There is a discussion going on, on The Corner about abortion that I like. Even though I think it’s a lot less “serious” than I would prefer its much more serious than most takes I read.
By serious I mean: folks attempting to grapple with the issue rationally rather than simply identify themselves with stances that are sentimentally appealing.
Also, before I get started I want to specifically set aside issue related to “what is the scientific consensus” because that draws us into arguments from authority when we actually have lots of observable information to grapple with.
Lets grapple with that information first before making appeals that “smarter people than you think X.”
The debate was in part kicked off by this pair of posts. I am going to quote liberally.
First from David French
At long last — and against the strong headwinds of the anti-science ideologues — the law is finally catching up to biology. Next week, Mississippi voters will determine whether all human beings in the state of Mississippi are also “persons” under the law. Such a vote is a logical — if belated — concession to well-established science. Indeed, scientists are virtually unanimous in declaring that the result of conception is a human child with a distinct DNA different from his or her parents. This unanimity is the essence of “overwhelming consensus.”
Given this biological reality, is it logical, reasonable, or remotely moral to characterize some human beings as “persons” and others not? Are we not long past such outright quackery? I hope and expect that Mississippi voters will decisively reject the deniers in their midst and recognize the reality of personhood. After all, it’s a simple matter of science.
In part this is important because we can clearly make theological arguments about the morality of abortion and the notion of personhood. However, its dicey to know what the law should do about that because we have no official church in the United States and churches disagree on this issue.
So, from a legal standpoint it would be nice if there was some sort of secular means of handling this question. Also, for us agnostics and atheists it would be nice if there was a secular way of handling the fundamental morality of this issue.
French is suggesting that there is. After conception we have “a human child with distinct DNA.”
I think human child is not quite right but I don’t really want to quibble over that because I think David really means human being and that I readily concede.
The question is, are all human beings persons?
Robert VerBruggen returns the obvious reply but with a example I usually don’t think of.
David — it is certainly true, as you write, that the result of conception is an embryo with “distinct DNA.”
What’s not clear to me, however, is why “distinct DNA” should be the criterion by which we judge personhood for moral and legal purposes. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey has pointed out, 60 to 80 percent of human embryos — post-conception, with distinct DNA — are naturally destroyed by the woman’s body. Are we to see this as a large-scale massacre of human beings, develop drugs to prevent it from happening, and require all women who have unprotected sex to take them? Certainly, we would be willing to take measures like this if post-birth infants were dying in comparable numbers.
What Robert is getting at here is what I term “revealed morality.” Which is to say look, David, you certainly don’t act like you believe distinct DNA constitutes a moral person.
Otherwise you would see the prevalence of early miscarriages as one the greatest natural tragedies in the world and probably the single most important issue facing the Developed World, if not humanity itself.
The point here is not to call David French a hypocrite, but to force him – and others – to consider what they actually believe. Do you believe that distinct DNA defines a new moral person and thus the prevalence of miscarriages are the most significant human tragedy in the Developed World.
What proceeds at The Corner is the typical devolution of the discussion once people are made to feel uncomfortable. That is, accusations that Robert is calling people insensitive and qualitatively meaningless undermining of Robert’s data and word choice. However, that’s fine. I am happy that it got this far.
There are other issues that I have with the notion of defining personhood as “distinct DNA.” I treat them lightly and if people are interested we can go into more depth.
First, the obvious issue that once conception is complete we have distinct DNA but we do not know how many people we are going to get. Robert brings up the case in which we get zero born people. This case is nice for highlighting the morality of the post conception loss. However, from a theoretical standpoint there much thornier issues are when we get more than one person and when we get fractional people.
Everyone is aware that it is possible for the egg to divide post conception and produce identical twins. I think most of agree that identical twins are separate people. Thus, there must be at minimum some secondary process of personification, in which the single person becomes multiple people.
How does this take place? Its important because the method in which secondary personification takes place might render the “distinct DNA” theory of personification superfluous.
To be more specific, if something like “secondary personification” always takes place but does not always result in twins, then why are we sure there is some meaning in the “primary personification” that takes place when new human DNA strand is constructed.
Even more gnarly, however, is the case of fractional people. It is possible for two fertilized eggs, each with their own Distinct DNA, to merge into a single born human. The result is a human chimera.
What do we believe is happening here?
Are there two persons in the same body? Are the persons “merged?” Is one person killed in the process? If the later then which one? Again, answering these issues makes the question of primary personification at distinct DNA difficult.
