Philosophy on Abortion

I've written about this at length over the years, but I find this morning that search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo can't find anything I've written on the subject. So let's run through it one time quickly.

1) Abortion kills a living, individual, human being. 

1a) Living: Philosopher Hans Jonas points out that the activity that is life, what makes a living being different from a rock, is that the living being is taking resources from nature and putting it into its own order. Your body does this all the time. You eat, your body digests the food and breaks it into constituent elements or molecules, and then puts those things into the order of your muscles, bones, organs. That's life. That's what life means; that's what life is. A child is doing that from the moment of conception, dividing and ordering, taking resources from its mother to bring itself into the order that also is itself. 

Cf. Aristotle Physics II.1: "Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes." That's what he meant too: the baby in an important sense causes itself to come to be ('by nature'), whereas the rock came to be because of forces not its own. Heat created magma, uplift created cooling, weather broke it from the earth and made it a rock rather than a part of a mountain. Life entails having a nature, an order of your own, taking from the world and putting a part of the world into your own order.

So: abortion kills a living being.

1b) Individual: The order that the being is putting itself into is its own. It is not its mother's, nor its father's. Even in the case of twins, quickly the orders begin to diverge from each other and are subtly different. The child is a unique being. The child is not you: the child is himself or herself.

1c) Human: Nevertheless, all children have an order that is recognizably human. It is genetically distinct and different from other sorts of beings, e.g. dogs or bats.

Therefore: It is proven that abortion kills a living, individual, human being.

2) Aborted children are usually innocent in the strict sense of the word.

2a) Innocence implies absence of guilt. As a rule, guilt is a matter of the will. The child's will, before birth, is in a minimal state of activity: the child can move about the womb of its own free will in the later stages, but for the most part his or her actions are informed by instinct rather than will. Growing, for example, is an act of the child but not a chosen or willed action.

2b) Occasionally guilt can occur accidentally. When a child's body embeds itself in an intratubal manner, the child through no act of will is going to be guilty of killing his or her mother. Other times, children die in the womb and cannot be ordinarily expelled. These children, likewise, are accidentally guilty of killing their mother through sepsis and the like. This is not guilt in the strict sense, but by analogy; but it is nevertheless the sort of thing that might license violence in self defense (see 3, following). If someone is accidentally about to kill someone, and there is not time or space to reason with them about it, you might reasonably use violence to stop them from doing so.

3) Usually violence towards another individual human being is only justified by defense of self or another who is innocent.

3a) From 2b, I can see limited cases in which abortion is fully justified. If the mother would die and, therefore, the child will also die, it is sensible to save the one life that might be saved. If there's a legitimate choice between saving either life but not both, the mother might sensibly defend her own life if she chooses to do so. This is not the position of the Church, please note; it is a place where I dissent from the Church's teachings for what I take to be honest and honorable reasons. I trust in forgiveness if I am in error.

4) Thought experiment A: The Deer Hunter

4a) Though it is here proven that the child is a living, individual human being, it is sometimes argued that we cannot really know if the child is a 'person' or not. This strikes me as a fiction created for the purpose of creating an ambiguity that might allow for an immoral action, exactly like 'race' was invented as a concept in order to create a class of human beings whose interests might be ignored for convenience. 'Personhood' separate from 'the category of being a living individual human being' is almost nonsense; it could in principle extend to aliens or some such, but even then it would still embrace all living individual human beings.

4b) However, consider the case of a person who has a duty to feed his family. Times are hard and they are hungry. He takes his rifle and goes out into the woods to hunt for food. After a long time, he sees movement. At that distance, though, he cannot quite be sure if what he is seeing is another person or a deer. It could be a deer, but it also might be a neighbor who is walking in the woods in a deer-colored coat. May he morally shoot what might be another person, being uncertain? 

4c) He may not. If he fires and it turns out to be a deer, all is well; but if he fires, and it turns out to be his neighbor, he is guilty of manslaughter. Choosing not to fire, by contrast, is always guiltless. 

4d) The needs of his family for food might be considered a mitigating factor in determining just punishment, but not a sufficient justification for the manslaughter.

4e) Therefore, uncertainty about the personhood of the child is not a defense for killing it. The only certainly moral choice in cases of uncertainty about personhood is not to choose to kill.

5) Thought Experiment B: The Artificial Womb

5a) Another defense of abortion that is sometimes made is that women should not be forced to harbor a child to term if they do not wish to do so. Consider -- as is not hard -- a technology that would allow the child to be safely transferred to an artificial womb, so that the woman did not have to carry the child if she did not wish. Would she still have the right to kill the child, if there were an alternative?

