Tooley on Infanticide and Potential Personhood

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Given that Giublini and Minerva’s recent article on after-birth abortion was little more than a restatement of Michael Tooley’s 1972 article “Abortion and Infanticide” (with maybe one minor difference), I thought it might be worth briefly revisiting Tooley’s argument. Now, I don’t wish to revisit the whole thing since it is a long and complex piece (which he gave a book-length elaboration and refinement to in 1983), but one aspect of it seems to warrant reconsideration in light of the recent discussion: his treatment of the potential personhood objection.

Those of you who read my analysis of the “after-birth abortion” article will be familiar with Tooley’s central argument. To give it the briefest of summaries, the argument is roughly as follows: only persons have a right to life; newborn infants are not persons; therefore, newborn infants do not have the right to life; therefore, it is permissible to kill newborn infants. Whatever about the merit of the personhood criterion, one typical objection here is that even if newborn infants are not yet persons, they are on the way to becoming persons, and that has to count for something. This is the potential personhood objection.

I looked at Minerva and Giublini’s response to this objection in my earlier posts, now I want to consider Tooley’s response, which is quite short but, I think, rather interesting.


1. Tooley on Why is is Permissible to Kill a Potential Person
Tooley’s response to the potentiality objection centres on two key premises. The first claims that there is no general duty to act so as to turn potential persons into actual persons. The second claims that there is no real moral difference between acts and omissions. From the conjunction of these two premises is drawn the conclusion that there is no prohibition on taking active steps to prevent a potential person from becoming an actual person. From which it follows it is permissible to kill a potential person. Let’s go through this more carefully.

First up, let’s consider the idea of personhood. Tooley defines a person as any being with the concept of itself as a “continuing subject of experiences”. In other words, as a being that is sentient, has a concept of self and has a concept of this self existing through time. He maintains that only beings with this kind of self-concept have a right to life. No doubt, that’s something you might like to critique, but taking it onboard for now, what does it say about potential persons? Tooley seems to understand “potentiality” in terms of counterfactual conditions. Roughly, he seems to think that a being has the potential to become a person if, some plausible possible world, it could have become a person.

It’s not clear exactly which concept of possibility Tooley is working with here. It clearly can’t be conceptual or logical possibility, that would be much too loose a standard. After all, there’s nothing logically contradictory in the notion of a possible world in which desklamps can turn into persons, but that surely doesn’t mean that my desklamp in this world is a potential person? So it must be a more constrained concept of possibility that's at play.

Reading between the lines, I think Tooley must be working with some combination of physical and technological possibility. In other words, he would maintain that if it were physically and technologically possible to turn my lamp into a person in this world, it then counts a potential person. I glean this by reading between the lines of the thought experiment Tooley uses to support the first premise of his argument.

The thought experiment is the following:

Personhood Serum: Suppose that scientists develop a serum that, when injected into a cat, will cause them to develop the mental faculties necessary (and sufficient) for becoming a person. This means that the cat is now a potential person. Do we have an obligation to inject all the cats we see with the serum?

Tooley’s intuition, no doubt shared by many, is that even though every cat is now a potential person, we have no duty inject them with the serum. In other words, there is no duty to take active steps to turn a potential person into an actual person. This is the first premise of Tooley’s argument. Note, given traditional deontic schemes of opposition, the corollary of this would be that it is permissible to fail (i.e. it is omissible) to take steps to turn potential persons into actual persons. Given the subsequent steps in the argument, this correlative formulation of the premise might be more sensible.

Moving on then to the second premise of Tooley’s argument. As you recall, this is the claim that there is no moral difference between failing to do something (omitting) and actually doing something (acting). This is the so-called “symmetry” principle and it is certainly controversial. For instance, many people hold that there is a significant moral difference between killing and letting die, which is based on the acting/omitting dichotomy.

Nevertheless, there are ways in which to defend the symmetry principle. One is to rely on James Rachel’s classic Jones/Smith thought experiment (note this dates from after Tooley’s article):

The Baby and the Bathtub: Smith enters the bathroom of his young nephew while the nephew is taking a bath. Knowing that he stands to gain a substantial inheritance upon the nephew’s death, Smith drowns the child. Jones is in a similar predicament with his nephew so he also decides to drown the nephew. However, when Jones enters the bathroom he finds that the nephew is already drowning so he simply stands by and watches as events unfold. Are Smith and Jones equally culpable?

The suggestion here is that Smith and Jones are equally culpable: they both had the same intent and both allowed their intentions to become a reality. As a result, this thought experiment is thought to provide support for the symmetry principle. And so Tooley has his second premise.

What now follows? Well, if its true it is permissible to fail to take active steps to turn potential persons into actual person, and if it is true that there is no moral difference between actively doing something and failing to do something, then wouldn’t it follow that it is permissible to take active steps to prevent potential persons from turning into actual persons? And wouldn’t that amount to the same thing as saying that it is permissible to kill a potential person.

In other words,

• (1) It is permissible to fail to take steps to turn a potential person into an actual person.

• (2) There is no moral difference between failing to something and actually doing it.

• (3) Therefore, it is permissible to take actual steps that prevent a potential persons from turning into an actual person.

• (4) Therefore, it is permissible to kill a potential person.

Now, to be clear, I’m not entirely sure about the validity of this argument, but I can’t quite put my finger on the reasons for my lack of certainty, so perhaps it would be best to consider its soundness.



2. Challenging Tooley’s Argument
Obviously, there are two ways to challenge the soundness of Tooley’s argument. The first is to challenge the principle he draws from the Personhood Serum example. The second is to challenge the symmetry principle. In his recent book on the ethics of abortion, Christopher Kaczor mounts both sorts of challenge. I’ll briefly outline what he has to say here.

Kaczor challenges premise (1) in two different ways. The first is to argue that the potentiality objection is flawed in the first place and so it does not even matter whether premise (1) is true or false. The reason for this is that, according to Kaczor, most abortion opponents — at least, within the philosophical community — do not base their opposition to abortion on the potential status of the foetus (or, indeed, the newborn), rather, they base their opposition to abortion on the actual status of the foetus/newborn. They argue that this status is what gives the foetus/newborn a right to life. Of course, this is to reject Tooley’s personhood criterion and if we were to consider the relevant arguments in favour of the actuality principle, we would be drawn away from the current topic. They are in Kaczor’s book, if you are interested.

But let’s just assume that potentiality is important, does the personhood serum case, which Tooley uses to support premise (1), really establish what needs to be established? Kaczor argues that it does not. This is because Tooley fails to distinguish between two varieties of potentiality. They are:

Passive Potentiality: Where the entity does not have any internal system or capacity to develop the actual status but instead requires outside intervention to develop the actual status.

Active Potentiality: Where the entity does have an internal system that allows it to develop the actual status.

Kaczor argues that the cat in Tooley’s thought experiment only has passive potentiality, whereas the newborn infant has active potentiality. What difference does that make? Well here’s what Kaczor has to say about it:

If functioning rationally [i.e. as a person] is the benchmark of respect, a being actively developing toward functional rationality (the human fetus [sic]) deserves a greater respect than a being with the passive potential to become a being actively self-developing towards functional rationality…

Unfortunately, that’s all he says about this important issue and I’ll be damned if I can detect anything close to an argument, as opposed to a mere assertion, in what he has said. One problem with the assertion is that it’s not really that obvious that the newborn infant has active potentiality. Although there is a biological developmental process that unfolds in a particular way, this process is constantly assisted by outside forces (e.g. parents providing care and nourishment). Is that really all that different from passive potentiality?

Furthermore, as some author’s have pointed out (McMahan, 2007) some infants definitely do not have the active potentiality to develop into persons. These are infants with severe congenital disorders. Kaczor seems to accept the counterexample here, but then responds by pointing out the importance of species-membership and flourishing relative to a species-typical ideal. Now the moral importance of species membership is one of Kaczor’s main arguments in his anti-abortion book, but it’s not something I can hope to explore here.

Even if Kaczor is a bit weak in his critique of premise (1), there’s always his critique of premise (2) to fall back on. What does he have to say about this? Several things, as it turns out. First, he notes that the truth of the symmetry principle is not self-evident. The Jones/Smith example provides one intuitive scenario in which symmetry seems to hold, but there are others which support asymmetry.

Second, there seems to be an important moral difference between failing to initiate a causal process, on the one hand, and intervening to prevent a causal process from continuing, on the other. The former may attract no moral blame, but the latter might. For example, you probably have no general obligation to promise to help your friend move into his new house, but if you do make the promise and are assisting them in carrying their grand piano into the house, you’d probably be doing something wrong if you suddenly decided to back out of the promise.

