A listener to my Radio Derb podcast had this to say:
Why you won’t ever be Rush [Limbaugh] is, I think, pretty simple; you are not “pro-life.” I just don’t think the Right Over Here is willing to make room for you. As a Christian, I think the movement to outlaw the death penalty in conjunction with the movement to kill pre-born children (yes, including embryos), is the surest evidence that “The West” is finished. Without a firm popular regard for justice — meaning in-kind punishment for the guilty and protection of the innocent — civilization, as we “knew it” is dead. I know you don’t agree with this, but I certainly hope that my simple analysis of your place in the conservative pantheon is incorrect. In my view, one of the true marks of the Right … is the freedom to disagree with your allies — something missing from all totalitarian dogmas, such as modern “liberalism.”
The first part is correct, I think. The whole “right to life” business is over my head. I don’t even understand what it means. If I fall down the basement steps and break my neck tomorrow, what happened to my “right to life”? I do of course have the legal right to expect that, if somebody wilfully kills me, he will be punished (by the death penalty, if it’s up to me — no inconsistency here!) I’d extend the same privilege to a new-born baby. Back beyond that — five minutes, or five months before the baby is born — the mother is rather intimately involved (and the father somewhat less so), and you are in a different situation.
I have no patience with the angels-on-pin-heads logic-chopping about “when life begins.” (Though I like the answer a biologist friend once gave: “Life begins in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch …” You have to think about it a minute.) Without a moral metaphysic and a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.
The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting to normal people, including me. As with other such acts — the eating of corpses, for example — an organized society needs some consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing but those widespread common emotions — disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for unconditional abortion up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the laws.
I disagree with my reader’s fourth sentence, though. (“Without a firm popular regard” etc.) Worthy and admirable civilizations can co-exist with all sorts of attitudes to fetuses, and even to newborns. The ancient Athenians exposed unwanted babies on the Acropolis. Were they not civilized? Abortion has been a human universal everywhere, among civilizations high and low, and also among primitives. (Geoff Blainey notes it in his history of the Aborigines.)
And what do the right-to-lifers want? A total nationwide ban on all abortions, at any time? Yes, that seems to be what they want. Do they really imagine that’s going to happen? What a waste of political energy!
My reader is correct, though. If you’re not in lockstep with the right-to-lifers, you’re never really quite the thing in U.S. conservative circles. It’s a marker of acceptability. I was phone-in guest on a radio show recently. Waiting for the on-air, some glitch allowed me to overhear the two hosts talking behind the commercial break. “Funny sort of conservative,” said one. “I mean, he’s OK with abortion …?” Yep, I’m OK with it. Sorry, guy.
I doubt there’s anything that can be done about this. I wish, though, that some of the time and energy that conservatives give to thinking about fetuses could be diverted to real problems of governance. As a political prospect, the anti-abortion crusade is just Prohibition redux; as a social phenomenon, it’s off-puttingly cultish (to me, and to a lot of people who might otherwise be more sympathetic to conservatism); as an intellectual construct, it loses most of its point once you drop ensoulment. Yes, I know the arguments to the contrary. I never heard a non-believer make them, though.
The pro-life movement is not against abortion because it is traditional & conservative. On the contrary, the Catholic Church was far more accepting of abortion in the early 19th century when ancient ideas about “quickening” still held sway. The life-begins-at-conception doctrine is an innovation in response to new facts and understandings.
“As an intellectual construct, it loses most of its point once you drop ensoulment. Yes, I know the arguments to the contrary. I never heard a non-believer make them, though.”
My position that the best candidate for the starting point for a human life is conception has been consistent my whole life, including the many years that I was an atheist. To this day, I have little confidence in the reality of a soul, and have never used the idea to defend my position. That Bradlaugh has never heard a non-believer make this kind of argument makes me to think that I must be an odd-ball, and that there is an even stronger affinity between atheism and American non-conservatism than I thought.
Bradlaugh: Back beyond that — five minutes, or five months before the baby is born — the mother is rather intimately involved (and the father somewhat less so), and you are in a different situation.
This should only be pertinent if the baby inside the womb is not a human being, which isn’t true.
The life-begins-at-conception doctrine is an innovation in response to new facts and understandings.>
Is sola scriptura a new innovation?
Ron: Well, again, I don’t know what “the starting point for a human life” has to do with it, or what follows from your proposition. That any post-conception destruction of an embryo or fetus should be against the law? Lots of luck with that.
The issue is, should it be legal to kill embryos and fetuses? If you respond that, well, post-conception, an embryo is a unique human being — all right. Then the question becomes, should it be legal to kill a unique human being, if it’s also an embryo? We’re really no further along. You just added some words.
Lots of women do want to kill their embryos and fetuses, whatever you think about their metaphysical status. Those women feel strongly that since it’s their bodies the procedure is being performed on, they should have the last word on the matter. What do you say to them? Should they be permitted to kill their embryos & fetuses, or not?
Ron, everyone agrees that a human life starts at conception. The real issue is what constitutes personhood. If you don’t believe that all and only humans have souls, you need to explain why biological humans are special anyway or you have to acknowledge that it is not the case that all humans have more rights than all non-humans.
