Nice article, and I get the view here — it used to be mine. But I’ve moved more firmly into the pro-life camp for two reasons: (1) I think it’s prima facie wrong to kill a vehicle for a person (something very weird about the view that one should “hurry up and kill it before it gives rise to a person!”), and (2) I think there’s a better than decent chance that a soul is bound up with a human organism right from the start (either because that’s just how ensoulment works or because hylomorphism is true).
Is there any reason to find this compelling if A) you do not already believe in the soul, and B) do not think the words "prima facie" wield some sort of quasi-mystical dialectical power?
I really don't find conjoined twins cases convincing because animalists should already think (for brain transplant reasons) that a brain by itself can count as a human organism, and in conjoined twin cases each twin has a brain. Put differently, if animalists have a good response to the transplant case then they will already have the resources to respond to the conjoined twins case. I totally agree that the pro-life position depends on you once being a fetus though, and I think way more attention should be paid to personal ontology questions! Its also just a fascinating area of philosophy because basically every view has unintuitive consequences
There’s also a conjoined twin that now works as a teacher and I’m not honestly sure it would be entirely accurate to say that even with two heads that they’re not one person.
Two heads each controlling an arm and a leg. Frequently finish each other’s sentences and played soccer with no loss of coordination. As if at least part of the same program was running on two computers.
To complicate the case, if this is the same case, one of the two women is married, and one isn’t. That is if you’re identifying ‘woman’ with the individual person and not the organism. Both parties in the married couple claimed that the man is only married to one woman and thus avoid polygamy charges.
Leaving out the consideration that relations between the man and the woman would still be adultery because the other woman would unavoidably be involved.
To my knowledge, no one has used these folks as an analogy for one-being/multiple-persons. This would probably fall under the ‘too soon’ rubric. We will probably have to rely on Bill Craig’s Cerebus cases a stand in for a decade or so.
I do think that Koukl’s “mom, can I kill it?” Analogy works to prevent abortion from conception out of an abundance of caution. If we don’t know what it is, we shouldn’t kill it. However, the issue of parental obligation comes in, imo. It’s not just that we are (potentially) killing a valuable human being/ rights bearer, it’s that we are allowing an aggravated and egregious violation of the duty of care of a parent to a child. And, perhaps this is the most egregious such violation possible, with the legalized killing of a child in the womb for any or no reason at minimal costs to the parent.
Perhaps, it begins in my opinion to look like finding justifiable reasons for genocide or some other horror.
Your argument that early abortion is not murder of a person does not entail that early abortion is morally acceptable.
Let me try two different analogies.
1) cutting up a dead body into little bits is often considered desecration. The treatment of bodies after death would be analogous to the treatment of organisms prior to personhood. However, unlike the decaying body, the zygote does have a future as a "chalice for a mind" (two minds in the case of the dicephalus twins). Would a zygote be more or less worthy of respect than the decaying body? Surely, more, thus there are cases where the abortion of the zygote is wrong.
2) I am a great stoic and possess great ownership of my own mind, so if someone were to break my arm, I would say, "The unjust one did not harm me, he harmed my arm +and his pitiful soul)." Yet you a just and righteous judge would count him guilty of committing a harm against me, even if you might agree that he did not harm my personhood. Whether my personhood exists now or will exist in the near future should have no bearing on whether breaking my arm is unjust. Similarly, harming a zygote in your view would not be harming a person, but still could be harming something owned by a person.
He basically argues that (1) the most plausible form of animalism will count the conjoined twins as two people, and (2) a plausible definition of "organism" (the Condics') will count the conjoined twins as two organisms.
Interesting work, and I am gratified that there is also truly thoughtful discussion. I met a child born at 16 weeks five days. She did not live long, but she seemed to respond to her mother’s presence, which was brief, as her mother had to be wheeled into emergency surgery due to hemorrhaging. Oh, the doctors tried to saved this much wanted child! She simply didn’t have fully formed lungs. Her name was Paige, she was my niece. I just wanted to add this, as you used the 20 week mark and I am almost sure this child had a mind and soul.
I do agree a zygote is not a child. Despite a possible futurity, I am sure there are times when that zygote may lose its life without sensing it. I am also sure that there are times when that is the best choice.
I heartily agree that most pro-life activists do not protest because they want the government to control women’s bodies or choices. I do believe that there are those in the background and in government who use this issue to divide people and to control women. It’s like the whole separate water fountain issue— the people behind it, especially in government, used it to divide the nation and control black people. Right or wrong, it is easy for government and other forces to co-opt divisive causes to increase division and in so doing, increase their control. That’s why those with signs about saving the unborn and those with signs that say “my body, my choice,” can never see eye to eye, they are actually fighting two different battles.