Third, Kaczor suggests that there is a moral difference between refraining from making someone better off, on the one hand, and positively acting so as to make them worse off, on the other. This difference is probably highlighted in the previous example anyway, but it seems less persuasive in this context. Why so? Because one of the big questions here is whether you actually make a non-person worse off by ending their lives. Kaczor is aware of this problem and promises to give an answer later in the book. Again, I won’t get into it here.

That then brings us to the end of this post. As I said at the start, the goal was mainly to set out Tooley’s response to the potentiality objection and hint at some possible criticisms of it. I appreciate that many rabbit holes have been opened but not followed down, but that, unfortunately, is the nature of this debate.

What the "After-Birth Abortion" Article Said (Part Two)

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(Part one)

This post is the second in a short series on the, now infamous, article “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” by Antonio Giublini and Francesca Minerva. The article generated a good deal of controversy upon its publication last week. I noted this in part one.

The purpose of this series is to clarify the logical structure of the argument being made by Giublini and Minerva and offer some critical observations. I ended part one with what I thought was the best formulation of their central argument. It was this (with the numbering following what was set down in part one):

• (8) It is permissible to kill non-persons (even if they are potential persons).

• (9) Neither the foetus nor the newborn infant are persons.

• (10) Therefore, pre-birth and post-birth abortions are permissible.

I will now consider the how the authors’ defend the two key premises of this argument. As we shall see, they spend far more time on premise (8) than they do on premise (9).

[Note: Those of you who have read the original article will find that my discussion of their defence of premise (8) does not follow exactly the sequence of their discussion. This is because, as I noted in part one, I found their discussion slightly confusing in that it didn’t clarify how their subsidiary arguments related to their central arguments. I’m hoping my discussion does a better job of this, while still reflecting the authors’ actual argument.]


1. The Permissibility of Killing Non-Persons
The key move in Giublini and Minerva’s defence of premise (8) is an old one. It is to argue that: (i) anything that lacks a right to life can be permissibly killed; and (ii) only actual, not potential, persons have a right to life. This is pretty much what Tooley argued in his 1972 article “Abortion and Infanticide”, but the authors adopt slightly different definitions of the key terms “person” and “right to life”.

Their definition of “person” is as follows:

Person = An individual who is capable of attributing at least some basic value to her existence such that being deprived of existence represents a loss/harm to him or her. (pg. 2)

Presumably then, a non-person is any entity, living or indeed non-living, that lacks this capacity. Some people might throw more into their definition of personhood (e.g. rationality), but this slightly more minimalistic definition is appropriate enough given the context. Since the argument is going to be that only persons have a right to life, and it is permissible to kill anything that lacks the right to life, we probably want to err on the side of inclusiveness in our definition. The authors’ themselves believe that their definition includes some non-human animals within the scope of personhood, but (controversially) excludes newborn infants. More on that anon.

Tooley’s definition of a person was roughly “anything that conceives of itself as a continuing subject of experience”. This personhood criterion is clearly broader than mere sentience since it requires awareness of existence through time. And allthough not worded in the same manner, it may be that his definition amounts to the same thing as Giublini and Minerva’s definition insofar as a continuing subject of experience might be the only thing that can attach basic value to continued existence.

Moving on, the authors’ offer the following general description of the conditions under which an entity has a “right”:

Rights: An entity possesses a right to X only if they are harmed by a decision to deprive them of X.

Giublini and Minerva describe this as being a minimal necessary condition for possessing a right. One interesting thing is that, on this definition, non-person’s can have rights since they may be harmed, (although presumably only if they have some form of sentience). Indeed, the authors make this point themselves when they declare (pg. 2) that a foetus may have right not to be inflicted with pain, since they may have some form of sentience. But sentient non-persons may still lack the right to life (or, better, to “continued existence”) if they cannot attach value to their continued existence and so be harmed by it. In other words:

Right to Life: An entity possesses a right to continued existence only if they can attach some value to their continued existence and so be harmed by being deprived of that existence.

One might complain that there some “stacking of the deck” going on here since the definition of person and right to life are so closely intertwined. The original paper is quite short though so presumably there wasn’t much space for engaging all these definitional subtleties. I’m sure if you want to criticise the argument you might like to go after some of these definitions.

Anyway, at last, this brings us to the basic argument for the permissibility of killing non-persons.

• (10) It is permissible to kill anything that lacks the right to life.

• (11) Non-persons (even if they are potential persons) lack the right to life.

• (8) Therefore, it is permissible to kill non-persons (even if they are potential persons).

There are two obvious lines of attack on this argument. The first targets premise (10), arguing that it may be impermissible to kill things even if they do lack the right to life. And the second targets premise (11), arguing that there is an important distinction between what we might call “pure” non-persons and non-persons who have the potential to develop in actual persons (potential persons). We’ll consider both of these lines of attack, and how the authors deal with them, next.


2. Attacking Premise (10)
Let’s look first to the attack on premise (10). Giublini and Minerva really only discuss one such attack (as far as I can tell). It is this: a living being ought not to be killed, even when it is a non-person, if it can derive a right to continued existence from someone else. In the context of the overall debate, this objection captures the idea that the parents or family of a foetus/infant may have an interest in its continued existence and so it would be impermissible to deprive them of that interest by killing the child. There are some, no doubt unfortunate, analogies that could be used to underscore this objection. For instance, one could argue that it is wrong to kill a person’s pet on similar grounds.

It seems that the authors’ are willing to concede the force of this objection. They argue that parents and family of a newborn infant often do have an interest in keeping the child alive and so, in this kind of scenario, it would, of course, be wrong for anyone to come along and kill the infant. But they maintain that this doesn’t do enough for the pro-life position. In this kind of scenario, the impermissibility of the killing is contingent upon the interests of the parent. It is those interests that do all the heavy ethical lifting. If the parents have conflicting interests — which might be the case if rearing the child would cause great physical/psychological or economic harm to the parents — then the impermissibility might dissolve.

In other words, any derivative right to continued existence that could be conferred on a non-person would not trump the (potentially conflicting) rights that actual persons have. In fact, the situation would be the exact reverse: the conflicting rights of actual persons would always trump the derivative rights of the non-person.

To summarise:

• (12) It is impermissible to kill a living being when another living being has an interest in its continued existence, i.e. a living non-person can derive a right to continued existence from an actual person.

• (13) But any such derivative right could be trumped by a conflicting right of the actual person (as may arise in the case of parent who would be harmed by the continued existence of their child).

To this point, the objection has in mind the scenario in which the parents and family have an interest in continued existence, which is then trumped by a conflicting interest. But couldn’t other actual persons (e.g. the persons in the broader society) have an interest in keeping children alive that would in turn trump the interests of the parents and family?

Giublini and Minerva make some gestures towards this kind of objection in their article when they consider whether compulsory adoption should be allowed instead of after-birth abortion. They respond to this suggestion by arguing that adoption could cause greater harm to the parent (mother in particular) than abortion, citing studies done on grief in adoption in support of this observation. However, they follow this up by saying:

We are not suggesting that these are definitive reasons against adoption as a valid alternative to after-birth abortion. Much depends on circumstances and psychological reactions. What we are suggesting is that, if interests of actual people should prevail, then after-birth abortion should be considered a permissible option for women who would be damaged by giving up their newborns for adoption (pg. 3)

I’m not sure that this response quite gets at the objection I was making — which was about interests of all actual people in society, not the parents — but I take it that it still lessens the force of the objection: much will depend on what the interests of actual people are. Empirically, it may be that society’s interests would trump those of the parents, but that is an empirical not a conceptual point. So the basic argument-counterargument in (12) and (13) would remain intact.


3. Attacking Premise (11)
We turn then to the second possible attack on the permissibility of killing non-persons. This one accepts that killing some non-persons might be acceptable, but that potential persons are in a separate class. They can in fact be harmed by their non-existence and so do have a right to life. One way to think of this might be in terms of Don Marquis’s classic “future like ours” argument, which I discussed on a podcast some time ago. Unfortunately, the authors never speak to this argument directly, which is surprising given its prominence in the literature.

What the authors do do, however, is consider some counterexamples to the general principle that, in order for an entity to have a right to X, they must both aware of and harmed by its absence. As they point out, there seem to be several cases in which a person is harmed by an action that deprives them of something, even when they were not aware of it.

One example they cite is that of the person who buys a lottery or raffle ticket, which is then stolen, but subsequently (and unbeknownst to them) turns out to be the winning ticket. The authors suggest that such a person is harmed by this even though they aren’t aware that their ticket is the winning one. It hard to know what to say about this. While there is a harm here, there isn’t really a lack of awareness. The person is presumably aware of the theft and of being deprived of the possibility of winning the lottery, and so is harmed by the theft itself, irrespective of whether the ticket is in fact the winning one. Maybe the authors’ saying that there is an additional harm here in respective of absence of the money they would have received. But this isn’t clear and, unfortunately, due to the brevity of their paper, I can’t work it out.