Pingback: Secular Right » New consenses made
You may want to acquaint yourself with Nat Hentoff, formerly of the Village Voice, an atheist who has long been strongly pro-life. He’s been arguing against abortion for a long time now: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/indivisible.html
I don’t think he’s as unusual as you may think. One of my two closest friends is an atheist who is also strongly against abortion. He looks at the issue the way I do, as involving the application of basic morality–“Thou shalt not kill”–to simple biology–life begins at conception.
“Lots of women do want to kill their embryos and fetuses, whatever you think about their metaphysical status. Those women feel strongly that since it’s their bodies the procedure is being performed on…”
Those women should be corrected: the brunt of the procedure is on the embryo/fetus.
“Should they be permitted to kill their embryos & fetuses, or not?”
Easy. They are mistaken and should be forbidden. Please allow me to give them the bad news.
How does the fact that some other person is “intimately involved” with us qualify our value as human beings? And is not a mother “intimately involved” with her child after it is born?
Contra Mr. Hume, who seems to have fallen sway to propaganda put forth by pro-choicers who (quite rightly) recognize the Roman Church as the greatest obstacle to their agenda, Catholicism has always strongly condemned abortion.
Derb: the real problems of governance are by your political philosophy (if you dislike that phrase, political notions) whatever our widespread common emotions say they are, correct? If so, then you can only appeal to the quantity of people sharing your emotions (ranking some emotions as higher quality is out of the question), and you can hardly blame pro-lifers for trying to get their emotions counted, and opposing a Supreme Court decision that nullified existing abortion restrictions. Unless, that is, you believe abortion jurisprudence is Constitutionally sound, rather than a fig leaf for moral claims based on another version of rights doctrine; but I have seen you imply otherwise elsewhere.
“I have never heard an unbeliever make them…” Well, Christians, and particularly Catholics, are more likely than others generally to make natural law claims at this period in history (but natural law as part of our heritage continues to influence our widespread common emotions). Belief in natural law, rather than doctrines of ensoulment, may very well be the reason for Catholics’ appeal to…natural law.
I have no patience with the angels-on-pin-heads logic-chopping about “when life begins.” (Though I like the answer a biologist friend once gave: “Life begins in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch …” You have to think about it a minute.) Without a moral metaphysic and a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.
Absolute rubbish. You don’t need a “soul” to define human life. What you need is a brainwave. Has a brainwave = legally alive. Doesn’t have one = legally dead. Killing a fetus that has established thalamocortical connections ought to be profoundly objectionable even to a “secular” conservative.
“And what do the right-to-lifers want? A total nationwide ban on all abortions, at any time? Yes, that seems to be what they want. Do they really imagine that’s going to happen? What a waste of political energy!”
That’s pretty funny coming from the guy who championed Ron Paul as the GOP candidate in 2008!
If Derbyshire was prevented from saying or writing anything that is “never going to happen” – on the grounds that this wastes his energy – would he ever get to say anything? Probably not.
Lugo: I assume then that you’re kept up nights by the fact that there’s a product called “rat poison” which is specifically marketed as a way of killing certain things with brainwaves. Fighting against abortion seems a bit misguided when there are a bunch of much easier things you could be doing which would save more organisms with brainwaves.
Tom: I’ve also met a few atheists that were against abortion. Without exception, though, they hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to their position. This Nat Hentoff seems rather like them – it’s apparent that any argument he has against abortion in itself boils down to “aww, look at the little baby” and that he’s mostly against it not because he firmly believes that abortion is wrong in itself but because he thinks it’ll lead to places that he doesn’t want to go. And it’s still not at all clear to me how he can avoid the other horn of Singer’s dilemma – why isn’t he also up in arms about slaughterhouses, hunting, and rat poison?
You absolutely need human exceptionalism in order to justify giving fetuses more rights than many animals, and it’s rare to see a pro-lifer meaningfully grapple with this in a non-religious way. The only really serious argument I’ve seen is in Don Marquis’ essay, but it’s hardly conclusive in itself and in my opinion has also been pretty thoroughly discredited.
Without a moral metaphysic and a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.
I think this is correct. Without a moral metaphysic or a belief in ensoulment, I too can’t see why one would argue for the illegalization of abortion. (I’m actually not sure why one would argue for the illegalization of murder either, but that’s another matter.) However, an atheist site really shouldn’t spread calumnies about atheists. While I doubt many atheists believe in ensoulment, not all atheists are so crazy that they lack a moral metaphysic. I am both an atheist and a moral realist. I regard both of these positions as being fairly obvious, but Mr. Derbyshire is quite correct in pointing out that both together appears to be very rare. Most atheists I meet, if you question them closely enough, tend to be positivists with an emotivist moral philosophy. The fact that positivism has been thoroughly discredited and that emotivism is a really quite curious moral philosophy seems to escape their notice. However, that’s not all atheists.
By the way, it is obvious to me why the pro-life movement is “off-puttingly cultish” to Mr. Derbyshire. If one doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with strangling kittens, it must seem very odd indeed that there are people so impassioned that they even try to get laws passed forbidding it.
Pro-abortion folks are right when they argue that we don’t know with certainty when a embryo/fetus is enough like you and me not to allow it to be killed. They are wrong when they conclude that, therefore, mom should decide. That’s like having a policy where a hunter is free to shoot at something moving behind the bushes when he is not sure it is not human. As long as we lack certainty, we shouldn’t allow people to shoot.
Gotchaye
– You absolutely need human exceptionalism in order to justify recognizing any human’s rights that animals don’t have.
