Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.
The recent South Dakota law banning almost all abortions is clearly intended as a strategic move in an effort to allow and newly-anti-choice Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade; the content of the law or its supposed justification are almost beside the point, and its backers have hardly pretended otherwise. It is still somewhat startling, however, to read the actual words of the rube who wrote this law. The gasping scientific ignorance, legal confusion, and sheer dunderheadedness they betray is almost as dismaying as the law itself.
A USA Today editorial by Roger Hunt, the South Dakota legislator who sponsored the anti-abortion law, states, among other things:
In the 33 years since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, its landmark decision on abortion, medical and scientific studies have produced a wealth of credible information about unborn children, fetal pain and post-abortion problems experienced by women, information not considered by the court. DNA studies clearly establish that the unborn child is not a glob of tissue but is a human being, separate and distinct from its mother. Abortions terminate the lives of unborn children.
In 2005, South Dakota created a 17-member state task force to gather information and evidence about abortions. The task force received testimony and materials from many national and international medical and scientific experts on abortions and unborn children, and more than 2,000 affidavits from women who had had abortions. The task force concluded that life begins at conception and that abortions harm women. Neither of these facts was considered or contemplated by the Roe court. . . .
Because the bill passed by the South Dakota Legislature only criminalizes the intentional taking of human life, conventional emergency contraceptives (for rape or incest) are not prohibited. But once human life can be medically determined, that unborn human life enjoys the same right to due process and equal protection of the law that a born human being does.
This is nonsense of many varieties.
To deal with the easiest first, the “task force” established by the legislature was a put-up job that embarrassed itself with its unbelievably shoddy report. The committee – officially mandated to “gain freedom for the unborn” – was deliberately overbalanced with explicity anti-choice members (16/17s of whom were male), called legions of explicitly anti-choice witnesses, and produced a report so distorted and unfactual that it became an instant laughingstock. But it appears nobody in South Dakota has learned anything about the issue since.
The “scientific” grounding of these anti-choice machinations continues to be touted, and continues to be as spuriously uninformed as ever. The scientific consensus on fetal pain perception has moved from 26 weeks’ gestation to “somewhere between 21 and 26 weeks” at most; claims of “post-abortion trauma” remain as bogus as ever and have been repeatedly repudiated, even famously by anti-choice figures such as Surgeon General C. Everett Koop; as to what science has learned about “unborn children” in 33 years, none of it sheds light on the moral issue of abortion. That, in fact, is the central fallacy of this pseudo-scientific posturing that has become so popular among the mandatory-pregnancy crowd: that any given fact about the fetus will ratify their position on the morality of abortion. The basic claim itself screams “naturalistic fallacy” – the idea that a fact of nature is believed to be equivalent to a moral fact with no moral principle intervening – that you can just say “oh, the fetus is thus-and-so, therefore we have to treat it as a moral person” with no claim at all that links being thus-and-so with moral personhood. And the eagerness with which any fact that seems to aggrandize the fetus is seized on as a springboard to that conclusion (a partial list: it has a beating heart, it has “brainwaves”, it feels pain, it has fingers or toes, it has human DNA, it has unique human DNA, it moves, it “screams”, it yawns . . .), and how flimsy and irrelevant such facts are, demonstrates how irrelevant real moral reasoning is to the anti-choice position.
Hunt’s editorial is a classic case in point: whatever may be the biological or moral status of the fetus, “DNA studies” have contributed nothing to its understanding. No one has ever been in doubt that a fetus is a “human being” in a biological sense, or that it was an individual organism “distinct” from its mother. That it is “separate” from that mother is errant nonsense: it’s inside her, and the whole point to abortion is to separate it from her. (Of course, if we were allowed to treat his words as if they made sense, we could end the entire argument right here: since the fetus, Hunt has determined, is already separate from the mother, then obviously nothing can happen if we simply . . . create a little space . . . between the placenta and the endometrium, or between the fetus’s body and its – separate and distinct – mother’s.) More importantly, Hunt knows (or, at least, most anti-choice activists know – what Hunt knows is gravely in doubt) that the real question is not biological but moral: the scientific fact that a fetus is biologically a human being is not the issue unless you introduce the moral proposition that all and every biologically human being is also a moral person – a claim that is an inescapable implicit premise of every “scientific” anti-choice argument but one that almost never gets made openly. It is a tremendous stroke of luck for anti-choicers that the phrase most lay people use to refer to moral persons is the more biologically-loaded term “human being”; that allows them to disingenuously make a biological claim (human fetuses are human) in the same words most people would use to make a moral claim (human fetuses are moral persons), without acknowledging the difference. Hunt thus silently slips morally-loaded terms like “human being” and “child” into a debate in which he has not bothered to introduce any actual moral premises, claiming that “medical and scientific studies” have proven them correct. The noise about “DNA studies” has become a recent anti-choice trope; it is both factually false (there have been no DNA studies of relevance to the abortion debate) and logically ungrounded, but it sounds so up-to-date and factual that morons like Hunt can use it, likely without even knowing why they’re wrong, and more sophisticated anti-choices can use it as yet another means to obfuscate their position.