The other example they cite is that of the person who is harmed by their mother taking drugs while they are in womb because this subsequently compromises their quality of life. On the face of it, this seems like a bad counterexample to use here since it deals directly with the foetus (i.e. a potential person), which is the focus of this whole debate. But letting that slide, it does seem to work a little better than the first example since it does involves a clear case of harm coupled with a complete a lack of awareness (at least in the personhood sense of awareness).

The problem with the counterexample, though, is that the harm is not done to the foetus per se, but to the person that the foetus eventually becomes. In other words, the harm is not realised until the status of personhood is obtained. But that is not the same as saying that a foetus (or potential person) is harmed by being denied continued existence and not becoming a person. If they don’t become a person, which is what will happen if they are aborted, then they won’t actually be harmed. As the authors put it:

So, if you ask us one of us if we would have been harmed, had our parents decided to kill us when we were foetuses or newborns, our answer is “no”, because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the “us” to whom you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, the no harm occurred.

Another way of putting this is to say that the example of the person harmed by foetal drug abuse works because the person really is harmed when they become a person. But that is disanalogous to the case of abortion (pre or after birth) because no person comes into existence. To given a snapshot summary of this dialectic:

• (14) If a person can be harmed by actions of which they were unaware, then potential persons have a right to life.

• (15) Potential persons can be harmed by actions of which they were unaware (the foetal drug abuse example).

• (16) But the example does not establish the key claim: the harm is only truly realised when the foetus becomes a person, so a potential person that never becomes a person cannot be harmed.

Before moving on, three observations. First, premise (14) might well be false here anyway, it is my creation and it looks a bit odd. Second, the authors make some interesting comments about the asymmetry between the harms and benefits of coming into existence in support of their rebuttal (i.e. in support of premise 16). The comments are interesting because they seem to clash with David Benatar’s comments on this asymmetry, which I discussed before. Third, I do think this section of the paper could have been improved by considering something like Marquis’s future like ours argument, or Christopher Kaczor’s more recent defence of potential personhood arguments. Or indeed by offering some response to actuality arguments against abortion, which are also defended by Kaczor (an actuality argument being one that defends the right to life of the foetus/newborn on the basis of what it actually is rather than what it has the potential to become).

Maybe these couldn’t be considered due to lack of space, but then the question arises: is a three-page article the correct place to discuss a controversial argument like this if its brevity then forces it to ignore significant counterarguments?


4. The Moral Equivalence of Foetuses and Newborns
So much for the authors’ defence of the claim that it is permissible to kill non-persons (even if they are potential persons). As you’ll recall from earlier, they also need to defend the claim (premise 9) that foetuses and newborns are not persons. Interestingly, for all their initial fanfare about drawing an analogy between the post-birth and pre-birth individual, they have surprisingly little to say about this. They seem to think it obvious that the foetus and the newborn lack the kind of self-awareness required for personhood.

Their main comment on this important issue comes in the second-to-last paragraph of the article. There, they say that they have no idea when the threshold of personhood is actually crossed, but that no more than a couple of days or weeks after birth would be required to determine whether a child suffered from some abnormality that would permit killing it. This statement about abnormalities is odd given, as I pointed out in part one, constraining the permissibility of abortion in this manner doesn’t seem to fit with their overall argument which gives an unconstrained permissibility to killing non-persons. But ignoring that, the implication seems to be that the personhood threshold is not be crossed until at least a couple of weeks after birth.

Is this a realistic point at which to draw the line? What we have here is the classic problem of drawing a categorical boundary across an underlying empirical reality that is inherently gradualistic. If we imagine a spectrum ranging from the newly-fertilised zygote at one end, to the fully mentally competent adult at the other, then it’s pretty clear that what was once a non-person does manage to morph into a person. But when we zoom in on each stage in that spectrum, there is probably no distinct point at which transmogrification occurs. This leaves us in a bind.

Since the relevant moral status here is personhood, and since personhood is defined in terms of a certain kind of awareness, it is probably fair to say that birth itself not a morally relevant boundary. After all, there’s no reason to think that the passage through the birth canal magically bestows the relevant kind of awareness on the child. But that’s not to say that the relevant kind awareness is not obtained prior to birth. David Boonin, for instance, suggests that the threshold may be crossed when the foetus achieves organised cortical brain activity, which would be prior to birth (around the 25th week of gestation, apparently). Boonin, however, may be working with a weaker criterion than personhood when determining what possesses the right to life.

The fact is, it’s really hard to say when personhood is achieved. This is because most of the informal “tests” we use to figure out whether someone is a “person” are based on observable behaviours (talking, making plans, remembering things etc.) which are typically absent in the foetus or newborn infant. But in this instance absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And since we probably should err on the side of caution here, far deeper consideration of the empirical reality would be needed before we could even begin to say that after birth abortion was permissible.


5. Conclusion
So that brings us to the end of this series. As I said at the outset, the primary intention here was to clarify the logical structure of the argument offered by Giublini and Minerva in their controversial paper. I hope I have succeeded in that aim. And while it was not my goal to heap any serious criticism (or, indeed, praise) on the argument, I think I have pointed out some weak points along the way. In particular, I have suggested that the argument would have benefitted from a greater engagement with the relevant literature (in particular with the arguments on potential persons and the “future like ours”-principle); and by a deeper consideration of the empirical reality (or lack thereof) in the transition from non-personhood to personhood.

What the "After-Birth Abortion" Article Said (Part One)

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Those of you who follow the world of applied ethics will, no doubt, be aware of the recent furore surrounding the Journal of Medical Ethics’s decision to publish an article defending the moral permissibility of infanticide. The article is entitled “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” and it’s by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. Apparently, the authors have been threatened with violence and the editors of the journal have received a considerable volume of hate mail as a result of it’s publication. You can read about this, as well as the editor’s defence of the decision to publish over here, if you like.

Given the controversy, I thought it might be worth taking a look at the paper and figuring out what kind of argument it is making. But also, given the controversy, I should probably preface my attempt to do this with a few cautionary remarks.

First, I’m certainly very queasy about the argument, as I think most people are, but I’m not sure where I ultimately come down on this issue. I’m trying to approach this in as neutral a way that I can. Second, I have no problem with the decision to publish the article, believing it is perfectly acceptable to discuss these issues in a reasoned manner. And third, I find the controversy somewhat odd: I can understand why people might be challenged or offended by what the authors say, but the fact is that leading philosophers (Singer and Tooley) have been making similar arguments for a long time.

The editors raise this in their defence of the decision to publish and, ironically, this is the one thing that makes me question the decision to publish. As far as I can make out, there’s nothing particularly original about the article, Tooley (in particular) made an almost identical case a long time ago. But to say that Tooley’s case is “almost identical” is not to say that it is “identical”. The authors do present the argument in a different way and it’s my goal to figure out the logical structure of their reasoning.

As it turns out, this is not a particularly easy thing to do. While the article is a short easy read (just three pages), I struggled as I read it to figure out exactly where each section fit in to the central argument. I concede that my difficulties may stem from my desire to project my own understanding of what the argument should be onto the article, but I can only speak from my own perspective and from that perspective I do genuinely think the central argument is not as clearly presented as it could be. Thus, I dedicate this first post in the series to an attempt at reconstructing the central argument.


1. Some Notes on Terminology
Before I get down to the reconstructive task, I need to back-up for a moment and talk about terminology. As it turns out, terminology is important to understanding the central argument so this is not a complete distraction.

Giublini and Minerva state that they are defending the permissibility of after-birth abortion. But “after-birth abortion” is a term of their own invention. On the face of it, it seems oxymoronic: you can’t have an abortion after birth since an abortion is defined as the termination of a pregnancy. Aware of this problem, the authors still prefer to use the term “after-birth abortion”. Why so? They offer two reasons.

The first is that using the term “after-birth abortion”, rather than the more traditional “infanticide”, plays an important role in the framing of the debate. It is designed to direct our attention toward the parallels between aborting a foetus and killing an infant. The authors are quite explicit about this, writing:

We propose to call this practice “after birth abortion”, rather than “infanticide”, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed, is comparable with that of a fetus…rather than to that of a child. (pg. 2)

The second reason is similar to the first. It is to draw attention away from possible parallels with euthanasia (hence, they don’t call it “after birth euthanasia”). This is because the authors think that the case of euthanasia is significantly different to that of after-birth abortion. Euthanasia is usually justified on the grounds that death is in the best interests of the person being killed. But the justification of abortion is different: it can be justified on the grounds that it is in the best interests of persons other than the individual being killed. Indeed, as we shall see, part of the argument is that foetuses and newborn infants are not “persons” properly so-called, so they can’t have interests of this sort anyway.