– Your critique is the opposite of Derb’s. While Derb would have us uncritically accept our widespread emotions, and has impatience with those who try to give a great amount of thought to the matter, you would have us radically critique them; even the powerful impulse to protect a baby requires some independent justification. If, as you seem to assume, reason is necessarily corrosive of moral ideas (if it does not end in natural law), then it affirms a Derbish reliance on impulses- something like Positivist assertion of will, or the Scottish Enlightenment belief in moral sentiments. If you have neither impulses nor natural law, I don’t know what you’re let with.
Danny: “…the Roman Church as the greatest obstacle to their agenda, Catholicism has always strongly condemned abortion.”
Correct – they distinguished between pre-“quickening” (bad) post-quickening (worse) abortions, but were against both.
Bradlaugh: “The issue is, should it be legal to kill embryos and fetuses? If you respond that, well, post-conception, an embryo is a unique human being — all right. Then the question becomes, should it be legal to kill a unique human being, if it’s also an embryo?”
Why not? A human life begins when there’s a new set of DNA, but it’s quite legal to kill people under certain circumstances: self-defense, war, legal executions, etc., so just add another circumstance. If “human rights” is a fiction maintained to maximize peoples’ well-being, then perhaps the well-being is maximized by adding another class of people whom it’s legal to kill: dead fetus vs. a kid nobody wants to deal with.
Lugo: “Has a brainwave = legally alive.”
“Legally alive” is whatever lawmakers decide to write down. California law is pretty amusing on this issue: a fetus is a person unless the mother says otherwise.
My main gripe is that the abortion-“rights” people like to pretend that they’re not killing anyone.
Anyone or anything?! Be sincere in your semantics.
Gotchaye: You absolutely need human exceptionalism in order to justify giving fetuses more rights than many animals, and it’s rare to see a pro-lifer meaningfully grapple with this in a non-religious way. The only really serious argument I’ve seen is in Don Marquis’ essay, but it’s hardly conclusive in itself and in my opinion has also been pretty thoroughly discredited.
The framers used Natural Law (Rights); although coming from the Bible, may not be religious, but then again, the framers said our unalienable rights come from the Bible.
I’m not really saying that we have to have a rock-solid argument for why it’s wrong to kill babies. My point wasn’t about the actual grounds we have for making various moral claims, but about making sure that the moral claims that we do make are consistent. One basic intuition that a lot of us have is that moral distinctions should only be made for morally relevant reasons, and almost nobody thinks that differences between the DNA sequences of two creatures are in themselves morally relevant. But this seems to be exactly what many pro-life atheists are insisting on – they’re saying that all humans have more rights than all animals by virtue of the fact that they are members of the species Homo sapiens.
Now, it’s possible to construct a pro-life argument that starts from this observation and then continues to say that there’s something important about the fact that fetuses have a future like ours (because they’re humans and will grow into reasoning beings), but most don’t go there. They rarely explain why mere genetic fact is enough to justify a moral conclusion. This mode of thinking seems to me to be the real slippery slope – if any genetically distinct category of thing can be given rights or stripped of rights on those grounds alone and with no further explanation, then we’ve got a problem. After all, the ‘argument’ sounds exactly as valid as saying that only males have a right to life because only they have Y chromosomes.
@our founding truth
The founders said that our unalienable rights come from our “Creator”, not from the bible. It is not defined who the Creator is.
The Derb is correct that opposition to abortion is a sort of litmus test of who is considered a conservative. It is a waste of political energy because an overturning of Roe vs. Wade would simply throw the issue back to the states, with most states keeping it legal. Any federal ban on abortion would be found unconstitutional on the same basis that an overturning of Roe vs. Wade. That it is a state issue, not under federal jurisdiction.
I consider myself pro-life but I’m well aware of the weaker parts of my argument. And even the religious houses don’t seem to view an abortion as equal to one adult slaying another. If they did they wouldn’t refer to the woman who procures one as “the other victim.”
I’m not a one issue voter though.
Camille Paglia admits that abortion is murder. She describes it as the strong acting against the weak, and she was quite a fan of Governor Palin.
What I really don’t understand is how once a baby is born he or she ceases to be the potential or actual trespasser that she is in the womb. If the baby’s mother finds motherhood overwhelming and destructive why is the baby any less of a trespasser in the crib?
It seems to me that the child ceases to be a trespasser when he or she is able to enunciate the plea that he wants to live.
Singer is a most depressing read for me, but he gets what I’m saying too. And he seems honest to me, so it’s hard for me to dislike him personally.
The real problem, I think, can be summed up by the recent report that porn is more sought after in Red States than in Blue.
Christians would go a long way in gaining respect if there existed an antithesis between “the world” and them. And while Grace may or may not avail them or they avail themselves of Grace, a true Christian life lived would likely produce a quiet humility and attractive exterior.
I don’t know how large the group is that maintains that unless you make ending abortion your top priority, you’re not a conservative–I would guess it’s pretty much the same group that insists that you’re not a conservative unless you’re an evangelical Christian–but they certainly are vocal. I was scanning a popular conservative website the other day when it was announced that Sarah Palin had appointed a former board member of Planned Parenthood to the judiciary. You never heard such wailing and keening and gnashing of teeth. Betrayed by that leftie RINO Palin! You’d have thought she was Nancy Pelosi in mukluks.