Hunt also seems confused as to which hymnbook the Church of the Mandatory Pregnancy is singing from this week. He claims his bill cannot prohibit emergency contraception “(for rape or incest)” because it only addresses the “intentional taking of human life”. But his own opening paragraph informs us that “DNA studies clearly establish” that “a human being, separate and distinct from its mother” is an “unborn child” and deserving of protection. As his fellow anti-choicers would no doubt quickly inform him, this means that the one-celled zygote or pre-implanted embryo is also an “unborn child” – since it is certainly just as “distinct” from the woman, on the basis of its DNA, as an implanted embryo, and a hell of a lot more “separate”. This is the whole point to the furor over emergency contraception taking place in other wings of the mandatory-pregnancy movement – a trend based on exactly the same arguments Hunt uses to establish (on scientific grounds) the moral status of the implanted embryo. The anti-EC crowd claims that precisely the scientific facts Hunt notes make the non-implanted conceptus a moral person as well. And if that is the case, then taking EC to prevent the further development of that conceptus would have to be regarded as “the intentional taking of human life”. Either Hunt doesn’t understand his own bill, or he doesn’t understand the implications of his own bogus “arguments”, or both.
As to what he means by “once human life can be medically determined” . . . I don’t know. It’s not even grammatical, let alone sensible, and his conclusion from this medical fact – “that unborn human life enjoys the same right to due process and equal protection of the law that a born human being does” – is both a moral and legal flight of fancy that, characteristically, rests on no further argumentative premise whatsoever beyond the bare “medical fact” that he mentions. It is yet another example of the magical hidden moral principle that somehow makes all anti-choice arguments follow validly from biological facts alone.
As Mark Twain put it:
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
This letter stands as testimony to both the ignorance and the gross disingenuity of the anti-choice movement. Whatever seems in some way compatible with their bizarrely obsessive vision of the fetus is taken by them to be proof of its truth – and that truth is taken by itself to justify their moral and policy positions with nothing added. The worst of them – and somehow Hunt strikes me as more blundering than devious, though I could be wrong – are completely oblivious to the gaps and leaps this entails; the most cynical of them use their ambiguous language and attention-getting overhype of “science” to deliberately obfuscate and mislead. Hunt gives us a pretty fair sample platter of anti-choice confusion here, and that he does so in public defense of the most virulently anti-choice bill in recent memory illustrates how shameless that movement is. Their typical arguments wouldn’t pass muster in a first-semester logic course, and they either don’t care or don’t need to bother. Even if some of them are so confused that they don’t know they’re spouting nonsense, the more influential leaders are not – and so have succeeded in hornswoggling their own followers as part of their attempt to do so with the rest of the public.
Here’s a question: what percentage of the anti-choice movement (not just the general public that leans anti-choice on polls, but actual mandatory pregnancy activists or people really strongly committed to it as an issue) realizes it’s full of shit? That is, what percentage holds a strong anti-choice position not because they have considered, consciously-held moral principles that hold women less important than fetuses, but instead because they believe false claims of fact or grossly distorted logical arguments without knowing it? And would it help to educate these people, or are those fallacious arguments just rationalizations for generally conservative leanings that are not going to go away no matter what?
I’ll leave you by noting that Twain also said:
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
It’s clearly working for Roger Hunt, and many of his kind.
12 Responses to “South Dakota Abortion Law: Shameless Idiocy”
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March 1st, 2006 at 12:34 PM
Hi Kevin,
Could you please explain why things like a beating heart, fingers, yawning, etc. are flimsy facts for “moral personhood” but your criteria (whatever they may be) are not as flimsy?
No one has ever been in doubt that a fetus is a “human being” in a biological sense, or that it was an individual organism “distinct” from its mother.
Are you serious? I run across scores of pro-choicers who not only doubt that but completely deny it. Go to my first exchange with individuals at MediaGirl’s website. You’ll see them consistently unable to accept that a fetus is a “human being” in the biological sense.
When prolifers talk about “distinct DNA” it is usually because some pro-choicers has incorrectly claimed that the unborn are “part” of their mother. They don’t claim these things to prove that the unborn are morally valuable but to prove that the unborn aren’t biologically part of their mother.
The whole point of abortion is not to “separate” the unborn from his/her mother but to kill the unborn. No abortionists delivers a living child (simply separating him/her from the mother) and thinks, “That abortion went great.”
Why is “human being” a morally loaded term? It’s also the appropriate scientific term, is it not? Should of Hunt’s editorial said “member of the species homo sapiens but not necessarily a ‘moral person’” instead of “human being?”
Because some percentage of the public see a distinction between things that are biologically human beings and “moral persons” doesn’t mean that someone can’t use the term human being without being deceptive (silently slipping it in).
Shouldn’t we know what something is biologically before we decide what it is morally? Or do biological facts have no bearing on whether something is or isn’t a “moral person?” And if biological facts have no bearing, then what does?
March 1st, 2006 at 6:10 PM
Thanks for dropping by.
Could you please explain why things like a beating heart, fingers, yawning, etc. are flimsy facts for “moral personhood” but your criteria (whatever they may be) are not as flimsy?
Those are flimsy grounds by themselves for moral personhood for an obvious reason: none of them carries any particular moral significance (and it’s pretty much impossible to argue that they do). Nobody thinks that being a moral person depends on having fingers or toes, or being able to move inside the uterus (if they did, then people who lost their fingers and toes in accidents would cease to be moral persons; the same with those who become paralyzed, etc.) A heartbeat does seem in some ways more “vital” – in the literal sense – but it, too, is irrelevant: (a) persons with artificial hearts, or who are on heart-lung bypass machines during surgery, are still persons; (b) most anti-choicers argue that the zygote is a person from the moment of conception, long before it has a heartbeat – this argument, while false, concedes the claim that a heartbeat is not necessary for personhood.