Another terminological/conceptual point, worth mentioning at the outset, is the difference between saying something is “permissible” and saying it is “obligatory” or “supererogatory”. To say that an action is permissible, is to say that its performance attracts no moral blame or introduces no moral disvalue to the world. This is very different from saying that the action is something that would attract moral blame if it were not performed (i.e. is obligatory) or that it enhances the moral value of the world (i.e. is supererogatory). The authors are arguing only for the permissibility of after-birth abortion.


2. An attempt at Reconstructing the Central Argument
I complained in the introduction about the authors' lack of clarity in presenting their central argument. But what exactly do I mean by “central argument”. Basically, I use the term to draw a distinction between what I see as being the primary argument of the paper — i.e. the one that ends with the conclusion “Therefore, after birth abortion is permissible” or something pretty close to that — and the subsidiary arguments that are used to defend the key premises of that primary argument. One of the main problems with the paper, as I see it, is that the authors are (sort of) clear about their subsidiary arguments, but not about their central argument.

They do, however, offer several clues as to the nature of the central argument. One such clue — already highlighted — is that the central argument tries to draw some clear parallels between the pre-birth and after-birth situations. Roughly, the authors are trying to say that since the status of the foetus is similar to the status of the newborn infant, if pre-birth abortion is permissible so too must after-birth abortion be permissible. So their argument must work with at least one premise setting out the similarity between the two cases and one setting out the implications thereof. What might those premises look like?

Well, the authors start the article with this statement:

Severe abnormalities of the fetus and risks for the physical and/or psychological health of the woman are often cited as valid reasons for abortion… A serious philosophical problem arises when the same conditions that would have justified abortion become known after birth. In such cases, we need to assess facts in order to decide whether the same arguments that apply to killing a human fetus can also be consistently applied to killing a newborn human. (pg. 1)

And then later they give the following capsule summary of their position:

Therefore, we argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. (pg 2)

This tempts me towards the following reconstruction of their central argument:

• (1) Abortion is permissible in a variety of circumstances (severe foetal abnormalities, damage to health of mother etc.).

• (2) If the circumstances permitting abortion arise after birth, then they would also permit after-birth abortion.

• (3) The circumstances permitting abortion do arise after birth.

• (4) Therefore, after-birth abortion is permissible.

The first two premises of this argument have some textual support, which is highlighted above. And there is an attempt to defend something like the third premise at the outset of the article. Thus, in paragraph three, the authors discuss a variety of factors that can lead to severe abnormalities that can actually be caused by the birthing process or are only capable of being discovered after birth.

But for all its textual support, I think this version is a poor fit for the central argument of the paper. The main reason for this is that when the authors get down to the actual business of defending the other premises — i.e. the premises defending the permissibility of abortion and the equivalent moral status of the newborn infant and the foetus — they don’t limit permissibility to just those cases involving harm to health. This is unsurprising, given the way in which abortion is most commonly defended: as a “free” choice, not something constrained by particular circumstances. This isn’t to say that a constrained version is implausible in general, just that it doesn’t seem to fit with the remainder of the article.

That leads me to pose an alternative formulation of the argument, a much broader and simpler one:

• (5) Pre-birth abortion is permissible.

• (6) If pre-birth abortion is permissible, then so too is after-birth abortion.

• (7) Therefore, after-birth abortion is permissible.

This formulation has the virtue of brevity and is a better fit with what the author’s ultimately say, but it is still not quite right. For one thing, this formulation may lead to an unfortunate straw-manning of the author’s argument. What do I mean by this? Well, since the main argumentative thrust of the article is framed in terms of the analogy between the moral status of the pre-birth and post-birth individual, one may end up thinking that the authors offer no defence of premise (5) and simply assume it to be true. Indeed, some people seem to be viewing the argument like this already and looking on it as a potential reductio of the permissibility of abortion. (It could also be construed as a slippery slope argument against abortion.)

But I don’t think that’s fair to the authors since they do offer something like a defence of premise (5), only their defence is explicitly not limited to the pre-birth scenario. Instead, it is a general defence of the permissibility of killing non-persons, which is then defended against an various counterarguments. That suggests that this might be the better formulation of the central argument:

• (8) It is permissible to kill non-persons (even if they are potential persons).

• (9) Neither the foetus nor the newborn infant are persons.

• (10) Therefore, pre-birth and post-birth abortions are permissible.

This, I think, is the best version of the central argument. It does justice to the authors’ attempt to argue for the equivalent moral status of the foetus and the newborn infant (in premise 9), and so grants them their framing of the debate. But it also allows them to avoid the straw man discussed above and offer some explicit defence of the permissibility of killing non-persons (premise 8). I’ll talk about how they do both of those things in part two.

Should we freeze ourselves? (Index and Introduction)

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This post serves as both an index and introduction to my new series posts on the ethics of cryogenic suspension. Cryonic suspension, for the purposes of this series can be defined in the following manner:

Cryonic suspension: Is the process or technology through which a mature human body (or some part thereof, typically the brain or head) is frozen and stored in the hope that it will be revived at a future date.

Definitions are always imperfect — somebody will probably argue that I’ve left something out of the above — but I think this one can be accepted (as a stipulation if need be) since it is the kind of cryonic suspension mentioned therein that is of concern in this series. The series explores the ethical arguments arising from the question: should we have ourselves cryogenically suspended?


1. The Structure of the Series
This series structured in an unusual manner, at least in comparison to other series on this blog. For starters, each post in the series deals with one — and only one — argument for or against cryonic suspension. Typically, I’d cover several arguments in one post, but I decided this more fragmented approach afforded some advantages.

Primarily, it gave me an excuse to avoid writing lengthy introductions to each post reviewing key parts of the preceding discussion. Although I usually enjoy writing such introductions, they can become tiresome. In addition to this, the fragmented format allows for easy revision and expansion of the series. Again, this is unlike my previous efforts. Why so? Well, primarily because I found the academic literature on the ethics of cryogenics to be rather sparse. Indeed, I only managed to locate one academic article on this topic (as well as some internet resources):

David Shaw, “Cryoethics: Seeking Life After Death” (2009) Bioethics, 23(9): 515-521

So I’m going to base my initial draft of the series on Shaw’s article, along with my own elaborations thereof. But I’m hoping that by publishing the series here, I might be presented with some additional resources to consider and arguments to address. That way, I can expand on what I initially say and build a fairly comprehensive database of arguments for and against cryonic suspension.

My goal is to write one entry per week in this series. I’m hoping this is a reasonable and attainable goal. I haven’t always been the best at completing the series I start — indeed, regular readers may note that I’ve essentially abandoned the custom of announcing series in advance of writing them, preferring now to cobble series together from previously written material — but I feel more confident about completing this particular one because the workload on the individual posts should be relatively low.


2. Cryogenics and Disorienting Dilemmas
Why am I doing this? I think it’s worth emphasising here that I come to this issue as a non-advocate. In other words, unlike many of those writing about cryogenics on the internet (at least, unlike many of the people I have read) I’m not writing this series with the explicit aim of convincing you that you ought to have yourself cryogenically suspended. Instead, I’m writing it with the explicit aim of dispassionately analysing the arguments for and against cryogenics.

That said, I do have something of a bias when it comes to this topic. The bias is my belief in the positive role that it can play in teaching students critical thinking skills. In his book, Teaching for Critical Thinking, Stephen Brookfield says that critical thinking is a process that consists of four stages: (1) identifying the assumptions that frame our thinking and determine our actions; (2) checking out the degree to which these assumptions are accurate and valid; (3) looking at our ideas and decisions from multiple perspective; and (4) in light of all this, making informed decisions. And although we may quibble with this four-stage model, I think Brookfield’s definition captures the important elements of critical thinking. It is a skill-set which all educators should try to inculcate.

In outlining some of the techniques that teachers can use to inculcate the skills of critical thinking, Brookfield highlights (chapter 3) the potential of disorienting dilemmas. These can be defined in the following manner:

Disorienting Dilemma: Any decision-making problem (real or hypothetical) that forces you to reassess or think differently about something which you previously have taken for granted.

Such dilemmas get their name from the notion that they are so unsettling that they “diorient” you from your worldview. They are important in teaching critical thinking in that they tend to be a highly effective way in which to encourage the four-stage process outlined above. Strictly speaking, they need not always be dilemmas since that term connotes a decision-making problem in which there are two possible courses of action. They could be trilemmas, or quadrilemmas or whatever. In the case of cryogenics there is a dilemma to contend with: should you freeze yourself or not? (We'll talk about the precise nature of that dilemma in more detail in the first proper entry of the series).

It is my contention that this dilemma can be genuinely disorienting. A proper consideration of the issues that bear upon it, will force you to confront assumptions of fact and value. What’s more, it will force you to think seriously about the degree of confidence that you place in your moral and factual beliefs.

It is thus because of its potential to serve as a disorienting dilemma, and not because of some desire for eternal or prolonged life, that I am enthusiastic about analysing the case for cryogenic suspension. This might seem slightly odd to cryo-enthusiasts, but it’s how I feel about it.