I'm not sold on the claim that substance dualists should be pro-choice. Consider: there are only two plausible, non-arbitrary points at which an organism might become ensouled, those being (i) when it begins to exist, and (ii) when it gains the capacity for consciousness. Even if you think (ii) is far more likely, you should think that there's at least *some* small probability (at least 5% or so) that (i) is correct. After all, we shouldn't think that a body has to be occurrently conscious in order for it to be ensouled (presumably if you went under under extremely heavy anesthesia or went into a coma, you wouldn't lose your soul, only to regain it when you wake up), and given that human bodies are the *kind of thing* which normally gets ensouled (unlike, say, tables), it isn't so implausible that it would be ensouled for the entire time that it exists. But if we think there's even a ~5% chance that early embryos are ensouled, then abortion will be wrong, since it's wrong to do something which has a ~5% chance of being murder even when the costs of not doing it would be very high (i.e. much higher than the costs of being denied an abortion): https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/foreclosures-and-fetuses
Here's another consideration: (1) dualists should be theists, (2) theists should be Christians, and (3) Christians should be pro-life. (1) and (2) are true for the standard phil. religion / apologetics reasons, (3) is true because the Christian tradition is unanimously pro-life up until the 20th-century (see David Albert Jones' book The Soul of the Embryo): https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/pro-life-patristics
Even if you're inclined to think that some other religion is more probable than Christianity, so long as you assign even a middling credence to Christianity (particularly some form which takes the tradition seriously), that will be enough to get the probability that abortion is wrong well into the "don't do it" range.
(And before anyone asks, yes, you should be a vegan if you think that there's a ~5% chance that chickens are people.)
I think the arguments for Christianity are good, particularly if one already has theism in the background (Swinburne's The Resurrection of God Incarnate is probably the best single book on this).
Any claims about "when consciousness begins" are necessarily guesswork. Until the person is capable of clearly telling you they are self-aware, we really have no idea when or how "consciousness happens," nor can we. The claim that an infant is "conscious" in a meaningful way that a 16-week-old fetus isn't, is entirely subjective and open to interpretation. In this very article, while saying that "early abortion is okay," you are unable to actually define a clear cut-off point for what counts as "early abortion."
I broadly agree with the conclusion of your arguments, but I think the standard justifications you mention are quite questionable.
Everyone in this corner of philosophy seems to equate personhood with "having a serious moral right to life", but making the right to life depend on personhood is too flimsy. Eastern philosophical traditions problematize personhood in different ways; it's a standard Hindu Advaita claim that "you are not the person, nor the body, nor the mind, but the neutral consciousness that is aware of all those", and it's a standard Buddhist claim that personhood ("pudgala") is illusory, yet both Buddhists and Hindus readily accept that human life has moral value.
Same goes with the idea that killing is wrong because it robs you of a future. You can be a temporal nihilist and not believe in metaphysical identity through time, yet still want to give moral value to life and put restrictions on killing. So it seems to me like these kinds of definitions are not the real reason why we give moral value to human life, but post-hoc rationalisations thereof.
As far as I can guess, the real causal reasons are in the ballpark of some combination of:
- self-preservation instinct; that requires no explanation, it's so basic that even mollusks have it
- the capacity for empathy, to project our sense of well-being or lack thereof on other beings; that also seems to be common in mammals at least
- generalization: the drive to put our norms in somewhat general terms; that seems to be exclusively human as far as we know.
Through self-preservation, we have an innate preference not to be killed, that is evolved and does not need any rationalization to justify it.
Through empathy, we apply that to others, and put severe restrictions on the acceptability of killing.
Through generalization, we also apply that to those who have no working self-preservation of their own, such as newborn babies, severely drunk or depressed individuals, etc.
The application to abortion then becomes: at which point in the early development of a organism, does it become non-ridiculous to generalize our intuitions about humans to it?
What I like about this framing is that it doesn't try to hide the fuzziness of the question.
Intuitively this appeals, tho (as a materialist) I'd probably go with the more morally sketchy gradual "enmindment". That, however, leaves us open to the idea that some people are more people than others, that many animals are also people, and that some human organisms are not people not only before they become people but also probably (or maybe not? is the mind once installed, never gone fully?) that the "being person" quality can be lost -- this is recognized in a sense with the changing definition of death for medical purposes but will open options for non consensual euthanasia of heavily brain damaged human organisms including when that damage has been caused by a progressive chronic condition like dementia, and not only acute catastrophic injury. And while I'm theoretically in support of that, I don't think it's practicable.