As for my own criteria, they have to do with having the mental wherewithal to participate in the moral community – at a minimum, to recognize oneself as a person, to have conscious “interests” (goods and bads that one is aware of and cares about), and possibly to recognize others as moral beings as well (though that may be going too far). Likely enough, that level is not reached until some few months at least after birth; I tentatively agree with Peter Singer on this point. (This does not by itself justify infanticide, but that’s another issue.) These criteria are at least plausible because they inherently incorporate moral concepts into their definition of moral personhood – i.e., I claim that a moral person is one who is capable of being the agent and the object of moral actions, which directly links moral status to the capacity for holding that status.
Claims about having a human form, or human DNA, or whatever merely adduce certain natural facts – facts that have no moral content – and then attempt to draw moral conclusions from them. This cannot work. You need some defensible moral principle to link the two (something like “being a distinct biological creature puts your moral interests apart from anyone else’s, and therefore subject to protection”) and some reason for believing it is true, before any mere scientific facts (“having distinct DNA makes you a distinct biological creature”) even become relevant. And the biological facts are not usually very much in dispute; it is the moral principle that purportedly ties them to the question of abortion that is the real issue.
No one has ever been in doubt that a fetus is a “human being” in a biological sense, or that it was an individual organism “distinct” from its mother.
Are you serious? I run across scores of pro-choicers who not only doubt that but completely deny it.
What they’re denying is your claim that it is a “human being” in any sense that has moral implications. If anti-choicers would stop using the term “human being” as if it had moral meaning – if they used it consistently as only a biological category – things would be much clearer, but the anti-choice position suffers when things are made clearer. You constantly see people equivocating between a scientific and a moral interpretation of that term, often in a single sentence, for instance “The fetus is obviously a human being, because it has DNA, so abortion is the killing of a human being, which is murder.” The first use is equivalent to “biologically human creature” and the second is equivalent to “moral person”, and there is a very common tendency – sometimes deliberate, sometimes merely confused – to use them interchangeably, but they are certainly not synonymous.
It is true that you will hear people denying that the fetus is a “human being” in the moral sense – and I wish they would make their exact meaning clearer, but it is invariably in response to the misuse of that term in the moral sense by anti-choice advocates. I don’t think anyone in the pro-choice community denies the biological sense of the term.
Why is “human being” a morally loaded term? It’s also the appropriate scientific term, is it not?
It’s morally loaded because it happens to be a phrase commonly used in casual conversation, or by laypeople, to mean “moral person”. Anti-choicers take advantage of this by equivocating on it as I stated above and in my original post – they claim they mean a fetus is “human” in a scientific sense, but then draw moral conclusions from that, or strongly imply moral conclusions (as when they say “abortion kills a human being” in the context of a debate over the morality of abortion) without making a clear distinction between the scientific and the moral implications of the term. Any argument that depends on your audience misunderstanding the meaning you yourself pretend to have is an inherently dishonest argument.
As for “scientific”, “human being” is indeed an appropriate scientific term if you’re discussing scientific categories. Be sure to point out clearly when that’s what you’re doing – and acknowledge that scientific categorizing by itself carries no moral implication.
Or do biological facts have no bearing on whether something is or isn’t a “moral person?”
They have such a bearing if you can state and defend an explicitly moral principle that defines moral personhood in relation to some sort of biological fact. You have to explain exactly which biological facts are relevant, and why. No natural fact by itself implies any moral conclusion – you have to explain what its moral significance is.
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:49 AM
Hi Kevin,
Why does what something is biologically have no moral content (which seems to be your position – correct me if I am wrong)?
I think that’s the foundation of whether something deserves legal protection or not. I think prolifers often use facts about fetal development not to prove “personhood” but to help identify what the unborn are biologically. This identification then leads to a position on whether the unborn deserves protection since many people have a difficult time explaining the difference between a human being and a “person.”
Does your position really incorporate “moral concepts” or does it incorporate various developmental achievements and then claim those developmental achievements are “moral concepts (whatever that means)?”
Why are your “moral concepts”/developmental achievements relevant compared to other “moral concepts?”
Do any animals fit into your realm of “moral personhood?”
Pro-choice people deny that the unborn are biologically human beings all the time. You may think they’re doing this because they don’t think unborn human beings are moral persons but it’s often not the case. I will often specifically tell pro-choicers that I’m talking about biology and that many pro-choicers (like yourself) recognize that the unborn are biological human beings but not “persons.” They still won’t accept that the unborn are biological human beings. Here’s a challenge: go to various pro-choice or feminist blogs and declare in the comments section that “Fetuses are biological human beings” and see what response you get. The response I’ve gotten for sharing such things at places like imnotsorrydotnet.blogspot.com or mediagirl.com has not been one of agreement.
Many pro-choicers deny the facts of science (at least verbally) because they believe that giving away that the unborn are biological human beings ultimately gives away that they are therefore “moral persons.”
March 3rd, 2006 at 1:10 PM
Why does what something is biologically have no moral content
Because biological – or other scientific – facts are not moral propositions. Believing that any particular fact of nature by itself proves some sort of moral claim (“sexual reproduction requires a male and a female, so homosexual relationships are immoral”) is referred to by philosophers as the “naturalistic fallacy”; it’s a simple category mistake – taking one kind of fact (scientific) as equivalent to a completely different kind of fact (moral). Facts of nature are neither moral nor immoral – they just are. Moral conclusions rest on moral principles – objective facts are often relevant to moral arguments, but facts are not the same as principles, and moral principles determine moral conclusions.