Pingback: One conservative take on the abortion issue « David Kirkpatrick
Scientifically, it makes sense to say that life begins when the brain and CNS first forms in the embryo. This occurs about 40-50 days into the pregnancy (about half-way through the first trimester). Everyone knows that the seat of human consciousness is in the brain. No brain, no human consciousness, therefor no human being.
I have noticed a funny thing about “pro-life” people. They not only want to ban abortion. They want to ban or restrict birth control options as well. I know some who even oppose vasectomy. This tells me that their stated objective of protecting “innocent” human life is nothing more than a pose or a red-herring. What they really want to do is regulate peoples’ social lives, irregardless of protecting “innocent life”.
You absolutely need human exceptionalism in order to justify giving fetuses more rights than many animals, and it’s rare to see a pro-lifer meaningfully grapple with this in a non-religious way. The only really serious argument I’ve seen is in Don Marquis’ essay, but it’s hardly conclusive in itself and in my opinion has also been pretty thoroughly discredited.
Gotchaye, could you elaborate on the discrediting of Marquis’s view? Because I’ve never yet heard a strong argument against it and I’m very curious. My own view is that, if we assume that there are such things as rights, then either A) only intellectually developed humans have rights (so killing animals and fetuses is all right, but so is killing infants), B) only potential humans have rights (so killing animals is all right, but killing fetuses and infants isn’t), or C) only creatures with the capacity to suffer have rights (so killing fetuses is fine, but killing animals and infants isn’t). What I cannot justify, on a rights view, is the dominant view. That it’s not all right to kill adults and infants, but it’s fine to kill fetuses and animals. I’ve yet to hear a coherent justification for this one and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist. (This isn’t to say one couldn’t arrive as such a view from some form of non-rights-based argument. Pure pragmatism or something.)
Marquis’s view is, in my opinion, the most powerful pro-life argument. For one thing, I think Marquis is 100% correct that his explanation is the only one which makes sense of our intuitions on why it is wrong to kill people. When a 90 year-old man dies, we think it’s a pity, but we’re generally all right with it. When a 10 year-old boy dies, we think it’s a tragedy. What’s the difference? The capacity for future experience. We seem to have no real problem with killing someone who is unconscious and will never recover, but we do have a serious problem with killing someone who is unconscious, but will. The difference? The capacity for human experience. And so on.
Marquis’s view does not entail that animals have no rights, by the way. One can accept Marquis’s view and either deny or grant rights to animals.
By the way, on that last paragraph, obviously I should have added a D to my first paragraph. So D) Adults, infants, fetuses, and animals all have rights. Obviously, this view can also be defended.
steveT: The founders said that our unalienable rights come from our “Creator”, not from the bible. It is not defined who the Creator is.
The framers said our unalienable rights are granted from “The Law of Nature and The Laws of Nature’s God”. A classical term coined by Reformation Christians: Luther, Calvin, Pufendorf, Locke, Hooker, Grotius, etc.
What they[pro-life people] really want to do is regulate peoples’ social lives, irregardless of protecting “innocent life”.
That’s a small minority.
“I have noticed a funny thing about ‘pro-life’ people. They not only want to ban abortion. They want to ban or restrict birth control options as well. I know some who even oppose vasectomy. This tells me that their stated objective of protecting “innocent” human life is nothing more than a pose or a red-herring. What they really want to do is regulate peoples’ social lives, irregardless of protecting ‘innocent life’.”
According to the General Social Survey, 83.5% of Americans against an abortion of a baby with a birth defect say birth control information should be available to anyone who wants it.
http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss08
And please, no “this is a question about information, not access” from a person making fact-free assertions about “pro-life” people.
Andrew: To my mind, elaborations of the “sperms are people too” objection to Marquis are conclusive. He tries to deal with this by saying that we can’t point to a single being that has a future in the case of a sperm or an egg, but that seems to me to be just as true of an early fetus. Just like the egg, the fetus needs to be combined with a whole lot of other material in order to produce something that can have the sort of experience we value, and we have every reason to believe that a given fetus has the potential to give rise to a very large number of experience-having persons depending on its environment. It’s arbitrary to point to a fertilized egg as having a future like ours instead of at the cow that the mother will eat some of while pregnant. It’s a mistake to think that the early fetus is relevantly continuous with an experience-having person just because it has a complete genetic code. Marquis seems to assume that a complete genetic code is determinative of a single experience-having person, and that’s just not the case. It’s ploidist. I’ll note here that the same argument doesn’t work to say that no adult has a future because human bodies are constantly replenished a la Theseus’ ship, since adult humans have consciousness (that we all recognize as having moral relevance) so that our choice of the adult human body as the object with a future is not arbitrary.
I’ve no problem with saying that deprivation of a future is at least part of what makes killing wrong, but I don’t think it makes sense to draw the line between things that have futures like ours and things that don’t at conception. If Marquis is otherwise entirely right, then it seems to me that rights ought to start when a fetus (or infant, or toddler – based on what exactly your conception of an experience-having person is) is far enough along that the number of potential persons it could give rise to collapses to almost one (in the same way that the number of potential genetically distinct fetuses that an egg can give rise to collapses to one upon fertilization).
I’ll also agree with you that there’s no morally relevant distinction between a very late fetus and a newborn, though I don’t think that this necessarily means that we can’t say that killing infants is always wrong while killing fetuses sometimes isn’t. Following my second paragraph above, perhaps this point at which a fetus acquires rights is roughly halfway through pregnancy.
