An Argument on Abortion

Patrick S. Tomlinson has what he thinks is a knock-down argument in favor of abortion. In fact, it's not a particularly difficult argument to answer if you are equipped with a little Aristotle.

It's a simple scenario with two outcomes. No one ever wants to pick one, because the correct answer destroys their argument. And there IS a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question.

Here it is. You're in a fertility clinic. Why isn't important. The fire alarm goes off. You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help. They're in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos." The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one.

Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no "C." "C" means you all die.

In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will.

Nonsense. "A" is the correct answer; but understanding why it is the correct answer shows that this argument actually tells us nothing much about abortion.

The reason "A" is the correct answer depends on the actual/potential distinction. As Aristotle explains in the Physics, potential is a kind of actuality -- he calls it 'first actuality.' A forest is potentially many houses in a way that a sand-filled desert is not, in that one could make houses out of the trees but not out of the sand. Yet you would not be surprised if someone valued one actual house, especially if it were well-made, over a forest of potential houses. The well-made house will keep him from freezing to death in a way that the potential house will not.

So you can set up a perfectly analogous story about a fire department that shows up to a fire that threatens both a well-made house, and also a nearby forest. They can stop the fire from spreading in only one direction. Does the owner prefer to protect his house, or his forest? It's going to be the same answer. What that shows is that abortion is actually irrelevant to the problem; you get the same story even if all the human lives are removed from the problem.

Tomlinson goes wrong in thinking that this means that destroying the embryos is not morally problematic. That's like arguing that it would be morally fine to set fire to the guy's forest since he cares so much more about his house.


There's a second issue of ontology where Aristotle is important. What is it to be a thing? Aristotle would say it is to have the form of the thing. What does that mean? Well, to be a house means that the wood isn't just growing in the forest, but it has been cut down, seasoned, shaped, and put in the form of the house. At each stage the potential for the house is more realized, i.e. more actual, than it was before. So it's not that the trees are potentially a house, the logs are potentially a house, the cured and shaped lumber is potentially a house. Each one is more potentially a house than the previous stage was, and thus it is more actually a house than the previous stage. Thus, burning up a guy's shaped and cured lumber is going to be a bigger harm against him than burning a few of his trees. Nevertheless, there is some harm at all stages.

The ontological point carries over to the embryos, with one huge distinction: embryos are self-organizing. Unlike artifacts that are put into a form by an agent, life forms take things from the environment and put them into their own form. They shape themselves: realizing their own form is their activity. An unfertilized egg or sperm is not capable of the activity of self-organizing as an individual human being. The frozen embryo is potentially capable of it, were it not frozen and placed in a womb of the right kind; but in a frozen jar it is only potentially doing it. The embryo in the womb is actively doing it. Stopping the activity by freezing it is morally problematic, as it is deciding to stop a living creature from engaging in the activity of life; stopping the activity by killing it is even more morally problematic.

The other thing to take away from that discussion is that the embryo is human, because it is engaged in the activity that defines humanity: i.e., putting itself into the form of a human. If we have duties to human beings as such, then, those duties exist here. If those duties are mitigated by levels of potentiality, well, we should be concerned with saying just how and why. But far from being a knock-down argument in favor of abortion, working through the issues shows that abortion remains hugely morally problematic even though there is a clear answer to the thought experiment.