I think prolifers often use facts about fetal development not to prove “personhood” but to help identify what the unborn are biologically. This identification then leads to a position on whether the unborn deserves protection since many people have a difficult time explaining the difference between a human being and a “person.”
That doesn’t mean there is no such difference. At the very least, the moral claim that a biologically human entity does have moral status is no more inevitable – no better grounded on moral principle – than the claim that only entities with certain mental capacities have moral status. In both cases, some explicitly moral principle is required to link the questions of fact with the final moral conclusion. By itself, the statement “this being is human” means nothing in a moral way.
It’s probably true that many people have a hard time seeing that difference, but merely taking advantage of that confusion by deliberately using ambiguous language does not strengthen your position. It’s also true that many people do have an intuitive appreciation of that difference in other circumstances: there is widespread support for terminating treatment for human beings in persistent vegetative state, for anencephalic infants, and possibly in other situations in which mental personhood is compromised. That suggests to me that many people do accept a distinction between mere biological humanity and actual personhood, and that they intuitively define personhood by reference to some sort of (vaguely defined) mental capacities. They tend not to make these distinctions as easily in the case of infants, which evoke an intuitive emotional response, but they have no trouble doing so in other cases.
Does your position really incorporate “moral concepts” or does it incorporate various developmental achievements and then claim those developmental achievements are “moral concepts
That question essentially asks why any particular definition of moral personhood should be accepted – if personhood does not rest on mere biological humanity, why should it rest on self-awareness, or sentience, or rationality, or any other such fact? What makes any such definition better than others, or non-arbitrary?
That’s an important question. To give a satisfying answer, we need a definition of moral personhood that rests on moral concepts, not mere natural facts. (I don’t know why you’re confused about what “moral concepts” means. It means “concepts that relate to morality”. Surely you believe there is such a thing as morality? Surely you believe there are thoughts or ideas about morality, which are different from thoughts or ideas about things that are not morality – for instance, thoughts or ideas about baseball, or acid-base chemistry, or whatever? The concepts embodied in thoughts or ideas about morality are moral concepts.)
Morality arises within the behavior of conscious, deliberate agents. That is, in order to have a moral component at all, a given behavior must be the product of a deliberate act on the part of an individual capable of appreciating and acting on moral constraints. (Accidental acts are not considered morally good or bad, though it is polite to apologize for them when they cause harm. Acts of individuals who cannot be responsible for themselves – young children, the insane, etc. – are also not regarded as morally good or bad, though we may impose rewards or punishments as a training mechanism.) Furthermore, to have moral interests – rights, or values that must be given regard in a moral sense – an individual must be capable of appreciating the fact that they have interests at all, since having your interests thwarted is of no consequence if you cannot experience them or take notice of them.
So, it make sense that moral agents must be individuals who are capable of acting with moral intent – that is, with knowledge that what they do is good or bad, and with capacity to make choices about their actions in response to moral considerations. (Animals can engage in self-interested behavior – they seek things that are “good for them”, such as food or water – but not moral behavior – they do not, for the most part, do things simply because they consciously regard them as right or wrong.) It also makes sense that moral “persons” – individuals who qualify to have their interests taken into account as morally valuable – must be those who are at least capable of knowing that they have interests and caring about whether their interests are fulfilled or not. (This “knowledge” does not have to be of a verbal/symbolic kind. Bentham famously asserted that animals had moral interests because “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?’”. Simply being aware of experiencing good or bad – at even the basic sensory level – was enough for him. Others have set the bar higher.) Traditionally, we have included as moral persons all those who meet the basic-interests test, even if they do not qualify as responsible moral agents – thus, young children are regarded as deserving protection on moral grounds even though they are not held morally responsible for their behavior; the same may be true of animals, the mentally deranged, etc. Exactly what type and degree of mental capacity is necessary for moral personhood is a matter of great debate (see below), the considerations given here at least lay out a reasonable sketch of what a good definition would look like: moral personhood depends on the ability to actually experience and participate in the promoting or thwarting of one’s own interests – to experience and care about good and bad, as a preliminary (hopefully) to developing the ability and will to act from a recognition of the interests of others as well. And note that this type of definition rests on inherently moral concepts – interests, benefits and harms, and will (as a condition of moral agency).
A definition of this kind may be right or wrong, but it is an inherently moral claim – the sort of thing that could be a correct definition of moral personshood – as a mere assertion of biological fact cannot be.
Do any animals fit into your realm of “moral personhood?”
That debate continues.
Non-humans – for the most part – do not behave morally or immorally – they are not moral agents. Animal behavior is thought to be non-moral precisely because we do not think animals have the capacity to think or act with regard to moral concepts. But animals do appear to be capable of experiencing their own interests – they suffer when harmed, and enjoy it when good things happen to them. (I say “appear to” because it is surprisingly hard to tell just what goes on in other individuals’ minds, or whether they have minds – an old philosophical problem. Many mammals appear to clearly express conscious intentionality and strong reactions to stimuli, implying that they are consciously aware of their own interests. But many “lower” animals – worms, insects – also appear to exhibit very clever behavior, and to respond strongly to stimuli, when it is obvious they cannot possibly have an interior mental life or conscious awareness of these things. So are we justified in concluding that mammals have an interior life? Appearance is obviously deceiving in the one case – why are we sure it is reliable in the other?) Some have even claimed that many animals have emotions (though there seems to be a lot of anthropomorphizing going on there.) This all suggests that animals are capable of experiencing their own interests, even if not capable of morally modulating their own behavior. If so, then they ought to qualify for moral protection in the same way children and the mentally non-competent do: they are moral persons even if not moral agents.
