Can Ethics Require Future Knowledge?

Obviously this argument on abortion is not one I favor; you've all been around long enough to know what I think about abortion, and if not, you can work through the arguments given in the comments of this old post from Cassandra's place. Those of you who didn't hang out there often will recognize a number of your comrades from the Hall!

But I'm not here today to talk about my position on abortion, or even this professor's position on abortion. I'm here to talk about a weird feature of her metaphysical argument that seems to me to disable it as an ethical argument.



The first thing she asserts that an unconscious, unfeeling early stage fetus lacks moral standing (e.g., any right not to be killed for convenience). That's a familiar enough stance, and if you accept it as true the rest of her argument that nothing morally bad happens in early stage abortions follows:

1) This kind of being has no moral standing.
2) An action is morally bad only if it harms a being with moral standing.
∴
3) The action of killing this being is not morally bad.

Obviously the way to reject that argument is to reject either or both of the premises, 1 or 2. That's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is the way that she then goes on to assert that all of us, when we were early stage fetuses did have moral standing. This is because each of us, in that stage, were early-stage persons. It's only the fetuses that don't have a future that lack moral standing.

As a metaphysical argument, I can grasp what that's supposed to mean. For illustrative purposes, imagine an all-knowing being sitting in judgment on the issue. This being can see, now, which of the many fetuses have a future or do not have one. A certain number will die in miscarriages, for example; those lack moral standing. Others will live to be fully-grown human beings, and these do have moral standing.

As an ethical argument, though, this approach surely fails. Ethics is practical philosophy: it's supposed to answer the question, "What ought I to do?" Since human beings cannot possibly have the knowledge of which fetuses have a future, this model can't provide us with any sort of ethical guidance except insofar as our actions determine that the fetus does not have a future.

Ordinarily it would be a big red flag to argue that another being is allowed to determine whether or not one has moral standing! But this leaves us in a very strange place, ethically: it seems to argue that early stage abortion is always a non-issue morally unless you fail at it. The one thing that you ethically must never do is to try and fail to kill a fetus, because then it might prove to be a person later -- meaning that it (he or she!) already had moral standing, and you attempted murder.

That seems impossibly weak ground for such a conclusion. It would also create the weird case in which your action was blameworthy because it was attempted murder, but if you had succeeded it would not have been a murder at all. So you attempted to do something that was not wrong (nor right, as an act against a being with no moral standing), but committed a crime because you failed to do the non-wrong, non-right thing.

That's just not going to work.