Now of course there needs to be the fundamental abortion debate, but I’m glad that that those of us on the pro-choice side can debate each other about related issues to try to develop our ethical views. It helps to keep us consistent and honest and to learn to stay civil in such debates.

I can’t help being curious – does the pro-life community have these kind of internal debates too?

I admit the force of these counterexamples. Certainly you can do harm to people by way of acts that take affect only later – such as the time bomb. And the step from that to the conclusion you can do harm to people who do not exist at all, or as persons at the time of your act seems clear as well. It seems very clear that we can’t allow people to set harmful acts in motion simply because they have a long time horizon.

But I harbor the intuition that a moral obligation must be an obligation to somebody, and that makes it hard to assign such obligations when the person in question does not exist, or may not ever exist.

Unfortunately, this is piling up faster than I can respond to it all, and, as I say, I also admit I have to re-think my position somewhat.I was probably hasty in at least some of what I said before.

Thanks very much for all the input; I’ll try to do it justice, but need to regroup a bit.

Still waiting for some responses, by the way. I think some folks (myself not included) have made some excellent points here.

I’m not sure what work the “at the time it has its effect” clause is doing here. All that matters is that the harm must be to someone with interests. The harming event, including all the direct causal “effects”, can occur at earlier times (i.e. with no time-delayed action involved), and nevertheless harm a later person. Consider my wooden statues example: the physical damage is done before the person exists.

So if by “effects” you mean the event of physical damage, then your claim is false. That event can occur earlier. But perhaps you instead mean the event of having the person “receive” the harm (i.e. “being harmed”, now, by the earlier damage).

I’m not convinced that harms are the kinds of things which can be temporally located in this way. I explain this in the post linked above. The metaphor of moral harm as a kind of physical “transmission” (from the originating actor to the victim who “receives” it) is potentially misleading. It probably arises from conflating moral harm with physical damage. While of course related, the two should be kept distinct. Otherwise you end up with KTK’s confusions about how harm could “time travel”, etc. Again, my post on ‘the temporal acrobatics of harm‘ clears all that up. (There I explain how, once we ditch the transmission metaphor, there’s nothing particularly mysterious about the possibility of cross-temporal relations of harm. An event E at one time can unproblematically stand in the relation of “E makes X’s life go worse than it otherwise would have” to a person X who exists at a different time. And that’s all that “harm” is.)

Woah woah woah.

do we have obligations to people who don’t even exist yet? The most commonly-accepted answer is that it makes no sense to talk as if we do.

That is bizarre, because I can see absolutely no merit in that. Let’s say that a childless woman has her dead father’s signet ring, and plans to give it to her firstborn son on his 16th birthday. Another, hearing of her plans, poisons the ring to kill whoever wears it. As expected, the woman has a son eventually, who one day wears the ring. Are you seriously saying that the man has done nothing wrong??? Similarly, say someone sets a bomb in their house to detonate in 150 years’ time. Clearly it will not hurt anyone in existence, so can you be saying that setting the bomb was morally neutral?

Obviously, examples are far-fetched. But surely just the fact that your philosophy would make traps set for those who are not yet conceived completely fine must send a chill down your spine? It flies counter to all our intuitions. Sure, the harm must be to someone with interests at the time it has its effect, but it need not be initiated during the victim’s lifetime to be wrong.

You’ve switched things about here, enough to completely change the complexion of the argument. Doctors and mothers routinely weigh up health risks to mother vs health risks to fetus with impunity (bearing in mind I’m mostly familiar with the rather more sensible Australian system here, not the warped bizarrities of certain USAn areas where so-called “fetal rights” might be seen by some to trump a mother’s right to continue living.)

Hypertension may carry significant risks of maternal stroke, eclampsia, placental abruption, fetal loss, and so on, life-threatening risks; in these cases, the mother’s risk is readily considered more important and immediate than risks to the eventual child.

Let’s go back to Accutane for a moment …

You may have escaped some of what you’re calling ‘bizarre muddles’ by proposing this, but you’ve created new ones in the process. Extending your argument to its bloodiest edge, it would seem that raping someone under general anaesthetic would be a perfectly fine thing to do.

Huh? My claim is merely that causing damage to pre-person bodily materials is harmful to the eventual person, in just the same way as causing damage to their body after it attained personhood would be. That has no implications whatsoever regarding “optimality”. No-one thinks that every single little harm is immoral. (They’re prima facie bad, of course, but might be outweighed by other values like autonomy. It depends how serious the harm is.)

“Among other things, it would immoral for people who carry genetic defects to have children at all”

No, re-read my previous comment (or, better, my blog post). I explain there the difference between giving birth and causing defects. In this case, the parents do not cause a defect to a person who could have otherwise lived healthily. The choice is between living with a defect or not living at all. That’s COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the choice between living with a defect or living without a defect. This same confusion comes into your irrelevant discussion of giving birth into poverty, etc.

As for being “unrealistic”, I certainly don’t think child abuse is widespread. But it obviously can happen, and it’s just as obviously a bad thing when it does. (I also think it’s pretty plainly PC nonsense that disabilities aren’t bad for you. Or should we allow parents to gratuitously amputate their children’s limbs on a whim?)