Peter Singer, the controversial Utilitarian (follower of Bentham) ethicist, believes that certain animals, specifically primates closely related to humans, have even greater capacities and should be granted a full range of moral rights, including a limited form of legal citizenship. He also – infamously – believes that human infants do not have mental capacities as great as that of adult chimpanzees, for instance, and therefore that grown chimpanzees should have greater claims on moral protection than very young human infants. (In particular, he has claimed that it would be proper to do medical research on human infants in preference to doing it on chimps, and that very young human infants may be killed – as a form of late abortion – while adult chimps may not.) Singer is now involved in a scientific project on a large compound filled with chimpanzees to gather evidence to prove or disprove his contentions about their moral capacities. He also believes that many vertebrates, such as chickens and cows, are capable of experiencing pain even if they do not have sophisticated mental states, and therefore it is wrong to harm them by crowding them into farms or killing them for food; he is a leading figure in the animal-rights movement and became a vegetarian because of these beliefs.
On the other hand, others argue that actual conscious moral concepts are of more value than mere ability to feel pain, and thus that animals are not moral persons. (This often involves arguing that young human infants are not either, though this does not by itself justify infanticide.)
I suspect that the “high-bar” people are right and Singer is wrong, but this is a question of scientific fact that hasn’t yet been resolved.
Many pro-choicers deny the facts of science (at least verbally) because they believe that giving away that the unborn are biological human beings ultimately gives away that they are therefore “moral persons.”
I suspect that most of them are reacting to the common use of these terms as interchangeable by anti-choicers. If not, then their position is confused and they need to straighten it out, but it would help a great deal if the anti- camp would acknowledge that biology and morality are two distinct spheres, and make their language conform.
March 3rd, 2006 at 3:27 PM
[...] erm are alive. (See my discussion with “Jivin Jehosphaphat” in the comments to this post.) All this would mean, of course, that this asshat believes that unfertilized gametes a [...]
March 6th, 2006 at 12:03 PM
If biological facts aren’t moral proposition then how can you take biological facts (such as when someone attains self-awareness) and then say that they are moral concepts. Isn’t this clearly question begging? You’re simply asserting that your criteria based on biology are morally relevant while other criteria based on biology aren’t.
How does the fact that an infant gains self-awareness at a certain point after birth determine that the infant is then a “moral person?” You seem to be doing the exact same thing that you’re attacking prolifers for doing.
True, there might be a difference but you’ve yet to provide (at least from what I’ve seen) any good reason to accept your criteria for “personhood” over anyone else’s. Or for that matter, any good reason to accept the idea that some human beings are worthy of legal protection while other’s aren’t based on nothing but on rather arbitrary biological achievements like self-awareness.
I still think it is unfair of you to go after prolifers because you assume they’re trying to fool people or “taking advantage of their confusion” when it appears to me that the prolifers are simply trying to share facts about fetal development and some people confuse that with their concept of “personhood.” These pro-choice people wouldn’t be confused if they actually had some solid basis for their “personhood” belief.
I believe there is such thing as morality but I don’t understand why your “moral concepts” (things you think are morally important) are somehow better than the “moral concepts” of the prolifer who thinks “personhood” starts at heart beating or whatever. They both seem wholly arbitrary to me.
Your argument seems circular to me – like this: “If someone is moral (meaning has moral interests, etc.) then they are a moral person. Moral persons deserve protection. Moral persons deserve legal protection because they are moral.” The argument basically seems to boil down to the idea that in order to be a “moral person” (which then entails being worthy of legal protection) you must be a moral actor but I don’t see why having morals and having the ability to act morally is the criteria which makes one worthy of legal protection.
I don’t know when you give “moral personhood” to the infant (30 days, 3 months, etc.) but from my experience with human infants and animals, I find it hard to believe that a human infant has more moral knowledge than numerous animals. Growing up my dog would at times mow down on something my parents left on the kitchen counter. After doing this, she would come into the family room and put her paws on her nose as if to say “I’m guilty.” It seemed to me that she knew she was doing something wrong. My cats also know that they aren’t supposed to sit on the heat vents and will be very careful to stand next to them (not on them) when I’m in the room but if I catch them on them, they make a hasty retreat. Now maybe it was just learned behavior but their behavior seems leaps and bounds ahead of a human infant but then again I don’t know your age limit (which would even probably change with each individual infant because they all develop with at least slightly different timetables).
March 6th, 2006 at 4:41 PM
If biological facts aren’t moral proposition then how can you take biological facts (such as when someone attains self-awareness) and then say that they are moral concepts. Isn’t this clearly question begging? You’re simply asserting that your criteria based on biology are morally relevant while other criteria based on biology aren’t.
I haven’t done that; I’ve explicitly criticized that and stated that a correct conception of moral personhood must start from moral concepts, and refer to natural facts only to identify particular individuals who fall within those moral concepts.
Simply having a given biological feature does not by itself imply anything; to link a given natural feature or capacity to having moral status requires showing that that capacity is required in order to operate as a moral person. The biological capacity is not by itself of much moral interest – only the fact that it allows one to become a moral person matters. The theoretical moral work in this argument is done by the claim that being a moral person requires a capacity which is defined in moral terms (which capacity happens to exist when certain biological facts obtain).
It really doesn’t seem difficult: there is an obvious moral quality to being someone who can empathize with and appreciate others’ feelings (for instance), while there is no moral significance at all to being someone who can pole-vault 12 feet. Not being a psychopath is a necessary precondition to being a moral agent, in a way that not being a good pole vaulter is not. So some natural capacities or features are morally significant and some are not, but the difference between them is not arbitrary. The difference is precisely that one is a capacity that has to do with morally significant features of the world, and the other is a capacity that has to do with morally irrelevant features of the world.