If we believe that there are two persons then how are we to morally deal with what seems to be a single adult. Are the cells descended from one fertilization event morally responsible for the actions of the cells descended from another fertilization event? And, what to make of the fact that the adult seems to insist that he or she is in fact and integrated person?
If the persons are merged then how does the process of “personifactional integration” take place? Like secondary personification, is this an event that always happens irrespective of whether there are two persons? If not how does the mixture of cells induce “personificational integration”? The DNAs are not joined in anyway. The cells are, at a basic level, simply in close proximity to one another.
If one person is killed then which one? How could we tell?
The reason all of these questions are really gnarly is because perhaps a natural response is to give some sort of “preference” to the person represented by the mind of the adult human and/or to say that twins become separate persons because they have separate minds.
However, obviously if we are going there then having a mind is key point in personification. At a minimum “mindness” induces secondary personification or personficational integration.
Yet, we strongly believe that there is a mind-brain connection.
We can talk more about this but I think even leaving aside any scientific consensus on the issue there are specific observations we can make that should strongly suggest to everyone that the mind and the brain are dually linked.
That is, it is not simply that the brain is the organ through which the mind manifests itself, but that the structure and chemical composition of the brain can be manipulated in ways that influence the mind. Thus the mind-brain connection must go both ways.
The most obvious of these observation is the influence that chemicals introduced into the brain seem to have on the mind of the person. If you ingest even, alcohol for instance, there is the strong sensation that the alcohol is affecting your mind.
Not just weakening the mind brain connection like a paralytic. Ones actual though processes and emotions seem to change. This is an easy experiment to do and almost everyone reports the same results.
Second, there is the problem of mutation. The distinct DNA of conception will mutate over time as cell divide. I am not sure anyone thinks of this as creating new persons. How are we to make the distinction.?
While that issue could probably be patched fairly easily, the need to patch it raises questions over whether or not we should be put particular emphasis on the generation of distinct DNA in the first place.
There are many other issues but the last one that I want to touch on is the connection between humanness and personhood in the first place. Is humanness necessary to being a person?
If we meet sentient aliens are they by definition not persons? If we develop intelligent machines, machines derived from human minds are they not persons? What if they can remember being a person?
Even if you are inclined to answer no to all of these on the grounds that humans are fundamentally specially then the silly sounding but important question arises: how do you know the people you are interacting with are actually humans and not aliens or machines?
This is important because if you can’t tell the difference between a human and an alien who can perfectly impersonate a human then we have to ask whether there is a moral difference between the two. What does it mean to be “really human” if we have no fundamental way of knowing that we are not being fooled.
There are obviously many other issues related to abortion and miscarriage. And, I know for some people’s taste I gave a very generous touch to the Distinct DNA dividing line.
However, I think the personification issue is an important question and a gentle touch is our best hope of coming to some consensus over an issue that naturally spawns strong emotional reactions.
27 comments
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Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 11:43 am
Andreas Moser
Can a foetus commit suicide?
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Johnnie Linn
The original meaning of the word “person/persona” is the mask worn by an actor. Suggesting that it is role that defines a person. An individual can play several roles and several individuals can play a role. The roles played are imbedded in our legal system. An individual sitting as a judge has different powers than that same individual when he is at home. Corporations are comprised of individuals but have singular personalities and are regarded as persons.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Gene Callahan
Wow, that anyone could take Robert VerBruggen’s reply seriously shows how degenerate moral discourse has become. It’s as though I tried to get off serial murder charges by saying “I only kill 20 people a year — what about the millions who die naturally?!” What utter idiocy.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 11:18 pm
anon
your argument makes little sense: we as a society spend tremendously more resources onpreventing naturally occurring deaths than on catching serial murderers.
Yet the proponents of “personhood at inception” do very little to prevent the millions of naturally occurring and preventable abortions that happen in the U.S. in a single year…
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
Chris
Gene, all VerBruggen is saying is that we obviously don’t consider day-old embryos persons based on revealed behavior concerning natural miscarriage (we don’t think an epidemic of death and destruction of children is going on around us), so there’s no reason to do so in the case of induced abortion. Not only is this view not idiotic, it’s almost self-evidently true.
I realize that your positions on issues of birth are incoherent (see here for a jaw-dropping example), but your rant here is nonsensical, and you know it.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 2:50 pm
BSEconomist
Great post, I’ve tried to make similar points before, but I don’t think I’ve managed so well.