Personally, I’m inclined towards your option A, with some caveats. I think there are degrees of personhood, and I’m inclined to say that the tremendous value we place on the lives of infants is the result of a moral intuition which is untrustworthy for the obvious evolutionary reasons. On the other hand, I’m inclined to say that we all do have an obligation to have some minimal amount of respect for other people’s values, and so given the immense sentimental value that almost everyone places on babies it might still be the case that killing them is a moral wrong.
Your musings about a “right to life” resemble those of L. A. Rollins on natural rights.
My own thoughts on abortion are here. As you can see from a pingback there, I used to be pro-life (though rather weakly so). Back then I favored greater access to birth control as a second-best to a revitalized prudery in order to prevent more abortions.
Gotchaye, thank you very much. An excellent explanation. I do object to your earlier statement that the view is “pretty thoroughly discredited,” since I think your critique has serious weaknesses. Perhaps the only thing that remains constant in a person’s life is his genetic code. It is certainly not arbitrary to point to the fertilized egg as having a future like ours rather than the cow, for example. I find that argument just baffling. (It may be mistaken, but it is very far from arbitrary.)
I’m not convinced that consciousness has moral relevance, either, as you seem to be suggesting. A thought experiment: a person is crippled in such a way that he cannot move in any fashion. He can’t communicate or anything of the sort. He is simply trapped in his body and there is no hope of his ever being able to walk or talk or even blink. However, we can keep this person alive until he dies of old age. Would it be such a tragedy to kill him? I think our intuitions say that it wouldn’t be. Why? He’s conscious after all. What he doesn’t have is a future like ours.
I do, however, find your own moral position completely defensible and refreshingly honest. I could be persuaded to that view myself. Your argument that our attachment to infants may derive from an untrustworthy source for evolutionary reasons rather than from genuine moral reality definitely has a force to it.
I’ll admit that “pretty thoroughly discredited” was overreach – I was hoping to hedge that with the “in my opinion” bit. It works for me, but I recognize that there are very smart and reasonable people who think that Marquis’ argument is a good one. As I said in my first post mentioning him, he’s got a secular argument against abortion that’s worth taking very seriously.
To be clear (though I think you caught this), I wasn’t trying to say that it makes sense to say that parts of the cow have a future like ours – my point was that it’s no more arbitrary to do that than it is to say that the unfertilized egg has a future like ours, and that therefore we can’t say that the unfertilized or fertilized eggs have futures like ours. Why should we care about the continuity of a genetic code? I’ll grant that conception isn’t arbitrary in that it’s a one-time event that’s clearly important for fetal development, and we have good reasons for thinking of the fetus as the precursor to a person in a practical sense (mostly the tremendous difficulty of saying what parts of the outside world are going to be incorporated into the growing baby), but I don’t see how it’s not arbitrary in a moral sense except insofar as we’re inclined to mistake a continuous genetic code for continuous personhood.
I’m not sure on your thought experiment. I doubt that you’d have many takers. A person lying unconscious in a coma is one thing, but someone who’s sitting there thinking is a bit different. Perhaps we don’t have an obligation to take steps to keep the person alive, but no one thinks that this cripple is just worth his weight in organic material. To the extent that we do think it permissible to kill him, I think it’s because we wouldn’t want to live like that. If we could read his thoughts and know that the man was actually quite content and didn’t want to die, we’d have lots of trouble, I think.
I’d never actually heard of Marquis until your comment, but I’ve been making essentially his argument for a decade now. (I’m not fanatically pro-life primarily because I have doubts that my reasoning on the matter is correct, but that’s where my reasoning takes me. Until I actually considered why murder is wrong and settled on the idea roughly similar to “futures like ours,” I had been pro-choice.) Thanks for pointing Marquis out to me, since I’ve always assumed that some philosopher would take this line, but had never heard of a prominent one doing it until now.
I don’t see how it’s not arbitrary in a moral sense except insofar as we’re inclined to mistake a continuous genetic code for continuous personhood.
The problem I have with this is that I’m not at all convinced that it’s a mistake. The genetic code is clearly vital for personhood. If we don’t believe in souls (and I don’t), it’s not clear to me what else matters. I see your objection that our intuitions don’t normally associate value with genes. (Intuitively, we don’t know anything about genes.) But science tells us that genes are what makes a person a person instead of a horse or a dog or a fly. Certainly environment has a great effect on what sort of person one ends up being, but without human genes (or genes of another sort which provides one with the potential to have futures like ours), one can’t be a person at all.
I’m not sure on your thought experiment. I doubt that you’d have many takers. A person lying unconscious in a coma is one thing, but someone who’s sitting there thinking is a bit different. Perhaps we don’t have an obligation to take steps to keep the person alive, but no one thinks that this cripple is just worth his weight in organic material. To the extent that we do think it permissible to kill him, I think it’s because we wouldn’t want to live like that. If we could read his thoughts and know that the man was actually quite content and didn’t want to die, we’d have lots of trouble, I think.
That last is a bit of a flaw in my thought experiment. I was arguing essentially that most of us, if not all of us, would not wish to live that way precisely because it is not a future like ours, indicating that consciousness alone is not enough to make life worth living. But I do completely agree that if he was content and didn’t want to die, then it would be wrong to kill him. Of course, even if such a person existed, I’m still not sure that this makes consciousness morally significant, just that such a life might constitute a future like ours after all. Consciousness is certainly morally significant in the sense that it is necessary (in the future) for one to have a future like ours.