3. The Index Proper
I think there’s been quite enough stage-setting in this post, it’s time to get on with the main event: the index to the series itself. As I said above, in this first draft of the series, I’m going to be using David Shaw’s article on cryoethics as my basic guide to the topic. And since Shaw’s article looks solely at the ethics of cryonics, I will avoid, for the time being at least, considering the technological feasibility of cryonics. I may consider this at some future point, but such an eventuality is unlikely for two main reasons: (i) it’s well outside my own area of expertise and (ii) as we shall see, the technological feasibility of cryonics does not need to be particularly strong for the main arguments to work.

There is one complication surrounding the term “ethics” that is worth mentioning here. In his article, Shaw draws a distinction between prudential and ethical arguments. A prudential argument being one that works from the premise that every person acts in accordance with (their perception) of their own self-interest, and a moral argument being one that works from some premise based on an objective value (e.g. “we ought to maximise human welfare”). If I were in a metaethical mood, I might challenge that distinction on various grounds, but since I’m not in that mood right now, I won’t. I will just use the phrase “the ethics of cryonics” to refer to both the moral and prudential arguments surrounding cryogenics. It might be worth bearing that in mind as you read along.

Anyway, at last, the index.


Series Index


0. The Cryonics Dilemma Considered

1. You should not freeze yourself

1.1 The Loneliness Argument
1.2 The High Cost Argument
1.3 The Opportunity Cost Argument
1.4 The Unproven Technology Argument
1.5 The Non-Physicalist Argument
1.6 The “Revival is Unlikely” Argument
1.7 The “Revival Before Cure” Argument
1.8 The "Life will be Boring" Argument
1.9 The Environmental Cost Argument
1.10 The Better Causes Argument
1.11 The Organ Donation Argument
1.12 The Death-Definition Problem
1.13 The Slippery Slope Argument

2. You Should Freeze Yourself

2.1 The Future Benefit Argument
2.2 The Time Travel Argument
2.3 The Wager Argument

Pinker and Per Capita Rates of Violence

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Like many, I was recently seduced into buying a copy of Steven Pinker’s latest opus The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, the essential thesis of which is neatly captured in the title.

I use the term “seduced” deliberately. I had no intention of reading or buying it originally. An 800-page tome, riddled with charts, and graphs, and complex statistical techniques, that tried to prove that violence was declining over time (and explain why this was happening) didn’t seem like my kind of thing. Added to this, was the fact that I’d already watched several talks in which Pinker laid out his basic argument and, so, it didn’t seem like I’d learn anything new by reading the book.

But the lure of the dead trees version proved inexorable in the end. Positive reviews started to pile-up — most noticeably the one from Peter Singer — and recommendations from normally sceptical bloggers appeared. My will was finally broken a couple of days ago when I spent a good thirty minutes reading bits and pieces of it while standing in my local Waterstones. I figured if it could hold my attention for that long, while I shifted uncomfortably from foot-to-foot in a drafty bookstore, it was probably worth buying.

In the end, I’m glad I did. It really does make for fascinating reading. There are so many interesting tidbits and asides that, even if one doesn’t agree with the overall thesis of the book, it’s well worth having a copy to dip in and out of. I say this despite not having read the entire thing (it is 800 pages long after all), but I feel confident that the 200 or so pages that I’ve read so far augur well for the remainder of it.

Anyway, that’s enough for the book-review portion of this post. For the rest of it, I want to take a good hard look at the backbone of Pinker’s thesis, namely: his claim that violence is declining over time. While I certainly couldn’t hope to evaluate all the lines of evidence Pinker offers to support this claim in his book, I do hope to offer some meaningful comments on one aspect of his methodology. An aspect that proves crucial to much of what Pinker has to say.

The aspect in question is his measuring the historical decline in violence by reference to the per capita rate of violence, as opposed to the total or aggregate level of violence. While the former may have gone down over the course of history (this is what Pinker tries to prove), the latter certainly has not (mainly because of the massive increase in population in the recent past). The question I want to ask is this: is Pinker right to focus on the per capita rate? In other words, is he right to say that violence has declined when the per capita rate has gone down, even when the total or aggregate level has gone up?


1. Pleasantville and Adamsville
I want to start by clarifying what’s at stake in answering this question. I do this by describing to two hypothetical towns and considering the differences between them.

Pleasantville: Pleasantville is a town of 10,000 residents. Although it has had problems with criminal gangs and violent crimes in the past, it has recently been experiencing a decline in the number of murders per year. At present, approximately 100 people are murdered every year in Pleasantville.

Adamsville: Adamsville is a town with exactly four residents. Adam, his wife Eve, and their two children. Adam and Eve have one new child every year but this leads to no overall increase in the population. Why? Because every year one of the children is murdered by their sibling.

Now let’s consider the per capita and aggregate levels of violence in both towns. The per capita rate of violence (specifically, murder) in Pleasantville is 1/100 or 1%; the per capita rate of violence in Adamsville is 1/4 or 25%. The aggregate level of violence in Pleasantville is 100 murders per year; the aggregate level of violence in Adamsville is 1 murder per year.

If we compare the two towns on the basis of the per capita rate, then Adamsville is clearly more violent. But if we compare them on the basis of the aggregate level, then Pleasantville is clearly more violent. Which comparison is more appropriate? And, more importantly, why should we care?

I take it that we should care because violence is a proxy measure for something that is morally undesirable (or, rather, for something that has moral disvalue). In other words, if for any pair of states of affairs (A and B), there is less violence in A than there is in B, then B is less morally desirable than A. Although Pinker doesn’t say this explicitly, I think he would agree with my moral undesirability reading of the issue. After all, he thinks the decline in violence is something to be celebrated and carefully analysed in order that it can be accentuated. It’s difficult to make sense of such an attitude if it’s not driven by a belief that less violence means less moral disvalue.

The fact that we care about violence because it is a proxy measure for moral disvalue actually helps to clarify the question we should be asking about Pleasantville and Adamsville. Instead of asking indirectly about the rate of violence, we should ask directly about the moral desirability of each town. To be precise, we should ask: which town is morally preferable? Is it Pleasantville or is it Adamsville?

In addition to clarifying the question we need to ask, the claim about moral desirability can also help us to clarify Pinker’s basic argument. As is clear from his book, Pinker wants us to believe that it’s Pleasantville that is morally preferable to Adamsville, and he wants us to believe this because the per capita rate of violence in Pleasantville is lower than it is in Adamsville. In other words, he wants us to accept the following kind of argument:

• (1) If the per capita rate of murder is lower in Town A than it is in Town B, then Town A is morally preferable to Town B.

• (2) The per capita rate of murder is lower in Pleasantville than it is in Adamsville.

• (3) Therefore, Pleasantville is morally preferable to Adamsville.

Instead of accepting this kind of argument:

• (4) If the overall number of murders is lower in Town A than it is in Town B, then Town A is morally preferable to Town B.

• (5) The overall number of murders is lower in Adamsville than it is in Pleasantville.

• (6) Therefore, Adamsville is morally preferable to Pleasantville.

These arguments directly contradict one another. That is to say, they are counterarguments to one another. For the time being, I’ll ignore the pro-Adamsville argument and focus on the pro-Pleasantville argument that Pinker makes. A couple of words about this argument are in order here. First, although I explain it by reference to the murder rates in two hypothetical towns, this argument could stand in for the basic argument that is presented throughout Pinker’s book Better Angels. What’s interesting is that Pinker focuses nearly all his attention on defending premise (2) of the argument. This is unsurprising: Pinker is a scientist so he is well-placed to investigate an empirical claim such as that presented in premise (2). I commend him for doing so. But to focus solely on (2) is unsatisfying because it leaves the crucial normative claim in premise (1) unsupported.

Pinker is obviously not unaware of this issue, and does spend some time addressing the kinds of issues one would need to address in order to defend (1) over (4). The problem is that he is all to brief in his treatment of these issues (one paragraph on pg. 47 is all I found so far). I want to correct this by giving these issues a more fulsome treatment.


2. The Pro-Adamsville Argument
Let’s look first at the pro-Adamsville argument. Premise (4) of this argument is claiming that the overall number of murders is what counts from the moral point of view. Is there any moral theory that would allow us to endorse this claim?

Perhaps. Utilitarianism is the view that we ought to maximise the amount of good stuff in the world, and minimise the amount of bad stuff. While this blog post is not the place to work out what kinds of stuff are good and what kinds are bad, it can be safely assumed that murders most definitely fall within the “bad stuff”-category. So, working from a utilitarian principle, we might be able to provide some support for (4). As follows:

• (7) A state of affairs with a lower level of bad stuff in it is morally preferable to a state with a higher level bad stuff in it.

• (8) Murders count as being bad “stuff”.