The one bugaboo (still a great word!) I have is a point I tried to make in another comment on when you responded to Caplan/Cowen by introducing your “revealed morality” is that the notion of revealed morality is thornier than you seem to think it is.
In particular, if you have a preference over some states which can be understood as “morality” than this says nothing of how you weight, for example, two conflicting morals against each other, or against the greed motive. This has profound implications for the “revealed preference” relation–a point I may not have sufficiently emphasized. In this example, you might be OK, so I’ll go back to the example from the other day and hopefully at least convince you that this is thornier than you seem to think. I’ll go through it carefully and mathematically, and avoid talking too much about how choice theory works in the presence of morals, because I don’t know that (yet) and might not ever figure it out (my idea isn’t even a project yet but a possibly workable potential project).
In the example from the other day, we were talking about a moral preference for egalitarianism. You seemed to agree with Cowen/Caplan that there was something strange about egalitarians who wish higher taxes from the rich or social programs, but who wouldn’t be willing to contribute without others.
So, OK, there is a moral preference for lower inequality, which cannot be bought and sold in the market, but reductions must be reflected on the market. This means that he preference relation over inequality over states which are not traded in the market–the inequality preference and the greed preference don’t share a common domain. So even if they are both rational preferences, they cannot be directly compared–this is the same reason that you can’t compare the vectors (2,1) and (1,2) using the preference relation “greater than or equal to”. There are some actions that (approximately or are perceived to) affect only affect preferences over inequality (such as advocacy) or greed (buying something). But when you talk about taxes you might be in the overlap–the greed motive for low taxes may be strong and if it lowers inequality, then the egalitarian motive is also strong. After all, a unilateral attempt to lower inequality will necessarily fail–even bill gates isn’t rich enough to really make a dent–so only actions that affect the overlap will reveal how the agent weights the moral dilemma (in this case, high taxes (bad for greed) or high inequality (bad for egalitarianism). So wanting higher taxes to reduce inequality reveals a preference for egalitarianism, but the “voluntarily drop a wad of cash on a homeless person” does not, even if on an individual level it’s sort of the same thing as pay taxes which will be spent on a homeless person. You might also identify a “care-harm” motive a-la Haidt which might also weight “help an individual homeless person, lose a wad of cash” against “keep your money for yourself”–the point is that this is a discreet and different moral choice.
So you really have to be careful about the domain on which a decision maker is working before you can correctly identify the “revealed morality” of the problem. In particular the context and the action will matter. I think you’re OK in this case, but be careful.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
GabbyD
do you buy robert verbruggen’s counterargument?
not all deaths are tragedies. life is inherently fragile at this point in development. all life therefore takes the quantity over quality strategy to propagate. its not just human embroyos. for an example. fish lay hundreds of eggs, and the majority of those die.
is that a tragedy? i disagree. thats just a facet of evolution. thats what life is.
a tragedy is actually very difficult to define. one element of it is human negligence. but it can’t be ALL of it. and negligence itself is a moving target.
not to say that this can’t be solved; only that it can be solved only by negotiating some societal definition of what “tragedy” is.
similarly, the fetus is in a precarious position at the beginning of its lifecycle. the woman can take specific steps to ensure the baby comes to term, but there is no guarantee that the fetus will survive.
think about it this way. there is literature that says what happens early in a child’s life can determine alot of his achievements. if a mother cannot provide ideal conditions for the child, and the child survives, can the child sue for negligence? is it a “tragedy” that a child didnt get some treatment X?
i hope the unanimous answer to that is NO.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
anon
If the death of a person is preventable then knowingly not preventing it not just a tragedy – but also a crime.
The answer to the question of why the natural, preventable death of the fetus is not considered involuntary manslaughter is that, of course, the fetus is not a person yet.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 3:24 am
GabbyD
it depends on the costs and benefits. if added precautions dont make a dent on the probability of survival, or perhaps even lower it, then it wont make sense. we make these tradeoffs all the time for ourselves and our children. for example — its not a crime to smoke with your kids in the room. even tho we suspect that its highly negatively correlated with health outcomes.
for pregnant women, medical opinion on best practices on how to avoid pre-natal survival is well-understood. it should be the stuff we know as common sense for pregnant women.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 9:46 am
anon
It’s only a cost/benefit analysis for the mother in question only because the fetus is not a person yet.
Along the same line why should abortion not be subject to the cost/benefit analysis of the only person affected, the mother?