5b) I submit that her bodily autonomy would be adequately preserved if she were free to remove the child to an artificial womb. However, notice that in such a case she would still have duties to her child. Just as a father has to pay child support even if he is not otherwise involved in the child's life, so too would she -- equal rights, equal duties -- have to pay for the support of a child she engendered even if she did not otherwise wish to be involved with the child.

5c) The current status allows a pernicious inequality of rights and duties between men and women, by allowing women to dispose of the child and/or their duties to the child (many states have surrender points where a living child can be abandoned without questions), but requires men to be responsible for 18 years regardless of their choice. This is a basic unfairness in our legal structure.

5d) More, it violates natural law as regards the woman and the child. The purpose of traditional institutions like marriage is the recognition that humanity naturally produces children, and children by nature need to be supported and educated to adulthood so that they can assume proper places in society. Children are due this from their parents by nature. That is true for both parents. It is a natural duty that our society has for decades attempted to relieve for women.

Conclusion: Except in rare cases as provided in (3a), abortion is morally wrong. It ought to be dealt with accordingly. 

6 comments:

Tom said...

This seems very well-reasoned, as I would expect.

I wonder if you could explain the statement that "the baby in an important sense causes itself to come to be" a little bit. In the common sense, I think, we would say that the parents cause the baby to come to be. In what way does the baby cause itself to come to be?

Grim said...

Just the other day I was talking about Silver as being Aristotelian in assigning multiple causes to things. We Moderns and Post-Moderns are used to thinking that a thing only has one cause, and each thing has a cause. Aristotle has a point here that's important but hard to consider given how strongly we're educated to think in terms of efficient causality. Let me try to explain what he's getting at, and what Jonas was also.

For Aristotle, there are at least four causes for anything, although it is usually possible to collapse those four into two: material and formal, efficient and final. Material cause has to do with what the material can and can't do: a saw can't come to be out of wool, as he says. Efficient is what we usually think of as a cause: you struck a match and used it to start the fire, and thus the striking of the match was the cause of the fire. Formal has to do with the order that is at work: the table is flat because a table isn't useful if it isn't flat. Final has to do with why someone went to the trouble of making it: the efficient cause of the fire is the match, but the final cause is that I was cold and decided to build a fire to get warm. I could only build that fire out of something that would burn like wood or coal (material), and I needed to lay the pieces of that substance in a stack so they would catch each other and consume properly (formal).

It's a much more complete picture of causality, Aristotle's.

So the baby comes to be. Well, you point to an efficient cause: the father and the mother got together, and as a result genetic material came together. It's like the match lighting a fire. That's efficient causality; and the material, at first, comes from the mother.

But the baby has a formal cause, too: its DNA informs the action that follows. The reason that baby becomes itself and not another being (imagine your sister or uncle) is that it has its own form in its DNA. It is making itself into itself, not something else.

And it has a final cause, too. Father and mother may not have even considered the child when they chose to mate, for reasons of their own: but the child has a reason to be that is completely apart from their intentions towards it. The baby is making himself (or herself) into himself (etc), for reasons of the baby's own -- and that from the beginning.

Tom said...

Thanks. So, could we say that all living things contain their own formal and final causes?

Grim said...

Well, if we want to be Aristotelians we can say that. For Aristotle, the form is 'in' the thing -- so yes, you'd say that the living thing 'contains' its formal cause (and its final causes, which are for Aristotle functions of its nature, and its nature is a function of its form). If we treat DNA as a sort-of physical form, which causes the baby to shape itself over time into the adult version of itself, this is a sensible way to speak.

Platonists will not agree with this formulation, and many Christians are Platonists as well. The form, for Plato, is in the mind of the One (i.e., the creator; cf. Jerimiah 1:5). The form that is in the thing is not the final cause, then, in the same way that the fire I was using as an example does not contain its final cause: I am its final cause, because I made it to warm me. The child's final cause, in this case, is God's love for that child -- God's desire that this child should come to be.

Tom said...

I wondered about that. I am not a Platonist, I think, but I do see a difference between the inherent telos and Divine telos. I'm not sure how to put this in the context of causes; would there be 5 causes?

Grim said...

No. This is an area where the systems are distinct. We don't get a lot about physics in Plato, because Plato has concerns about our ability to access real knowledge. You remember the parable of the Cave in the Republic: most of what we see is just shadows on the wall, with very few philosophers able to get outside the cave to see the real things -- the Forms -- that are making the shadows. Physics is just talk about the cave shadows and how they're interacting, and it's not very interesting to him. What he wants to know about is the capital-T truth behind the shadow play.

Aristotle has a divine mind in his system as well, but it's embedded in reality. These are the unmoved movers (there are actually several in his system, not just one).

This is a separate post, though. It gets off into the weeds about the differences in their metaphysical systems.