I have previously rejected the claim that abortion is or should be legal because of a right to “privacy”. Here I will address pro-abortion arguments rooted in “logic”.
First up is Peter Smith, a British philosopher and proprietor of Logic Matters, who offered some thoughts about abortion. Passages from Smith’s post (in block quotations) are followed by my comments.
As the human zygote/embryo/foetus slowly develops, its death slowly becomes a more serious matter. At the very beginning, its death is of little consequence; as time goes on, its death is a matter it becomes appropriate to be gradually more concerned about.
This statement is presumptuous and, in many cases, wrong. A couple wanting a child can be devastated by the miscarriage of a fetus, even at an early stage of pregnancy.
After all, very few of us are worried by the fact that a very high proportion of conceptions quite spontaneously abort…
Again, very few of us are scandalized if a woman who finds she is pregnant by mistake in a test one week after conception is then mightily pleased when she discovers that the pregnancy has naturally terminated some days later (and even has a drink with a girl friend to celebrate her lucky escape). Compare: we would find it morally very inappropriate, in almost all circumstances, for a woman in comfortable circumstances to celebrate the death of an unwanted young baby.
What do “we” and “worry” have to do with it? The issue is the morality (and therefore the legality) of abortion, not whether many individuals are emotionally involved in the natural termination of a pregnancy.
Suppose a woman finds she is a week or two pregnant, goes horse riding, falls badly at a jump, and as a result spontaneously aborts. That might be regrettable, but we wouldn’t think she’d done something terrible by going riding and running the risk.
Speak for yourself, not “we”. There are many who would condemn the woman who knowingly risked the life of her fetus by jumping a horse or doing something similarly risky.
So: our very widely shared attitudes to the natural or accidental death of the products of conception do suggest that we do in fact regard them as of relatively lowly moral status at the beginning of their lives, and of greater moral standing as time passes. We are all (or nearly all) gradualists in these cases. [Assumptions not granted, but pray continue.]
It is then quite consistent with such a view to take a similar line about unnatural deaths. For example, it would be consistent to think that using the morning-after pill is of no moral significance, while bringing about the death of an eight month foetus is getting on for as serious as killing a neonate, with a gradual increase in the seriousness of the killing in between.
At what point, then, does it become morally significant to kill a fetus? At one week, one month, three months, three months and a day, five months, six months, seven months? If killing a eight-month fetus is “getting on for as serious as killing a neonate,” then killing a seven-month, three-week fetus is as serious as killing an eight-month fetus, and so on.
Some, at any rate, of those of us who are pro (early) choice are moved by this sort of gradualist view. The line of thought in sum is: the killing of an early foetus has a moral weight commensurate with the moral significance of the natural or accidental death of an early foetus. And on a very widely shared view, that’s not very much significance. So from this point of view, early abortion is of not very much significance either. But abortion gradually gets [sic] a more significant matter as time goes on.
Smith’s popularity-contest view of morality aside, this is asinine “logic”. By Smith’s “reasoning,” the murder of a 90-year-old white, male American (who was expected to live for another four years) has less moral weight than the death by heart attack of a seemingly healthy 70-year-old white male American (who was expected to live for another fourteen years. Only a proponent of Britain’s “death panels” would believe such a thing.
You might disagree. But then it seems that you either need (a) an argument for departing from the very widely shared view about the moral significance of the natural or accidental miscarriage of the early products of conception. Or (b) you need to have an argument for the view that while the natural death of a zygote a few days old is of little significance, the unnatural death is of major significance. Neither line is easy to argue. To put it mildly.
Smith’s “logical” sleight-of-hand is revealed. His trick is to treat unintended and intended acts having the same consequences as if they were equivalent. But they are not. The unintended death of a fetus by wholly natural causes is not the same as the intended death of a fetus by abortion. In the first instance, a life ended prematurely but under (presumably) unavoidable circumstances; there is no one to blame for the death of a prenatal human being. In the second instance, a prenatal human being of untold potential is deliberately murdered; blame for that murder can be readily fixed. This is an easy line to argue, to put it vehemently.
Now comes economist Steven Landsburg, who seems to have endorsed Smith’s position. In a (much) later post, Landsburg goes off the deep end with his invocation of “we, as a society”. What that phrase really means, of course, is “the state” — which is decidely not “society”. In any event, “we” is inapt because “we” consists of millions of persons with widely varied preferences that can’t be reconciled. For example, if A punches B in the nose and gains pleasure from doing so, his pleasure doesn’t cancel the pain he inflicts on B. That is to say, there is no such thing as a social-welfare function that sums gains and losses and arrives at “society’s” state of well-being.
In any event, Landsburg begins with this:
Let’s try to make the best possible case for restricting abortion and see how far we get.
To make that case as strong as possible, let’s start from the presumption that we care about the interests of the unborn in just the same way as the interests of the born.
See what I mean? In real life, there are “we” who care about the interests of the unborn and “we” who don’t care. But I will grant Landsburg’s assumption (not presumption) and see where leads.
Where it leads is to the absurdity of taxing women who choose to have an abortion and using the proceeds to subsidize pregnancies carried to term:
[I]f A has an abortion but simultaneously coughs up enough money to induce B to become pregnant and carry a baby to term, … the world as a whole is no worse off than before — and in fact better off, because the pregnancy has been voluntarily transferred from A to B. If A is willing to pay that price, I can’t find any reason to disallow it.
This is utilitarianism at its worst. It is, in Jeremy Bentham’s famous formulation, nonsense upon stilts. If abortion is wrong in principle because it is the same thing a murder, adding a pregnancy to “compensate” for an abortion does nothing to mitigate the immorality of abortion.
But that’s Landsburg for you: All “logic” and no principles. (See also “Landsburg Is Half-Right”, “Winners and Losers”, and “Social Accounting: A Tool of Social Engineering”.)