryo has nothing essentially to do with 'women's rights' and the like (instead it is focuses on the alleged immorality of killing the innocent). Consider: in looks extremely likely that sometime in the near future human technology will have reached the level where-at artificial wombs are possible. Here again the question of embryo termination will arise.
 
(There is also the even grimmer topic of whether under some circumstances a third-party e.g. the government or the owner of the genetic material in question can demand the woman undergo a termination. Most people, with good reason, would flinch away from such ideas, though on some ethical systems it’s not clear what grounds they would have to actually object).
 
Another point: as is clear from the other discussions talk of consent and non-consent in terms of the embryo's presence are equivocal (clearly it has no say in the matter). Consider if we were to modify the famous violinist scenario slightly to the effect that the violinist had no choice about his being hooked up to the healthy party for 12 months (and thus is innocent of any invasion) - here we must follow consistency and say that it would be wrong to unhook oneself from the machine and thus cause the violinist's death.
 
Whether or not abortion is ultimately permissible the whole 'bodily autonomy' line appears spurious. The rapist and the torturer are equally exercising their bodily autonomy when they go about their bloody actions. Goverments which seek to prohibit and penalise such actions are certainly coercive and would claim to be justified in being so.

Mattman wrote:

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.

Far be it from me to support 'won't someone please think of the children! argument but it would appear that a sizable number of people are inclined to consider the death of a young child more tragic than that of an adult precisely because of this loss of potential.
 

Last edited by DanielCC (2/24/2016 6:24 am)

 
Posted by iwpoe
2/24/2016 7:48 am
#3

I found bodily autonomy compelling for a time, but I've subsequently decided that it arbitrarily privileges the mother's autonomy so either presupposes the denial of fetal rights, rendering the autonomy argument superfluous, or is in rank contradiction. It simply doesn't follow from the concept of personal determination that should you find yourself dependant on me I can unilaterally determine your own bodily integrity. The decision is by definition not merely a personal determination.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 
Posted by Mattman
2/24/2016 10:51 am
#4

"I've subsequently decided that it arbitrarily privileges the mother's autonomy"

What made you come to this conclusion?

 
Posted by Mattman
2/24/2016 10:57 am
#5

From my understanding the basic pro choice argument for bodily eight goes something like.
..
They [both mother and unborn child] are entitled to their own bodily rights. So exactly how does a fetus have the right to co-opt another person’s body without consent?

 
Posted by Timocrates
2/25/2016 11:00 pm
#6

Conscription.


"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).

Defend your Family. Join the U.N. Family Rights Caucus.
 
Posted by Mattman
2/26/2016 10:48 am
#7

Tim, why conscription? Do you think women should be forced to carry their frozen embryo's as somw sort of biological duty?

 
Posted by Timocrates
2/26/2016 6:41 pm
#8

They don't usually come frozen, Mattman.

You simply asked how another person's body can be rightfully co-opted, even without their consent. I provided an instance. The principle can be abstracted.


"The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16 (3).

Defend your Family. Join the U.N. Family Rights Caucus.
 
Posted by DanielCC
2/27/2016 6:04 am
#9

Mattman wrote:

From my understanding the basic pro choice argument for bodily eight goes something like.
..
They [both mother and unborn child] are entitled to their own bodily rights. So exactly how does a fetus have the right to co-opt another person’s body without consent?

The first premise is couched in suspiciously wife-beating terms but it is really where the problem lies. As in all cases one's freedom is limited by moral obligations (not possessing complete freedom after all also prevents rapes and itchy trigger fingers). So as much as pregnancy makes an innocent dependent on one's body for a time even if one doesn't will it then 'No', one does not posses complete freedom to do what one likes with said body, however one never possessed such unqualified freedom anyway.

(A more interesting moral case along the non-intentional lines discussed in the previous thread is whether pregnant women are morally barred from suicide)
 
As for the 'co-opt, 'consent'' issue we have been other this before only a few posts back. The fetus does not 'co-opt' anything in the relevant moral sense for it is not an intentional agent - in the case of rape the one who does the co-opting is the rapist, the fetus being a consequence but not an accomplice, who is to be punished for his actions.

 
Posted by Mattman
2/28/2016 4:56 am
#10

(A more interesting moral case along the non-intentional lines discussed in the previous thread is whether pregnant women are morally barred from suicide)

I missed where this was discussed. I have pretty strong feelings about this in particular. Having been suicidal, I know how it can actually feel.

I'm confused what you mean by morally barred- I thought in NL theory all people were barred from suicide.

And perhaps with the fetus I shouldn't have said xo opt. Let's just say "use" the mothers body. Whether it is innocent is irrelevant. An innocent child can not use my lung without me concenting, why the fetus a womb, specifically?

 


 
Main page
Login
Desktop format