The problem that I have here, as you may have noted, is that I do think it’s a great tragedy when an infant dies and the reason why is precisely because they have futures like ours even if right now their reasoning ability is non-existent and their consciousness rudimentary. And since I can’t find a morally significant dividing line between infants and fetuses, I am forced to the conclusion that the death of a fetus is a tragedy as well. However, your argument is certainly the second best one. Perhaps I am merely rationalizing a strong evolutionary urge in regard to infants. (I don’t think so, but I grant the possibility.)
I’m finding it pretty interesting that nearly this entire discussion is being conducted by men (except for Susan, of course).
If you accept Derbyshire’s emotivist view–that the only foundation of a moral imperative is common consensus, then upon what basis could you prefer any common consensus over another one–say the consensus of the Allis in WWII to that of the Axis countries?
#35: Well, “prefer” doesn’t express your point very well. An individual might prefer one system to another based on all sorts of personal variables. Plainly tens of millions of Germans preferred the Axis system to the Allied one. Great numbers of them preferred it enough to sacrifice their lives for the preference. I suppose you would say they were mistaken on absolute-morality grounds. But then, if the Axis had won the war, that’s what they’d say, too.
We know this because people just as bad as them did triumph, and
did say so. In Communist China, which in its Maoist phase could trade horror for horror with the Axis powers, they are still saying so. I taught Eng. Lit. in communist China from local textbooks filled with lurid descriptions of “the darkness and oppression of bourgeois society” (that’s us).
I don’t see what your absolute morality gets you. If you want to tell me “We must be on the side of absolute good because we won WW2!”, well, what do you say to Stalin’s later victims, or Mao’s later and current ones?
I’m glad we won WW2, but I can’t see that it tells us anything about the existence or not of absolute morality. If we’d lost, absolute morality would be described in Axis terms. And Stalin won the war, too.
You seem to simply assume that plurality implies relativity. It would be interesting to see the justification for it. The result is that you also seem to think that an absolute system of morality is somehow tantamount to might having some claim in saying what is right simply because it can prevail. But the whole point of an absolute morality is that it is immune from such vicissitudes. An absolute morality has a metaphysical vantage point from which judgments can made of things–things like whether the winning side in a war is justified in imposing its morality.
Just because there are competing claims what is absolute has no effect on a particular system of absolute morality if it were true. Any relative system, however, like the theory of emotivism you have championed, is prone to exactly this: that it has no transcendental standard to which it can hold any particular consensus to account because its standard claims to be embedded in a particular consensus.
Upon what basis does a theory of consensus condemn the Holocaust? Or can it at all?
The problem Bradlaugh’s pointing at is less an issue of whether or not there is an absolute morality and more that, even if there is an absolute morality, we don’t seem to have reliable access to it.
What does it matter if Schrodinger’s Cat is actually either alive or dead if we have no way of knowing either way? An absolute moral claim rests on two premises – that something is absolutely wrong and that the speaker can perceive that the something is absolutely wrong. Plurality doesn’t mean that there isn’t an absolute morality, but it’s devastating to the claim that we can ever know what is or is not absolutely moral (given that it’s possible for there to be intelligent people on more than one side of any given moral issue). Perhaps it’s useful for us to all pretend that our own particular moral views are metaphysically true (so that we can condemn the Holocaust, etc), but our desire to have access to an absolute morality does not give us access to an absolute morality.
In short, I don’t see how something like traditional Christian morality avoids the problem you’re pointing out with emotivism. It’s just one layer deeper, but it’s also incapable of demonstrating that its moral claims correspond to some absolute morality. Insisting that its moral claims are absolute isn’t good enough.
First of all, there is a distinction between moral absolutism and moral objectivism. I mention this only because the terminology exists for a reason and this thread would be easier to follow if every instance of “absolute” were replaced with “objective.”
On to more pertinent matters: Martin Cothran is making the point that someone who does not believe in objective morality loses the right to assert certain things. For example, if you believe that the only standards of right and wrong are built on “consensus,” which I gather is something like the democratic theory of truth applied to morality, then you lose the right to assert that the consensus is wrong if you disagree with it. If the society sanctions slavery then, ipso facto by the theory, there is nothing wrong with slavery. If the society condemns teaching evolution in schools, then teaching evolution in schools is wrong. This is an entirely separate issue from Gotchaye’s response which is that, even if objective morality is true, it is not clear that human beings can know what it is.
Side issue: Personally I am baffled that anyone still defends emotivism or any other form of non-cognitivist ethics. It seems pretty clear that moral propositions are not simply meant to describe one’s emotions (we have a whole other vocabulary for that); they are assertions about moral reality. So the only options left to us are moral realism or error theory (we are trying to describe moral reality, but failing because there is no such thing, so all moral statements are false).
Gotchaye, however, is overreaching in his critique. Plurality does not mean that we cannot ever know what is or is not objectively moral. All that it means is that sometimes people make mistakes. Individuals have different degrees of intelligence, education and experience, bias, motivation for finding the truth, and attention and time spent on any given issue; and all of these factors affect their ability to form a correct judgement. There is wide disagreement among historians, even if they are all experts, but no one (as far as I know) argues from this that therefore, we cannot ever know who is right. We do more research, try to discover documents or what have you, and settle the issue. Perhaps we never will know who is right, but it’s not a foregone conclusion.