• (9) Therefore, a state of affairs with fewer murders is morally preferable to a state of affairs with a more murders.

This could then be used to support (4).

But even if we grant that utilitarianism is correct, this argument fails. Why so? Because (7) is not an accurate representation of the utilitarian thesis. (7) only talks about the level of bad stuff in the world, it does not talk about the level of good stuff. Or, to put it more precisely, it does not talk about the aggregate level of good (a figure which would add together the good stuff and the bad stuff to get a total sum). If we revise (7) so that it speaks of the aggregate level of good, instead of the overall level of bad stuff, we get the following:

• (7*) A state of affairs with a greater aggregate level of good stuff is morally preferable to a state of affairs with a lesser aggregate level of good stuff.

The problem is, once we complete this revision, it becomes much less obvious how we can move from (7*) to (4). Why is this? Well, because (4) only focuses on the overall level of murder (which is bad), it does not consider the good stuff that might be associated with a larger number of murders. It could be that a town with a large number of murders has an even larger number of good things going on it. These good things could offset the effect of the number of murders. Indeed, this suggests an independent line of argument for (3), one that I won’t get into here.

Is there any other way to justify (4)? Possibly. I can imagine working my way from some kind of precautionary principle to (4). The precautionary principle would have to state that when making moral evaluations we should care about minimising bad stuff, not about maximising aggregate levels of good. In other words, it would have to explicitly rule out the potential offsetting power of the good stuff. We could phrase it as follows:

• (10) When it comes to the moral evaluation of states of affairs, we should focus exclusively on minimising the level of bad stuff, irrespective of the good stuff that might thereby by affected.

Call this the minimisation of bad stuff-principle (MBSP for short). Accepting that murders are bad (premise 8, above), we could indeed use this principle to support (4). The problem with doing so is threefold.

First, even if we accept that murders are bad, we would have to acknowledge that there are other bad things out there too. It could be the case that minimising the number of murders increases the number of these other bad things. Thus, we can’t escape the aggregative question simply by focusing exclusively on the bad stuff: we still need to know the aggregate level of bad stuff. Admittedly, the claim that reducing the number of murders might increase other bad things may not be very likely, but it is possible and that seems to be enough to block the inference from (10) to (4).

• (11) Reducing the number of murders might increase the number of other bad things.

Second, the MBSP could lead to absurd conclusions. In particular, it could lead to the conclusion that a world with no people in it is morally preferable to a world with 1 or more people in it. Think about it: a world with no people minimises the number of bad things that might happen more so than a world with only one person in it. I would argue that this is absurd and that a principle that allows us to reach absurd conclusions of this sort has little to recommend it. (Note: there are some who disagree with this. I have discussed their arguments before).

• (12) The MBSP leads to absurd conclusions. A principle which leads to absurd conclusions should be rejected.

Finally, while I accept that precautionary reasoning of this kind is plausible in some instances, particular when dealing with unknown potential goods (e.g. the goods associated with speculative technology), I submit that when the potential goods are known, it loses this plausibility. When it comes to assessing relative merits of our two towns (Pleasantville and Adamsville) it seems like we are dealing with potential goods that are known, not potential goods that are unknown.

• (13) The MBSP derives its plausibility from precautionary reasoning, this kind of reasoning is plausible when the potential goods associated with a state of affairs are unknown. When the potential goods are known, it loses its plausibility.

To sum up, the pro-Adamsville argument seems to have little going for it. This does not, however, mean that Pinker is home and dry. In addition to showing that the pro-Adamsville argument is implausible, he needs to show that the pro-Pleasantville argument is plausible. Can this be done?


3. The Pro-Pleasantville Argument
I’ve already suggested one way in which we could endorse the pro-Pleasantville conclusion, namely: by adopting an aggregative utilitarian principle and arguing that Pleasantville, despite its high number of murders, has a higher overall level of good than Adamsville. Note, however, that this kind of argument doesn’t endorse the per capita measurements that Pinker uses to make his case. Is there another argument that does?

Have a look at what Pinker has to say about this (pg. 47):

…[O]ne could reason that part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. So the number of people in a given time and place who enjoy full lives has to be counted as a moral good, against which we calibrate the moral bad of the number who are victims of violence. Another way of expressing this frame of mind is to ask, “If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era, what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence? The reasoning in this second frame of mind, whether it appeals to the proportion of a population [that are victims of violence] or the risk to an individual, ends in the conclusion that in comparing the harmfulness of violence across societies, we should focus on the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts.

There are the bones of an interesting argument in this passage. Pinker is saying that when evaluating the moral desirability of a two or more societies, we should ask ourselves the question: which society would we prefer to live in? In addition to this, he’s saying that when we answer that question, we’ll focus on per capita rates of violence not on overall numbers. Why? Because what matters is our personal risk of dying, not the total number of deaths, and personal risk is captured by the per capita figure, not the total number.

To clothe this in a more moralistic garb, I might appeal directly to a constructivist or Rawlsian set of principles. The idea being as follows. When comparing the moral desirability of two states of affairs, we should ask: which state of affairs do I have most reason to endorse? Or, to put it another way, if I were placed behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and I was asked to choose between two societies knowing only the total number and per capita rate of murders in that society, which one would I choose? The answer seems obvious in both instances: you would choose the society in which you had less risk of dying, i.e. the one with the lower per capita murder rate.

In formal terms:

• (14) The state of affairs that one has most reason to endorse (from behind a veil of ignorance) is the morally preferable state of affairs.

• (15) All other things being equal, one has most reason to endorse the state of affairs in which one has less risk of being killed.

• (16) One has less risk of being killed in the town with the lowest per capita rate of murder.

• (17) Therefore, if Town A has a lower per capita rate of murder than Town B, then Town A is morally preferable to Town B.

Now, (17) is equivalent to (1), so this argument really does give us grounds for endorsing the pro-Pleasantville argument. As well as this, it gives us reason to endorse Pinker’s methodology throughout Better Angels.

But is this argument above reproach? Not quite. Note how I’ve added a ceteris paribus (all other things being equal)-clause to the start of premise (14). Why did I do this? Well, I did so because I can imagine situations in which the risk of being killed is not the overriding variable in deciding which state of affairs one has most reason to endorse. For instance, I might choose to go for real sky-diving instead of virtual sky-diving, despite the fact that the real version carries a greater risk of dying than does the virtual one. I would do so if there were other goods (e.g. exhilaration, sense of achievement, bragging rights) associated with real sky-diving that I couldn’t get out of virtual sky-diving.

This suggests that the pro-Pleasantville argument might fall victim to the same kinds of problems as did the pro-Adamsville argument. But we needn’t despair too quickly. After all, one would only have more reason to endorse a state of affairs with a higher risk of dying attached to it if that risk of dying had some deep causal connection to the factor that made that state of affairs the more reasonable choice. To go back to the sky-diving example, I only have more reason to go for the real sky-diving if I think the goods of exhilaration, sense of achievement and bragging rights are deeply connected to the real activity.

When it comes to choosing which town is morally preferable, I have no reason to think that a high per capita murder rate has some deep causal connection to moral goods that (a) could not be obtained in a town with a lower per capita murder rate and (b) override the moral evil of the murder rate. Thus, it would seem like the ceteris paribus clause is met in this particular instance. And so Pinker’s methodology is, as far as I can tell, appropriate.

Corvino on the PIB Argument (Part Three)

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Philosopher John Corvino (courtesy of Flickr user yksin)

(Part One, Part Two)

This is the third part of my series on John Corvino’s article “Homosexuality and the PIB Argument”. In part one, we learned what the PIB argument was and we considered some pre-existing responses to it. In part two, we were introduced to Corvino’s preferred response to the argument. In this part, we will look at how Corvino handles the criticisms of the “new” natural lawyers such as Robert George, John Finnis and Patrick Lee.

The PIB argument works off the idea that if we accept that homosexual relations are morally permissible, we must then accept that polygamous, incestuous and bestial (PIB) relations are morally permissible. But since most people agree that PIB relations are not morally permissible, it follows that homosexual relations must not be morally permissible. As such, the argument proposes that a slippery slope exists between homosexuality and PIB: if we accept homosexuality we must slide down the slope to PIB.

As we saw in part two, Corvino challenges this argument in an unusual way. First, he argues that nonprocreative heterosexual relations and homosexual relations can be endorsed for the same moral reasons. Then he points out that if this is the case, there is no more reason to think that there is a slippery slope between homosexuality and PIB, than there is to think there is a slippery slope from heterosexuality to PIB. And since no one thinks there is a slippery slope from heterosexuality to PIB, the argument is defeated.

There is, however, one important criticism that Corvino needs to contend with. This criticism comes out of the work by the new natural lawyers. They argue that there is something crucially different about heterosexual relations (even of the nonprocreative kind) when compared with homosexual relations. And it is this crucial difference that makes the former morally permissible and the latter morally impermissible. Today we’re going to learn what that crucial difference is supposed to be, and see how Corvino deals with it.