When the child is a real person it does get protection even against its parents: child abuse, child labor is not permitted and life-saving vaccinations are mandatory in most developed countries.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 12:12 pm
GabbyD
yeah, the answers all depend on what the status of the fetus is.
in my reply above, i believe that the fetus is a person, and is changing to be a human child.
in my reply above, i was commenting on tragedies, ASSUMING the fetus is a human being. is the death of a human being necessarily a tragedy? maybe. maybe not.
negligence is also a moving target. society, somehow, has to determine what child abuse is, for example.
clearly its always possible to define it, as your reply implicitly states.
i am suggesting that abortion is something that ought to be defined as wrong; because of the status of the fetus. having said that, should society expend a great deal more of its resources to keep miscarriages to ZERO? maybe not. probably not. should mothers be indicted for murder when they miscarry. it depends. probably not.
Sunday ~ November 6th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
teageegeepea
I reduce “moral personhood” to asskicking.
Gene, you have to think on the margin. Those dead from natural causes are dead anyway and we can’t prevent any by incarcerating a natural cause.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Sister Y
The assignment of LESSER value to preventing unintentional harm to intentional harm makes sense, but the assignment of, apparently, ZERO value to preventing unintentional “harm” (natural destruction of early fetuses) does not comport with fetuses having personhood.
I wrote about this (calling it “revealed belief”) here.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
egyptsteve
I question whether you are correct that it “makes sense” to assign lesser value to preventing unintentional harm than it does to preventing intentional harm.
This attitude results in severe distortions, such as spending literally trillions to prevent terrorist events that kill at most a few thousand people in any given year, and in most years kill people in the low triple digits — when like resources expended on anything from cancer research to highway safety would result in vastly, vastly, vastly more lives saved.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 2:24 pm
GabbyD
i agree with you that it takes a cost benefit calculation. if it saves more lives at less cost, it should be done.
the argument here is whether there is “benefit” of keeping the fetus alive, even if the woman doesnt want it.
if that fetus is a person, then there is a benefit.
the next argument is should the state expend effort to make miscarriages ZERO? probably not. why? because of the cost-benefit issue you raise here.
should it make abortion more difficult, in recognition that it is a wilful act to kill the fetus? i say yes.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Sister Y
I agree that policy often gets it wrong; what I admit is that there are possibly coherent reasons for treating intentional harm differently from unintentional harm.
But yeah, if they really believed a zygote was a person, it seems they’d be at least a LITTLE horrified by the fact that over half of all “children” die before ever taking a breath, and maybe devote some resources to preventing those “deaths.”
(I do not think abortion is ever a harm, though, intentional or not, person or not, because I don’t think it’s a benefit to be born.)
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
egyptsteve
Twins are natural clones. If the cloning process produces separate human individuals entitled to moral and legal recognition, then what happens when (NB: not if) artificial cloning of humans becomes possible? Will every cell in every body — each of which could in theory be cloned into a new, separate individual — be entitled to personhood? How many do hundreds of thousands do you murder when you have your tonsils taken out?
And: will the legal-moral status of artificial clones only obtain once artificial human cloning becomes technically possible? If so, the moral status of humans depends on the technical level of society. And if that is so, then this moral-legal status is probably not ordained by God, because it has nothing to do with the ontology of the clone itself.
Or, knowing as we do that artificial cloning will one day be possible, are we already obligated to protect all human cells, against the day when someone will be able to grow them to adulthood?
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
egyptsteve
And one more thing: those on the religious right are generally *against* human cloning. Do they actually murder the potential life that they prevent from coming into existence through their resistance to human cloning technology?
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 3:15 pm
Steve Kellmeyer
Egyptsteve,
Is rape just as legitimate a way to have sex as getting married to your spouse and getting consent?
Most people would say no.
But most people would also agree that a child can be conceived either way.
Is a woman’s menstruation considered murder?
No, because
(a) the fertilized egg comes into existence through a willed act (whether via cloning, rape, or consensual sex) and
(b) the unfertilized egg does not come into existence through a willed act.
Religious people are against the act of cloning for the same reason they oppose the act of rape – both are sins against persons. A person has a right to come into existence via a loving consensual act between mother and father, not a pay-for-hire work by a lab tech.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Sister Y
Is any existence better than none?
Global inequality is rising, but “dreamtime” Western technology is still progressing. If technology were perfected such that a conceptus could be transferred at low cost from one womb to another (or artificial womb or animal), then a transfer could have as little impact on the mother as an abortion.