Re: the difference between a person and an organism.
Let's say that there is a person on life support. This person is competely braindead: an EEG shows no brain activity whatsoever, and there's nobody "in there" by any conventional definition. Based on my understanding of your distinction, I would say that this individual, or rather this body, is an organism but not a person.
Now, say that you know there is an advancement of medical science coming down the line that, if you could manage to keep the individual alive on life support for a few more weeks or months, would allow you to restart their brain and reverse the condition of brain death. If someone wanted to pull the plug on them during the intervening period, while they are still braindead, would that be okay? Or do you have a duty to keep the body alive until such a time as the condition of personhood can be restored?
Even if the pro-life people, (actually pro-fetus as they don't care at all about the living, breathing woman and if she dies it's So What), might possibly be not on the surface simply wanting to control women, their demands and actions result in severe control of women. They are unforgivable for the damage and deaths they have caused through the millenia. Some 50,000 woman a year die from unsafe (illegal) abortions and millions more are damaged. Families destroyed, children left motherless, women forced into one pregnancy after another so her health suffers and the infants that make it are weak and poor. But, Hey, So What.
I agree with you that those are serious problems, but I also think it's possible to care deeply about them while still being unable to justify abortion to yourself despite the consequences. Maybe holding this view without hypocrisy requires taking a much stronger interest in the social welfare of women who have or are at risk for unwanted pregnancies, as well as for the welfare of the children born from those pregnancies, than pro-life advocates have a reputation for taking. But I do believe it's possible.
It is definitely possible to be an activist pushing for many areas that would reduce need for abortions while also not electing politicians who pass laws against abortion, and staying out of the woman's decision. Areas to work in would include men being responsible since they are they ones knocking women up, improving cost of child care would really help, pushing for paid maternity leave, pushing for good sex education in schools, etc. Until recently, like this year, the anti's have been with the Republicans in being against all those things, so a change would be welcome.
Nice article, and I get the view here — it used to be mine. But I’ve moved more firmly into the pro-life camp for two reasons: (1) I think it’s prima facie wrong to kill a vehicle for a person (something very weird about the view that one should “hurry up and kill it before it gives rise to a person!”), and (2) I think there’s a better than decent chance that a soul is bound up with a human organism right from the start (either because that’s just how ensoulment works or because hylomorphism is true).
Is there any reason to find this compelling if A) you do not already believe in the soul, and B) do not think the words "prima facie" wield some sort of quasi-mystical dialectical power?
Yes.
I really don't find conjoined twins cases convincing because animalists should already think (for brain transplant reasons) that a brain by itself can count as a human organism, and in conjoined twin cases each twin has a brain. Put differently, if animalists have a good response to the transplant case then they will already have the resources to respond to the conjoined twins case. I totally agree that the pro-life position depends on you once being a fetus though, and I think way more attention should be paid to personal ontology questions! Its also just a fascinating area of philosophy because basically every view has unintuitive consequences
There’s also a conjoined twin that now works as a teacher and I’m not honestly sure it would be entirely accurate to say that even with two heads that they’re not one person.
Two conscious heads, or two heads where one is unconscious?
For late night philosophizing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_and_Brittany_Hensel
Two heads each controlling an arm and a leg. Frequently finish each other’s sentences and played soccer with no loss of coordination. As if at least part of the same program was running on two computers.
To complicate the case, if this is the same case, one of the two women is married, and one isn’t. That is if you’re identifying ‘woman’ with the individual person and not the organism. Both parties in the married couple claimed that the man is only married to one woman and thus avoid polygamy charges.
Leaving out the consideration that relations between the man and the woman would still be adultery because the other woman would unavoidably be involved.
To my knowledge, no one has used these folks as an analogy for one-being/multiple-persons. This would probably fall under the ‘too soon’ rubric. We will probably have to rely on Bill Craig’s Cerebus cases a stand in for a decade or so.
I do think that Koukl’s “mom, can I kill it?” Analogy works to prevent abortion from conception out of an abundance of caution. If we don’t know what it is, we shouldn’t kill it. However, the issue of parental obligation comes in, imo. It’s not just that we are (potentially) killing a valuable human being/ rights bearer, it’s that we are allowing an aggravated and egregious violation of the duty of care of a parent to a child. And, perhaps this is the most egregious such violation possible, with the legalized killing of a child in the womb for any or no reason at minimal costs to the parent.
Perhaps, it begins in my opinion to look like finding justifiable reasons for genocide or some other horror.
Your argument that early abortion is not murder of a person does not entail that early abortion is morally acceptable.