1. The Marital Good Dilemma
The new natural lawyers — represented by the work of Finnis in Corvino’s article — believe that there is a set of basic goods toward which all human action should be oriented. (There is some doubt about the precise form of this orientation. Most natural lawyers are presumptive deontologists, but there is no particular reason why they could not be presumptive consequentialists. That, however, is an argument for another time). These are all intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, goods. Which means they are good in and of themselves, irrespective of the other consequences that may flow from them.

Now one of these intrinsic goods is the so-called marital good. This good is achieved when a man a woman achieve a two-in-one flesh sexual union of the procreative kind ( i.e. vaginal intercourse). Why is this a good? Well, there are two answers. Either it simply is, and there are no more questions to be asked, or it has to do with value of certain biological functions: the reproductive function being the only (human) biological function that requires the coordinated activity of two people.

It is important to be clear that, according to the new natural lawyers, the marital good can only be achieved by uncontracepted vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman who have committed themselves to one another through a marriage ceremony. All other forms of sexual union are not intrinsically good; in fact, they are (intrinsically?) bad. This includes contracepted vaginal intercourse, premarital sex, non-vaginal intercourse, oral sex, masturbation and, of course, homosexual acts and PIB acts. Finnis, in particular, is remarkably clear and consistent about his moral opposition to these other sexual acts. Why are these other acts bad? A variety of reasons are cited, chief among them being the supposed damage they do to the marital good, and the mental/physical disunity they promote. We’ll talk about both in more detail later.

It is also important to be clear that, again according to the new natural lawyers, the marital good can be achieved by sterile married couples. How can this be if the activity is essentially connected to procreation? The answer is convoluted, and not entirely persuasive, but it seems to have to do with the intrinsic goodness of reproductive kind acts: it is morally good to perform an act of the reproductive kind, regardless of its ultimate consequence. Cutesy analogies are often used to support this point, such as “it’s still baseball, even if the team never wins.”

Anyway, if the marital good is recognised — and all non-marital sexual relations are thereby distinguished — an argument can be mounted against the gay-rights advocate like Corvino, and in support of the original PIB argument. To be precise, the PIB argument can be reformulated with a disjunctive major premise, a pair of hypotheticals, and a conclusion supporting the traditionalist view of sexual morality. As follows

• (1) Either heterosexual relations are only morally permissible when they realise the intrinsic goodness of the marital good, or they are morally permissible when they are instrumentally important in achieving a range of other goods.

• (2) If heterosexual relations are only permissible because of the marital good, then homosexual relations are not morally permissible.

• (3) If heterosexual relations are permissible because of their instrumental importance in achieving a range of other goods, then homosexual relations are permissible but so too (probably) are PIB relations.

• (4) PIB relations are definitely not morally permissible.

• (5) Therefore, heterosexual relations are not permissible because of their instrumental importance in achieving a range of other goods (from 3 and 4).

• (6) Therefore, heterosexual relations are only morally permissible when they realise the intrinsic goodness of the marital good and homosexual relations are impermissible (from 1,2, and 5).

This argument is my own interpolation into Corvino’s article, but I think it’s a valid reconstruction of how he views the impact of new natural law. I also think it’s valid (someone might check this for me). As you can see, the argument is partly dilemmatic. It’s challenging the gay-rights advocate to either accept the new natural law position or accept the permissibility of PIB.

But is there any reason to accept this argument? Corvino thinks not. He points to three problems that make the natural law argument deeply implausible.


2. The Sterility Problem
First, there is the sterility problem. How can natural lawyers consistently believe that: (a) sexual acts are only morally permissible if they are of the reproductive kind; and (b) that sexual acts are still permissible even when they have no chance of achieving reproduction? Admittedly, there is no blatant contradiction taking place here, but there is, nonetheless, a strange metaphysics of value underlying this set of beliefs. It is reminiscent of the sympathetic magic rituals that are sometimes practiced by primitive tribes: imitating or metaphorically representing the act or object that you really value is deemed equally valuable.

But saying this highlights a potential stumbling block for the natural lawyer. If a sterile, but reproductive-kind, sexual act is morally valuable because it metaphorically mimics or represents a genuinely reproductive act, is it really that much of a stretch to say that certain homosexual acts are valuable because they metaphorically represent genuinely reproductive acts? Admittedly, there are dissimilarities between the two kinds of act, but if we’re going to allow that the act need not have even the remotest possibility of leading to reproduction (e.g. as in intercourse between a castrated male and a woman with a hysterectomy), isn’t there a new slippery slope argument to be made?

The situation is not helped by the analogies offered by the natural lawyers to support the alleged link between reproductive-type acts and sterile sex. Robert George and Patrick Lee, for instance, ask us to imagine a man who has some severe digestive disorder that leads him to vomit-up all food that he eats. Nevertheless, the man continues to eat. George and Lee contend that even though no food is fully digested, the man is still performing acts of the “nourishing-type”.

Presumably, the point behind the analogy is that the man’s nourishing-type acts have the same intrinsic value as genuinely nourishing acts. But as Corvino points out, this really stretches the bounds of credulity. Surely, there’s no way such a man could be said to be performing acts of the nourishing type. And similarly, surely there’s no way that a sterile married couple could be said to be performing acts of the reproductive kind.

Natural lawyers could respond by pointing to other goods realised by sexual acts between sterile married couples. The problem is, once you go beyond the supposed good of traditional reproduction, these other goods will tend to be available to homosexual couples. So there’s no longer a principled line to draw between heterosexual sex and homosexual sex.


3. The Damage-to-Marriage-Problem
A second problem arises from the supposed link between the value of the marital good and the impermissibility of homosexuality. Just because one set of activities is deemed morally permissible for one reason, it does not follow that another set of activities are not morally impermissible for the same reason. Both sets of activities could be deemed permissible for different reasons. For example, chess might be deemed valuable because it improves our cognitive powers, whereas tiddlywinks might be deemed permissible because it helps forge bonds of loyalty between those who play it. Why couldn’t something similar be true of heterosexual and homosexual relations?

The typical answer from the natural lawyers is that homosexuality somehow damages the marital good. Finnis, for example, argues that once you allow non-marital sexual acts, you allow for the possibility that the marital good is a “merely incidental” dimension of sexuality. This, according to him, is wrong. The complete exclusion of all other sexual acts from one’s sphere of morally acceptable behavior is an “existential, if not logical, precondition” for the marital good. What’s more, damage can be done to the marital good even by those who have no intention of trying to realise the traditional marital good themselves. Finnis supports this second claim — which is more important in the present context — with the following:

Just as a cowardly weakling who would never try to kill anyone yet deliberately approves of the killings of innocent people in a terrorist massacre has a will which violates the good of life, so [someone] violates the good of marriage by consenting to (deliberately approving) non-marital sex acts such as solitary masturbation.

Corvino thinks this whole line of reasoning is unpersuasive and question-begging. It’s not at all clear that people who have no interest in marriage, who do not actively try to break-up traditional marriages, and who nevertheless engage in non-marital sex acts damage the traditional marital good. They certainly don’t thereby prevent others from realising it, if that is what they wish to do. To suggest that the fact that others treat the marital good as a merely incidental aspect of sexuality will necessarily lead others to do the same is to engage in armchair psychology.

Furthermore, this kind of argument neglects the dilemma involved in either approving or disapproving homosexual relations. There are possible goods that sex acts carried out in committed homosexual realtionships can help to realise (e.g. those listed in part two) that would otherwise not be achieved. Surely, these need to be taken into consideration when deciding what to do? Then again, natural law has never been particularly good at dealing with dilemmatic situations of this sort.


4. The Integrity Problem
Even if non-marital sex acts do no harm to the marital good, there is another sort of damage they may do. They may damage personal integrity. This an argument beloved by Finnis. He says the following: sexual acts that do not realise the marital good are motivated by a desire for gratification (or conscious pleasure); a desire for gratification involves the instrumentalisation of body (i.e. the use of the body as a means to a good, rather than as an element of an intrinsic good); the instrumentalisation of the body leads to the disintegration of body and mind; and this disintegration is necessarily bad.

To put this more succintly and more formally, we say:

• (7) All acts in which the body is used as an instrument for achieving some good are morally impermissible (because they lead to personal disintegration).

• (8) Non-marital sexual acts involve the instrumental use of the body in order to achieve gratification.

• (9) Therefore, non-marital sexual acts are morally impermissible.

With its logic exposed, Finnis’s argument becomes much less tenable.