How do we know that caring about others is morally significant and pole vaulting is not?: because morality has in large part to do with interactions between moral persons. That is part of what “moral” means. This logically requires recognizing other moral persons and responding to them as such. Empathy has a clear relationship to this process; pole vaulting has no relationship to it. So we can perfectly reasonably – and non-arbitrarily – say that empathy is a moral quality and pole vaulting ability is a morally neutral quality.
So we can talk about what capacities or natural features give living creatures moral status, but only if we have identified those capacities as being ones that have moral significance – which we can do by asking whether they are a necessary part of acting as a moral being, or responding to moral concerns that affect oneself, questions that do not admit of arbitrary answers.
How does the fact that an infant gains self-awareness at a certain point after birth determine that the infant is then a “moral person?” You seem to be doing the exact same thing that you’re attacking prolifers for doing.
As I said above, morally-significant qualities are those that are necessarily a part of having a moral life. Self-awareness is one of those qualities – it is a necessary part of having moral interests. Self-awareness is an inescapable preconditon to being capable of suffering from having one’s interests violated or benefiting from having one’s interests promoted. If you are not aware of your own interests and are not aware that your interests are being helped or hindered, you have no moral life, no participation in your own life in respect of its potentially moral qualities.
The biological features that anti-choicers tend to pick out in paying homage to the fetus – having a heartbeat, having fingers and toes, etc. – are irrelevant to having interests and the capacity to have them helped or hindered. (They are irrelevant to all other moral considerations as well.) So they are not relevant to determining moral status (except insofar as they relate to actual biological life or death, but that is only a bare preliminary to moral status). Self-awareness is vital to having any moral life at all, so it is relevant.
True, there might be a difference but you’ve yet to provide (at least from what I’ve seen) any good reason to accept your criteria for “personhood” over anyone else’s. Or for that matter, any good reason to accept the idea that some human beings are worthy of legal protection while other’s aren’t based on nothing but on rather arbitrary biological achievements like self-awareness.
It sounds bizarre on its face to assert that self-awareness is an “arbitrary biological achievement”. At any rate, as I’ve explained more than once now, the choice of which features or capacities grant moral standing is entirely non-arbitrary. The ones that have moral significance are relevant, the ones that do not are not – and there is a non-arbitrary distinction between the two. Anti-choicers just keep choosing the wrong ones, a problem made more complicated by the fact that they never explain what relationship they think there is between the capacities they favor and moral standing – they just obliviously assert the naturalistic fallacy like means something. (“Abortion [is wrong because it] stops a beating heart!” Everybody with that bumper sticker ought to be required to wear a “DUMMY” sign around their neck.)
I still think it is unfair of you to go after prolifers because you assume they’re trying to fool people or “taking advantage of their confusion” when it appears to me that the prolifers are simply trying to share facts about fetal development and some people confuse that with their concept of “personhood.”
Well, I do think it is fair to criticize people for making arguments with the explicit expectation that their words will be misunderstood. I also think that doing so is an implicit admission that your argument is invalid.
Your argument seems circular to me – like this: “If someone is moral (meaning has moral interests, etc.) then they are a moral person. Moral persons deserve protection. Moral persons deserve legal protection because they are moral.” The argument basically seems to boil down to the idea that in order to be a “moral person” (which then entails being worthy of legal protection) you must be a moral actor but I don’t see why having morals and having the ability to act morally is the criteria which makes one worthy of legal protection.
Well, that argument isn’t even circular, it’s just a mishmash of assertions. I don’t know how you got that from anything I said above – I haven’t even discussed legal protections for moral persons very much if at all. At any rate, it seems obvious to me that the only very strong argument for granting legal protections to any beings is that they are moral persons; necessarily that gives them a presumptive claim not to be harmed or molested, and it doesn’t seem so radical that our legal system should recognize that claim. I don’t think that’s really a controversial point, either. The real question is what kinds of beings qualify as moral persons; “human beings” is an arbitrary category that both includes human creatures with no morally-significant features and excludes all non-human creatures no matter how morally engaged they are. Instead we need some sort of category definition that hinges on the actual features that define the category – i.e., we need to agree that “moral beings” are those that have moral qualtiies.
As for being a “moral actor”, I assume you mean by that what I mean by “moral agent” above – someone who is capable of consciously acting on moral beliefs or principles. I have made a distinction between “moral agents” and “moral pesons” – each is a status that obtains on different sets of facts, and implies a different kind of moral standing. “Moral person” is the most-inclusive category: it includes everyone who hast the minimal necessary moral capacities; being a moral person grants you moral claims or moral rights – it obligates all moral agents to respect you as a moral person, recognize your rights or interests, and treat you accordingly. “Moral agent” is a less-inclusive category: it includes moral persons who have not only the minimal moral capacities but also the ability to consciously recognize and act on moral principles; moral agents are subject to the moral obligation to be sure that they do act on those principles and to treat all moral persons with due regard. So, all moral agents must be moral persons, but not all moral persons are moral agents. Specifically, those who are capable of having moral interests, but do not have the mental or psychological ability to act in accordance with moral concepts, are moral persons but not moral agents. They have moral claims to protection – they may not be harmed gratuitously – but do not have moral obligations to others. Who would they be? People self-aware enough to experience goods and harms, but mentally incapacitated enough that they cannot be expected to control their behavior – children, the mentally deranged, and so forth. (Note that this follows almost exactly our actual practice – which is to hold that children, the elderly demented, the psychotic, and others are deserving of protection but are not held legally liable for their behavior.)