For another thing, the level of disagreement is exaggerated. People tend to agree that honesty, courage, and compassion are virtues. They tend to agree with moral propositions such as “people ought to eat when they are hungry.” Very few people argue that happiness is not good. Whether one is impressed with the convergence or divergence of moral codes all depends on what things you’re looking at. (By the way, I am going to argue that most moral disagreements are not disagreements about morals, but disagreements about facts, but that’s another issue.)
Gotchaye’s argument is that if moral truths exist and we are capable of discovering them, then presumably people would exercise their rational faculty and come to know the truth. Since people often disagree, it must be the case that either A) there are no such things as moral values or B) we cannot discover them. This is an unwarranted conclusion. If, for example, values are subjective and we are capable of knowing that, why is it that so many people (including me) don’t know it? Shouldn’t we all agree? If, as Gotchaye says, it is not possible to know moral reality and we are capable of knowing that, why is it that I don’t agree with Gotchaye that it is true?
Let me make it clear, by the way, that I am not arguing that we can know moral truths with absolute precision or certainty. I regard infallibility as a wholly mistaken criterion for knowledge, moral or otherwise. Nor am I arguing that there are any exceptionless rules for judging moral issues (belief in the existence of at least one constitutes the position known as moral absolutism) or that there is an algorithm for computing morality. I am also not arguing whether people should or should not be tolerant of people with differing practices or views (either one of which could be consistent with moral objectivism).
I do think Christian morality has serious problems, for what it’s worth, but then I am an atheist. (The Euthyphro dilemma tells us that either God’s commands are wholly arbitrary or that God’s commands accord with moral law, thereby leaving no real role for God in morality except as a transmitter of moral knowledge.)
Personally I am baffled that anyone still defends emotivism or any other form of non-cognitivist ethics. It seems pretty clear that moral propositions are not simply meant to describe one’s emotions (we have a whole other vocabulary for that); they are assertions about moral reality. So the only options left to us are moral realism or error theory (we are trying to describe moral reality, but failing because there is no such thing, so all moral statements are false).
Personally I’m baffled that anyone attempts to defend error theory: if the statement “Abortions are always morally wrong” is considered a proposition at all, then it must obey the law of the excluded middle and have a truth value. The statement and its negation are both moral claims; but they can’t both be false without doing great and unnecessary violence to the meaning of “false”. It is precisely that fork that noncognitivism attempts to avoid by saying that this is not a well-defined statement at all, regardless of the subjective intent of the speaker.
Of course if you give a complete definition of “morally wrong” then it can be applied to produce a truth value. But the act of doing this exposes the usually hidden assumptions – all the work of the sentence is in the unstated and disputed definition of “morally wrong”, which is precisely what’s so troublesome about it. By the time you get to “All abortions are WRONG1, but some are not WRONG2” then you start discussing why you’d prefer one definition of wrong to another, and moral realism can’t survive such a conversation – there’s no basis to justify exalting one definition above all possible others.
One basic intuition that a lot of us have is that moral distinctions should only be made for morally relevant reasons, and almost nobody thinks that differences between the DNA sequences of two creatures are in themselves morally relevant. But this seems to be exactly what many pro-life atheists are insisting on – they’re saying that all humans have more rights than all animals by virtue of the fact that they are members of the species Homo sapiens.
Say what? Of course the differences between the DNA sequences of two creatures are morally relevant. Otherwise human life would have no greater moral weight than bacterial or viral life. If you do not think the differences between DNA sequences is morally relevant, how can you justify eating anything, plant or animal? Do you regard the extermination of insects, rats, and other vermin as immoral?
People who do not think that humans should have more rights than all animals by virtue of the fact that they are members of the species Homo sapiens scare the hell out of me. These are exactly the people who would happily kill billions of humans to “save the planet”.
Pingback: » Quote of the Day
Far be it for me to defend error theory, but I don’t agree with your critique. There is no excluded middle problem here. Right/wrong does not operate like true/false if one denies that there is any such thing as right or wrong. To give an example, if you were to tell me that all things are either unicorns or fairies, you might claim that if I’m saying that “X is not a unicorn” then I must be saying “X is a fairy.” But if I reject the reality of both unicorns and fairies, I’m perfectly consistent in saying both “X is a unicorn” and “X is a fairy” are false.
I.e. to avoid the excluded middle problem that you are suggesting, an error theorist would say that it is true to say both “abortions are not wrong” and “abortions are not right.” Since there’s no such thing as right or wrong, it’s not possible for abortions to be either. An error theorist doesn’t precisely say that all moral propositions are false since those which deny moral content are true.
Meanwhile, non-cognitivist ethics runs into the Frege-Geach problem, which I believe is fatal. The best a non-cognitivist ethicist can say is to assert error theory and then argue that what people ought to do (oops) when talking about morality is cease to talk about it as if it were true, and describe one’s emotions instead.
Of course if you give a complete definition of “morally wrong” then it can be applied to produce a truth value. But the act of doing this exposes the usually hidden assumptions – all the work of the sentence is in the unstated and disputed definition of “morally wrong”, which is precisely what’s so troublesome about it. By the time you get to “All abortions are WRONG1, but some are not WRONG2″ then you start discussing why you’d prefer one definition of wrong to another, and moral realism can’t survive such a conversation – there’s no basis to justify exalting one definition above all possible others.