For starters, (7) is not obviously true. Corvino suggests there may be situations in which the instrumental use of the body is not morally impermissible. He cites an article by Perry in support of this, but since I haven’t read it I can’t say what it contains. I have a suggestion though: suppose there was a fire in an inner city building and suppose the only escape route was to go out through the window of the building and into an adjacent building. Suppose, however, the gap between the two buildings was too wide to jump for a number of small children in the building with you. Now suppose you use your body as a human bridge for these small children to crawl or walk across the gap. Would this be impermissible because it involves the instrumental use of the body? Surely not.

Premise (8) has two flaws. First, the only reason Finnis can say that sexual gratification involves the instrumental use of the body is because he assumes the mind and the body are distinct, that the conscious experiences in the mind are separate from the physical activities in the body. But this is to assume the truth of mind-body dualism, something that he cannot do here. Second, the whole premise rests on a massively impoverished view of sexual phenomenology. As Corvino points out, the idea that outside of the marital context people only engage sexual acts for gratification is almost insulting. People also engage in sexual acts to forge bonds, attain intimacy, and to share experiences. These are commendable things.


5. Turning the Natural Law Argument on its Head
With these three problems identified and described, the natural law version of the PIB argument looks like its in trouble. So much so that one might be inclined to leave it there. But why not twist the knife a little further?

All along, we have been assuming that if heterosexual relations are only permissible because they secure the marital good, it follows that PIB relations are impermissible. But this is not an assumption we are warranted to make. Although, the marital good cannot be achieved in bestial sex acts, it’s possible that it could be achieved in polygamous and incestuous sex acts. After all, its reproductive type acts that seem to matter for the natural lawyer and multi-partner or sibling-sibling sex can be of this form.

No doubt natural lawyers will balk at this, but have they any right to do so? They might demand monogamous commitment, but this — along with the other goods discussed in part two — is ultimately incidental to the marital good. They might also speak in horrified tones about parent-child sex, but this is to focus on the most objectionable form of incest (a form that can be rejected on other moral grounds). What can they object to about sibling-sibling sex?

To be clear, the suggestion here is not that polygamy and incest are permissible, but, rather, that the natural law argument doesn’t actually give good grounds for thinking they are impermissible. Thus, the natural law version of the PIB argument must be deemed a failure.

All of which raises a final question: are there any good grounds for deeming PIB relations impermissible? We’ll answer that in the final part.

Note: All quotes from and references to Finnis are in relation to "The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations".

Corvino on the PIB Argument (Part Two)

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Philosopher John Corvino (from Flickr user yksin)

(Part One)

(NB: For appropriate background and context, please read the introduction to part one.)

This is the second part in my series looking at John Corvino’s article “Homosexuality and the PIB Argument”. In part one, we introduced the PIB argument and followed Corvino in dismissing some of the traditional responses to it. In this part, we look Corvino’s attempt to come up with a better response. Corvino’s project is an important one since the PIB argument is surprisingly popular and it would be nice to be able to dismiss it.

As you recall from part one, the PIB argument is a slippery slope argument. It rests on the idea that once we accept that homosexual relationships are morally permissible, we will also have to accept that polygamous, incestuous and bestial relationships are morally permissible. This is not because of any causal connection between the acceptance of homosexuality and the acceptance of these other relationships, but, rather, because whatever principle we would use to ground the permissibility of homosexuality would also (so the argument goes) logically entail the permissibility of PIB relationships. To put it more pithily and more formally:

• (1) If homosexual relationships are morally permissible, then PIB relationships are morally permissible as well.

• (2) But PIB relationships are not morally permissible.

• (3) Therefore, homosexual relationships are not morally permissible.

As with all arguments of this sort, there are two possible ways to respond: (i) reject premise (1) or (ii) reject premise (2). Since most people wouldn’t be willing to reject premise (2), we’re focussing on rejections of premise (1). We surveyed two such rejections in part one (from Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, respectively). We found both to be lacking. Corvino thinks we can do better.



1. A New Strategy
The reason Corvino thinks we can do better is because he thinks defenders of homosexuality have been making a strategic error. To see what he is on about, we begin with a general observation about premise (1). The observation is as follows:

If it is right to say — as premise (1) does — that the moral basis from which we approve of homosexual relationships also requires the approval of PIB relationships, then this is only because the two sets of relationships are analogous in morally significant respects. Conversely, if it is wrong to say the approval of one requires the approval of the other, then this is only because the two sets of relationships are disanalogous in some morally significant respect.

This, in fact, was one of the key messages of part one: if you want to reject premise (1) you must present some reason for thinking the relationships in question are morally disanalogous.

The problem with this message is that it accepts that the burden of proof is on those who reject the PIB argument. Indeed, Sullivan and Rauch tacitly accepted that the burden of proof was on them to prove the disanalogy when they presented their objections. That is why they felt it necessary to point to things like the constitutive nature of homosexual preferences, and the denial of access to loving relationships that were present in the case of homosexual relationships but not in the case of PIB relationships. Corvino thinks they were wrong to accept this burden of proof. They should have realised that the burden is on the defender of the PIB argument to prove the analogy in the first place.

This leads Corvino to propose a new strategy for responding to the PIB argument. The strategy is desiged to reinforce the idea that burden of proof is on the proponent of the PIB argument. Corvino adopts this strategy by making an interesting reverse analogy. The reverse analogy links homosexual relationships to non-procreative heterosexual relationships. The reverse analogy is driven by the idea that whatever makes non-procreative heterosexual relationships morally valuable, will also make homosexual relationships morally valuable.

If Corvino’s reverse analogy works, it changes the entire complexion of the dialectic: the proponent of the PIB argument will then be forced to explain why it is homosexuality in particular, as opposed to nonprocreative relationships in general, that gives his argument its impetus.



2. The Good of Nonprocreative Sexual Relationships
It is generally agreed that some (not all) nonprocreative heterosexual relationships are good (or, rather, are a good). Those who believe that sexual relationships must have the consequence of procreation will disagree, but they are surprisingly few in number. Indeed, even the most ardent of contemporary natural lawyers, like Robert George, John Finnis or Patrick Lee, tends to think that sterile heterosexual marriages are good. So there really does seem to be widespread agreement on this point.

But what is it that makes some nonprocreative heterosexual relationships good? Leaving to one side the answer proposed by the likes of George, Finnis and Lee (this answer will be discussed in the next part), there seems to be a number of positive outcomes attached to such relationships. We could list them as follows: they are pleasurable for the participants; they assist in emotional and personal development; they create stability and security; and they provide fulfillment over an extended period of time.

Now ask yourself, are any of these things necessarily lacking in homosexual relationships? The obvious answer would seem to be “no”. Some homosexual relationships also provide pleasure, opportunities for emotional and personal development, stability and security, and fulfillment over an extended period of time. But if these things are all present in homosexual relationships, then how can we object to them? In other words, why can’t we say — as the proponent of PIB said of homosexuality and PIB relations — that the moral basis for approving of nonprocreative sexual relationships also entails moral approval of homosexual relations? Corvino sees no reason why we can’t.



3. Two Objections to Corvino’s Analogy
There are two obvious concerns one may have about Corvino’s reverse analogy. First, one may contend that the key features of nonprocreative sexual relationships — as listed above — are not really “sexual” at all. That is to say, one could contend that pleasure, emotional and personal growth, security and stability, and long-term fulfillment can be achieved in relationships with no sexual components. As in, for example, a long-term friendship.

Corvino rejects this contention. He thinks there are good grounds for thinking that sexual activity plays a key role in securing the positive outcomes just listed. To be precise, he argues that sexual activity builds, celebrates and replenishes the bonds of love between the two people within the relationship. And since it is these bonds of love that help the participants to attain the positive outcomes associated with their relationships, the sexual element is essential (in support of this he cites the example of sexless marriages being typically unhappy marriages).

Second, one may ask the obvious question: wouldn’t it be possible to achieve all those positive outcomes in PIB relationships too? Well, I suspect there are legitimate doubts to be raised about some of them ( e.g. Are polygamous relationships secure and stable? Do you really develop emotionally and personally through bestial relationships?), but in general this is the right question to ask. Indeed, the whole point of Corvino’s argument is effectively to get you to ask this question. His point seems to that once we understand what is good about nonprocreative heterosexual relationships, we will see that there is no greater reason for thinking that there is a slippery slope from those types of relationship to PIB relationships, than there is from homosexual relationships to PIB relationships.

Of course, this realisation can lead us in a couple of different directions. We could use it as a basis for challenging premise 2 of the PIB argument; or, as Corvino wants us to do, we could use it as a reductio of the PIB argument. After all, if there’s no reason to think there is a slippery slope from heterosexual relationships to PIB relationships, and if homosexual relationships are affirmed for the same reasons as heterosexual relationships, then there can’t possibly be a reason to think there is a slippery slope from homosexual relationships to PIB relationships.

This then is the essence of Corvino’s preferred response to the PIB argument. One difficulty it faces is that the “new” natural lawyers such as George, Finnis and Lee think they can avoid it. We’ll see why in the next part.