Since our (U.S.) constitutional right to abortion is predicated on balancing the needs of the mother with those of the fetus, there is some argument that given a transfer procedure as easy as an abortion, there would be no constitutional right to abortion. This is especially true if (because of global inequality) the fetus could be implanted and raised at very low cost, comparable to the cost of a first-world abortion.
So the million or so fetuses that are aborted each year in the United States could instead be shipped off to the poorest, most miserable parts of the world, implanted, and raised there – perhaps to starve or die of disease, perhaps to be sold into prostitution or slavery, perhaps to have a happy life.
This gets rid of the person/privacy business and instead focuses on the welfare of the fetus/baby.
Abortion is only “always” morally wrong if coming into existence is “always” better than no life at all. It’s hard to imagine many people, other than religious extremists and Bryan Caplan, asserting that the situation described above would be an improvement over the current situation. It makes it easier to understand how abortion can be the result of caring for the fetus and its future happiness.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Steve Kellmeyer
Your position is denied by essentially every non-nihilistic philosopher of the last four millennia.
All philosophers (except perhaps some nihilists) agree that existence is better than non-existence. That’s a starting point for philosophy.
So, if you wish to posit that non-existence might at times be superior, then why not put the shoe on the other foot for the whole scenario?
What if someone were to propose that the woman should carry to term, give birth, then be killed, with the child to inherit all of her goods?
After all, if non-existence is sometimes the better option – as you insist – then we should at least consider the idea of helping some women by putting those women out of their misery. It’s just one more variation on child support, right?
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 4:33 pm
Sister Y
That’s a starting point for philosophy.
Are you saying there can be no coherent moral philosophy without taking it as a starting point that existence is better than none? If it’s axiomatic, then how can we know if it’s true? Or are you saying, all these smart people have thought it’s better to exist than not, so it must be true?
Related: the Logic of the Larder (i.e., it’s okay to raise animals under factory farming conditions or worse because otherwise they wouldn’t get the precious gift of existence)
After all, if non-existence is sometimes the better option – as you insist – then we should at least consider the idea of helping some women by putting those women out of their misery.
If we don’t assume that life is always a benefit, then yes, there are conditions where losing a life isn’t a loss – like suicide, which remains illegal for practical purposes. I think suicide is fine.
The prohibition against murder is consistent with the belief that life is not a benefit. Life might not be a great thing to get in the first place, but once you have it, there are reasons you become attached to it and would be harmed by having your choice to live (or die) taken from you by force. We have good reasons to avoid starting a smoking habit, but good reasons NOT to kidnap smokers and forcibly detox them.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Chris
if non-existence is sometimes the better option – as you insist – then we should at least consider the idea of helping some women by putting those women out of their misery.
Keep in mind the distinction between dying and not coming into existence. I’m guessing Sister Y would agree that once born, death can be a harm. That (despite what Gene Callahan may think) does not imply that not coming into existence is a harm.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
Sister Y
Yes.
Monday ~ November 7th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Steve Kellmeyer
Nonsense.
If you don’t believe in God, then once they’re dead, they can’t be said to have suffered a harm because they don’t exist, so harm can’t be assigned.
That’s one of the reasons philosophers rejected the entire position.
If you accept that non-existence can be better than existence, then it’s impossible to hold against murder as a general principle. And this was from philosophers who uniformly held the existence of some kind of Creator (including the pagans Aristotle and Plato).
” If it’s axiomatic, then how can we know if it’s true? ”
We can’t logically PROVE it’s true – Kurt Godel demonstrated the Incompleteness Theorems close to a century ago. You can’t logically PROVE the truth of any system so complex it can say “1+1=2″.
As for the Logic of the Larder – that’s right. Animals are good to eat. Especially puppy dogs and kittens. You just need sweet and sour sauce.
OF COURSE you think suicide is fine. Abortion is a kind of suicide – you’re killing someone made in your image and likeness.
Friday ~ November 11th, 2011 at 4:53 pm
Cheryl Jones
Man was created by God and commanded to be fruiful, in other words, have children.
If you are born again, you can be aware of this. If not, you will run your atheistic arguments forever and get nowhere.
Sunday ~ November 18th, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Is Abortion Murder? | Jeremiah Thomas Bannister
[...] date, I’m not entirely settled on the issue of abortion. On the one hand, I am no longer convinced that personhood begins at conception–I also believe twins cause a problem for this claim. More to the point, I don’t believe [...]