So, being a moral agent (or, “actor”) is not a prerequisite to deserving protection on moral or legal grounds; it is a prerequisite to being obligated in one’s behavior on those grounds. Being a moral person is the prerequisite to deserving protection, and that includes a much wider range of individuals.
March 7th, 2006 at 2:40 PM
Why does acting as a “moral being” (or attaining the developments necessary to be self-aware) have moral significance? Couldn’t someone just as easily assert that attaining any random development is morally significant? Your whole argument assumes that “being moral” (as you define it) is what is “morally significant.”
You again assert that “morally significant categories” (categories which determine whether an organism should be legally protected) are determined by whether they are self-aware, etc. and provide no basis for this reasoning besides your just so explanation. What I see you basically doing is creating a category “moral personhood” and then asserting that those in the category are worthy of legal protection while those outside aren’t necessarily worthy of the same protection.
It sounds bizarre to you? Well, it sounds bizarre to me and probably 90+% of the public to assert that a newborn human infant isn’t a “person.” Your criteria are arbitrary – you believe them for your own arbitrary reasons (based on what you deem important) while others have different personhood criteria based on their own arbitrary reasons (based on what they deem important). You’ve deemed that some biological achievements have moral significance while others deem other biological achievements as having moral significance. You simply assert that your criteria mean something because they have do with what you consider important. You’re doing the exact same thing you’re accusing prolifers of.
Why do prolifers expect that their arguments will be misunderstood? You’re again assuming faulty motives.
You provide no reasoning for your views on legal protection. You just assert “it seems obvious to me that the only very strong argument for granting legal protections to any beings is that they are moral persons.”
Why is what something is biologically arbitrary? Self-awareness seems much more arbitrary to me. It’s simply a single, hard to pinpoint, accidentally-achieved accomplishment in a long line of mental developments that occur throughout an individual’s life. Sure, you’ve placed special emphasis on it and regard it as significant but it seems wholly insignificant to me when we’re talking about whether an organism should have legal protection or not.
When do you think a human being usually attains moral personhood?
From your earlier comments, I’m guessing you’re not necessarily in favor of infanticide? Why not if the human infant isn’t a moral person, much less a moral agent?
March 8th, 2006 at 12:30 PM
Another problem I have with your criteria is that it seems that individuals who are unconscious (sleeping, reversible coma, getting their wisdom teeth removed, etc.) wouldn’t be considered moral persons. Being unconscious they don’t have the current ability to “act with moral intent” or “actually experience and participate in the promoting or thwarting of one’s own interests.”
Did I become a non-person when I was knocked out and then returned to personhood when I emerged from unconsciousness?
I’d be interested to know how your criteria explains this.
March 9th, 2006 at 2:25 PM
Why does acting as a “moral being” (or attaining the developments necessary to be self-aware) have moral significance? Couldn’t someone just as easily assert that attaining any random development is morally significant? Your whole argument assumes that “being moral” (as you define it) is what is “morally significant.”
That – defining moral status in terms of some quality arbitrarily proclaimed by fiat to be the threshhold – is precisely what my argument doesn’t do; in fact, that’s the whole point of the argument.
As I’ve explained several times, “moral” qualities are defined in terms of what morality itself consists in, independently of who occupies that realm. We know what the word “moral” means, and if we disagree over that we can debate that question without any reference to precisely who falls under its meaning. “Moral” refers to the interactions of certain beings, considered as being either right or wrong for universal, non-arbitrary reasons (and, possibly, to certain moral duties people have to themselves alone, but that is a side issue). By necessity, moral terms and concepts can only be applied to those beings who are capable of being the subject of statements about morality – about right and wrong. We can go further to define “right” and “wrong” in this context, but the basic point is that none of this requires stipulating that any particular type of creature is uniquely subject to moral constraints – in fact, a standard feature of most theories of ethics is that they apply to any creature meeting basic non-arbitrary tests (usually having to do with rational capacity), not just to one species, one race, one religion, or one person. For morality to be universalizable in this way, there must be a standard for determining who falls under its commands and who does not, and that test must be a test for given capacities, not just a category stipulation.
As to what capacities define moral personhood, again it’s obvious, and again I’ve explained repeatedly: they are those capacities that make it possible to be the subject of moral statements, or the agent of morally-directed actions. (You cannot make a moral statement about rocks, because they do not have the capacity of appreciating moral concepts that makes it reasonable say that one is a “good rock” or a “bad rock”. You cannot make moral statements about newborn babies for exactly the same reason: they are simply not capable of comprehending moral concepts, and so cannot be held responsible for acting under them. You cannot make moral statements about severely mentally handicapped people, again for exactly the same reason, but you can apply moral concepts to adults of sound mind and a reasonable comprehension of moral concepts – and then hold them liable for moderating their behavior in keeping with those concepts.)
I’ve offered a two-part scheme of minimal mental capacities (sufficient merely to be aware of one’s own interests as a person) as qualifiers for moral personhood and protection under the moral law, and more advanced capacities (the ability to analyze and act in accordance with moral concepts) for moral agency and liability to moral obligation. In both cases, what defines one’s status is the ability to comprehend, and if necessary respond to, moral concepts. It’s obviously absurd to apply concepts that fundamentally have to do with individuals’ welfare and interactions with others to beings who are incapable of even being aware of their own interests, or of controlling their interactions with others. So we define moral personhood in terms of the ability to comprehend and respond to moral concepts.