I adopt G.E. Moore’s argument that good is indefinably simple and cannot be defined in terms of natural properties. I admit that this makes it seem like I am taking my bat and ball and going home, but for language to operate, some concepts must be indefinable or you get circularity.
@Meredith Wright: that’s because most women have better and more useful things to do than write long tracts on abstract subjects on a little-read blog, which in the end changes nothing.
@Andrew Stevens: It seems to me that what you are defending as error theory is very similar to my concept of noncognitivism. To take your unicorn/fairy example, I see error theory as asserting that “X is a unicorn” and “X is not a unicorn” are both false – which is an obvious contradiction problem.
Frege-Geach fails as an objection (IMO) because Geach fails to translate his conditional premise fully. If “It is wrong to tell lies” should properly (in a noncognitivist account) be rendered “I disapprove of telling lies”, then “If it is wrong to tell lies, it is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies” renders as “If I disapprove of telling lies, I disapprove of getting your little brother to tell lies”. Given those axioms, the expected conclusion follows – “I disapprove of getting your little brother to tell lies”.
The whole point of the expressivist rewriting is that by removing the reference to an outside definition of right and wrong, everything has to be rewritten in terms of the speaker’s *personal* definition. It prevents the speaker from inadvertently confusing their perspective with a universal, objective perspective (an error so common it doesn’t even have a name AFAIK).
Upon further reflection, I think that moral reasoning can be more usefully expressed not in ordinary logic, but in modal logic. “In system A, X is wrong” and “In system B, X is not wrong” are not logically inconsistent statements, they merely describe moral systems that disagree.
From this perspective, “Abortion is wrong” is an incomplete statement – it has a hidden free variable, namely, the system in which judgment is performed. It can be completed either by inserting the speaker’s reference frame – “In my personal system of morality, abortion is wrong” – or by inserting the modal necessity operator – “In every possible system of morality, abortion is wrong” – or possibly in some other way. ISTM that the first interpretation gives rise to expressivism and the second to error theory (“Abortion is wrong” and “Abortion is not wrong” are incompatible when expanded this way, but they are *no longer logical negations of one another* because of the interaction between the necessity and negation operators, so asserting that they are both false is no longer inconsistent).
If you don’t complete the incomplete statement at all, but merely point out its incompleteness, then you come to the conclusion that it can’t have a truth value any more than “X is even” when you don’t know the value of X. This leads to the logical positivist forms of noncognitivism – the sentence is “meaningless” because it’s incomplete.
(Note that this is in addition to the context-dependency of the moral judgments themselves, for systems in which the morality of an act depends on its context. This will often lead to two layers of modality – one for the moral system doing the judging, one for the circumstances of the act being judged.)
Moral realism is now expressed as “There is a system of morality that is truer than all the others” – immediately prompting replies like “Oh yeah? Why?” and “Which one, and how do you know?”.
It seems to me that what you are defending as error theory is very similar to my concept of noncognitivism. To take your unicorn/fairy example, I see error theory as asserting that “X is a unicorn” and “X is not a unicorn” are both false – which is an obvious contradiction problem.
J.L. Mackie would not agree. There is nothing problematic with saying “X is not a unicorn” is true if there are no such things as unicorns. In fact, it has to be true no matter what X is (if X is real).
Frege-Geach fails as an objection (IMO) because Geach fails to translate his conditional premise fully. If “It is wrong to tell lies” should properly (in a noncognitivist account) be rendered “I disapprove of telling lies”, then “If it is wrong to tell lies, it is wrong to get your little brother to tell lies” renders as “If I disapprove of telling lies, I disapprove of getting your little brother to tell lies”. Given those axioms, the expected conclusion follows – “I disapprove of getting your little brother to tell lies”.
This isn’t a non-cognitivist account at all. Non-cognitivism says that moral propositions are not genuine propositions and therefore not truth-apt, but imperatives or expressions of feeling (boo! or hurray!). Your translation of “lying is wrong” as “I disapprove of lying” is straightforwardly a proposition and straightforwardly truth-apt. Either you disapprove of lying or you don’t. This view (that ethical statements are propositions about the attitudes of people) is known as ethical subjectivism and is a cognitivist account. Your modal logic view which follows is, in my opinion, a natural extension of such a view, but it’s certainly not non-cognitivist.
If you were to really adopt the subjectivist account, then you’d probably need something like your modal logic to make sense of disagreement. After all, if, for example, Mr. Pro-Choice is simply saying “I don’t disapprove of abortion” and Mr. Pro-Life is simply saying “I approve of abortion,” then it’s very strange that they are fighting with each other since, in fact, they don’t actually disagree about anything. However, your modal logic makes sense of the disagreement. Now Mr. Pro-Choice is saying “Abortion is not wrong in the universal morality” and Mr. Pro-Life is saying “Abortion is wrong in the universal morality” and perhaps Chris is saying, “Abortion is not wrong in my own personal morality.” Which leaves Mr. Pro-Choice and Mr. Pro-Life to get on with their battle.
But I don’t know why one wouldn’t simply assert error theory and be done with it. As near as I can tell, the whole purpose of ethical subjectivism is to allow its proponents to continue to assert moral propositions even though they don’t actually mean what they’re saying anymore (after all, nothing’s stopping them from saying “I disapprove of lying” rather than “lying is wrong”), and otherwise differs not at all from error theory.