Let me try two different analogies.
1) cutting up a dead body into little bits is often considered desecration. The treatment of bodies after death would be analogous to the treatment of organisms prior to personhood. However, unlike the decaying body, the zygote does have a future as a "chalice for a mind" (two minds in the case of the dicephalus twins). Would a zygote be more or less worthy of respect than the decaying body? Surely, more, thus there are cases where the abortion of the zygote is wrong.
2) I am a great stoic and possess great ownership of my own mind, so if someone were to break my arm, I would say, "The unjust one did not harm me, he harmed my arm +and his pitiful soul)." Yet you a just and righteous judge would count him guilty of committing a harm against me, even if you might agree that he did not harm my personhood. Whether my personhood exists now or will exist in the near future should have no bearing on whether breaking my arm is unjust. Similarly, harming a zygote in your view would not be harming a person, but still could be harming something owned by a person.
Patrick Toner has a nice paper on the conjoined twin objection to animalism: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-023-02060-z
He basically argues that (1) the most plausible form of animalism will count the conjoined twins as two people, and (2) a plausible definition of "organism" (the Condics') will count the conjoined twins as two organisms.
Interesting work, and I am gratified that there is also truly thoughtful discussion. I met a child born at 16 weeks five days. She did not live long, but she seemed to respond to her mother’s presence, which was brief, as her mother had to be wheeled into emergency surgery due to hemorrhaging. Oh, the doctors tried to saved this much wanted child! She simply didn’t have fully formed lungs. Her name was Paige, she was my niece. I just wanted to add this, as you used the 20 week mark and I am almost sure this child had a mind and soul.
I do agree a zygote is not a child. Despite a possible futurity, I am sure there are times when that zygote may lose its life without sensing it. I am also sure that there are times when that is the best choice.
I heartily agree that most pro-life activists do not protest because they want the government to control women’s bodies or choices. I do believe that there are those in the background and in government who use this issue to divide people and to control women. It’s like the whole separate water fountain issue— the people behind it, especially in government, used it to divide the nation and control black people. Right or wrong, it is easy for government and other forces to co-opt divisive causes to increase division and in so doing, increase their control. That’s why those with signs about saving the unborn and those with signs that say “my body, my choice,” can never see eye to eye, they are actually fighting two different battles.
Real question is, did I ever exist before subscribing to Wollen?
Silly question, no
Very clever
I'm not sold on the claim that substance dualists should be pro-choice. Consider: there are only two plausible, non-arbitrary points at which an organism might become ensouled, those being (i) when it begins to exist, and (ii) when it gains the capacity for consciousness. Even if you think (ii) is far more likely, you should think that there's at least *some* small probability (at least 5% or so) that (i) is correct. After all, we shouldn't think that a body has to be occurrently conscious in order for it to be ensouled (presumably if you went under under extremely heavy anesthesia or went into a coma, you wouldn't lose your soul, only to regain it when you wake up), and given that human bodies are the *kind of thing* which normally gets ensouled (unlike, say, tables), it isn't so implausible that it would be ensouled for the entire time that it exists. But if we think there's even a ~5% chance that early embryos are ensouled, then abortion will be wrong, since it's wrong to do something which has a ~5% chance of being murder even when the costs of not doing it would be very high (i.e. much higher than the costs of being denied an abortion): https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/foreclosures-and-fetuses
I should note that this argument is far from original. I've seen both Brian Cutter and Alexander Pruss make basically the same argument; see e.g. https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2009/09/abortion-and-probability.html
Here's another consideration: (1) dualists should be theists, (2) theists should be Christians, and (3) Christians should be pro-life. (1) and (2) are true for the standard phil. religion / apologetics reasons, (3) is true because the Christian tradition is unanimously pro-life up until the 20th-century (see David Albert Jones' book The Soul of the Embryo): https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/pro-life-patristics
Even if you're inclined to think that some other religion is more probable than Christianity, so long as you assign even a middling credence to Christianity (particularly some form which takes the tradition seriously), that will be enough to get the probability that abortion is wrong well into the "don't do it" range.
(And before anyone asks, yes, you should be a vegan if you think that there's a ~5% chance that chickens are people.)
Why should theists be Christians?
I think the arguments for Christianity are good, particularly if one already has theism in the background (Swinburne's The Resurrection of God Incarnate is probably the best single book on this).
The conjoined twins argument rules
Any claims about "when consciousness begins" are necessarily guesswork. Until the person is capable of clearly telling you they are self-aware, we really have no idea when or how "consciousness happens," nor can we. The claim that an infant is "conscious" in a meaningful way that a 16-week-old fetus isn't, is entirely subjective and open to interpretation. In this very article, while saying that "early abortion is okay," you are unable to actually define a clear cut-off point for what counts as "early abortion."