When do you think a human being usually attains moral personhood?
I’ve said above that this depends on scientific facts which aren’t yet clear (and upon details of individual moral development that are very hard to monitor). Taking a rough guess, I would expect somewhere between 3 and 6 months post-birth for most infants – the point at which they become aware of themselves as distinct individuals and begin to respond to their environment in a self-interested fashion.
From your earlier comments, I’m guessing you’re not necessarily in favor of infanticide? Why not if the human infant isn’t a moral person, much less a moral agent?
From its not being a moral person follows the fact that it doesn’t have the claims to moral protection that a person has. That’s not the same as saying you can do just anything to it. (Dogs aren’t moral persons, but you can’t mistreat them, either.)
There may be a strong moral reason for treating infants as moral persons even though they’re not: many people have strong attachments to infants (even other people’s), and regard their mistreatment as a horrible act; for this reason, we shouldn’t allow them to be mistreated even though they’re not moral persons. (From this perspective, killing an infant would be similar to desecrating a church or burning a flag: something many people think is a grave trespass even though the physical object in question cannot itself suffer harm.) For another, we may just wish to erect protection for infants as a fail-safe, or to avoid the difficulty of distinguishing those infants who are moral persons from those who are not yet so.
Note, finally, that this argument does not apply with much force to protection of infants in utero, where another person’s most fundamental autonomy rights are at stake.
Another problem I have with your criteria is that it seems that individuals who are unconscious (sleeping, reversible coma, getting their wisdom teeth removed, etc.) wouldn’t be considered moral persons. Being unconscious they don’t have the current ability to “act with moral intent” or “actually experience and participate in the promoting or thwarting of one’s own interests.”
This question occasionally comes up, and it’s not unreasonable, but it’s also easy to answer. As you’ll note, my criteria for moral status were expressed in terms of capacities, not actual practice in the moment. Persons who are sleeping or anaesthetized, but who will wake up unimpaired, have not lost their capacities for moral engagement even though they’re not using at that instant. They certainly still have those capacities – in just the same way that you would say that “so-and-so speaks Spanish” even if they’re asleep or anaesthetized and not actually speaking the language at that time. The reason the criteria are set in terms of capacities and not performance is, simply enough, that we do not always utilize every capacity we have, but that is completely different from not having such capacities at all. One is a “Spanish-speaker” if one can speak Spanish, whether or not one is doing so at the time – but one is not a Spanish-speaker if one has no capacity at all to do so. And so, of two people who appear outwardly indistinguishable (i.e., they’re both not talking), we can still say one is a Spanish-speaker and the other is not, because the one has the necessary capacity to be categorized that way and the other does not. The same goes for moral personhood.
This also explains the moral distinction between someone who is unimpaired but sleeping and someone who is “brain dead” or in a persistent vegetative state. Outwardly they appear similar, but one’s moral capacities are merely lying dormant, and the other’s are non-existent. That’s a huge moral distinction, and it makes a huge practical difference: the one will (presumably) regain consciousness and resume life as a moral person, and the other has no such hope. So it’s perfectly natural to treat them differently, because in terms of fundamental moral capacities they are different, even if in terms of outward physical appearance they are similar. (This ought to make the infamous Terri Schiavo “balloon” video look even dumber than it already did – and deservedly so.)
March 10th, 2006 at 3:01 PM
Hi Kevin,
What I think I’ve noticed here (and it is likely my fault) is that we use “moral” from different perspectives. You use the word “moral” to describe the actions and behaviors an organism possibly has but when I hear the term “moral person” I’m thinking that the “moral” is with regards to significance and protection by law.
Basically, it appears to me, from my perspective, that you’re asserting that only things that can behave morally have moral significance and are worthy of protection. But I’ve yet to see any reasoning behind this. It seems that whether an organism is worthy of protection is a much more complicated question than whether an organism has the capacity to act in a moral way.
Just wondering, have you ever said “bad dog” or “good dog?” Could a computer ever be a “moral person?”
Don’t infants also interfere with a person’s “fundamental autonomy rights?” From what I’ve seen newborn children take more work than unborn children do. Parents have to constantly feed, clothe, and change them. If newborn children are merely the moral equivalent of flags then why shouldn’t parents be allowed to take their lives? Your reasoning on this subject isn’t very convincing to me.
How is a 6 month old infant a moral person while my cat is not? My cat can do so many more things than a 6 month old infant. My cat is aware of himself (he certainly knows he exists) and his environment and acts in his own self-interest (that standard seems lower than your last one). He knows how to shake, he knows how get me to let him out on the porch, he knows he isn’t supposed to jump on the pool table or sit on the heat vents, etc. A 6 month old infant is unlikely to be able to do or know anything of those things.
Yes, capacities. Those who are unconscious don’t have the current capacities to do what your category of moral persons do. Even though when I woke up after my wisdom teeth were removed and I had your capacities. When I was asleep, I did not. When I woke, I regained that capacity which I lost for a time while unconscious. If they don’t have the current capacities as described then how are they currently “persons.” They certainly have the potential capacity to do such things but then again so do the unborn.
April 24th, 2006 at 11:38 AM
Baby Magic…
Babies gurgle and coo, but only the self-deluded would think that they’re self-conscious. It would be more of a crime to throw Tickle-Me-Elmo in a dumpster — although he also has no idea of what he’s saying, at least he can talk. But Kevin T. Keit…