I broadly agree with the conclusion of your arguments, but I think the standard justifications you mention are quite questionable.
Everyone in this corner of philosophy seems to equate personhood with "having a serious moral right to life", but making the right to life depend on personhood is too flimsy. Eastern philosophical traditions problematize personhood in different ways; it's a standard Hindu Advaita claim that "you are not the person, nor the body, nor the mind, but the neutral consciousness that is aware of all those", and it's a standard Buddhist claim that personhood ("pudgala") is illusory, yet both Buddhists and Hindus readily accept that human life has moral value.
Same goes with the idea that killing is wrong because it robs you of a future. You can be a temporal nihilist and not believe in metaphysical identity through time, yet still want to give moral value to life and put restrictions on killing. So it seems to me like these kinds of definitions are not the real reason why we give moral value to human life, but post-hoc rationalisations thereof.
As far as I can guess, the real causal reasons are in the ballpark of some combination of:
- self-preservation instinct; that requires no explanation, it's so basic that even mollusks have it
- the capacity for empathy, to project our sense of well-being or lack thereof on other beings; that also seems to be common in mammals at least
- generalization: the drive to put our norms in somewhat general terms; that seems to be exclusively human as far as we know.
Through self-preservation, we have an innate preference not to be killed, that is evolved and does not need any rationalization to justify it.
Through empathy, we apply that to others, and put severe restrictions on the acceptability of killing.
Through generalization, we also apply that to those who have no working self-preservation of their own, such as newborn babies, severely drunk or depressed individuals, etc.
The application to abortion then becomes: at which point in the early development of a organism, does it become non-ridiculous to generalize our intuitions about humans to it?
What I like about this framing is that it doesn't try to hide the fuzziness of the question.
Intuitively this appeals, tho (as a materialist) I'd probably go with the more morally sketchy gradual "enmindment". That, however, leaves us open to the idea that some people are more people than others, that many animals are also people, and that some human organisms are not people not only before they become people but also probably (or maybe not? is the mind once installed, never gone fully?) that the "being person" quality can be lost -- this is recognized in a sense with the changing definition of death for medical purposes but will open options for non consensual euthanasia of heavily brain damaged human organisms including when that damage has been caused by a progressive chronic condition like dementia, and not only acute catastrophic injury. And while I'm theoretically in support of that, I don't think it's practicable.
Re: the difference between a person and an organism.
Let's say that there is a person on life support. This person is competely braindead: an EEG shows no brain activity whatsoever, and there's nobody "in there" by any conventional definition. Based on my understanding of your distinction, I would say that this individual, or rather this body, is an organism but not a person.
Now, say that you know there is an advancement of medical science coming down the line that, if you could manage to keep the individual alive on life support for a few more weeks or months, would allow you to restart their brain and reverse the condition of brain death. If someone wanted to pull the plug on them during the intervening period, while they are still braindead, would that be okay? Or do you have a duty to keep the body alive until such a time as the condition of personhood can be restored?
What an absolute banger of an opener. If only every article about abortion (on both sides) began that way!
Even if the pro-life people, (actually pro-fetus as they don't care at all about the living, breathing woman and if she dies it's So What), might possibly be not on the surface simply wanting to control women, their demands and actions result in severe control of women. They are unforgivable for the damage and deaths they have caused through the millenia. Some 50,000 woman a year die from unsafe (illegal) abortions and millions more are damaged. Families destroyed, children left motherless, women forced into one pregnancy after another so her health suffers and the infants that make it are weak and poor. But, Hey, So What.
I agree with you that those are serious problems, but I also think it's possible to care deeply about them while still being unable to justify abortion to yourself despite the consequences. Maybe holding this view without hypocrisy requires taking a much stronger interest in the social welfare of women who have or are at risk for unwanted pregnancies, as well as for the welfare of the children born from those pregnancies, than pro-life advocates have a reputation for taking. But I do believe it's possible.
It is definitely possible to be an activist pushing for many areas that would reduce need for abortions while also not electing politicians who pass laws against abortion, and staying out of the woman's decision. Areas to work in would include men being responsible since they are they ones knocking women up, improving cost of child care would really help, pushing for paid maternity leave, pushing for good sex education in schools, etc. Until recently, like this year, the anti's have been with the Republicans in being against all those things, so a change would be welcome.
I am way less confident in this particular philosophical account of how organisms are individuated than I am that I was once conceived.