My “What’s Wrong with Killing?” was first published by Secular Pro-Life in 2018. The following version is now re-published here, in April 2022, with their permission. In this version, some of the passages have been tweaked.

Suppose a cute toddler is playing in front of us, riding on a toy truck, laughing and having a great time. She may be my child, or she may be anyone’s child. And suppose I kill that toddler before your eyes. You will all be shocked, certainly.

What I want to dig into here is what exactly has shocked us. I would like to submit that we would not have been shocked if not for our expectations that the life of that conspicuously alive child would continue in the next moment – and the moment after that, and the moment after that. Our shock will, by definition, consist simply of emotion and a pre-logical sense of wrongdoing. Logical analysis will not constitute any important part of our initial experience. And yet that gut experience, though it does not include analysis, can be subjected to analysis. We are shocked by the violence and the gore, but the violence and the gore mean what they do to us because subconsciously we understand their consequences. Their consequences (or all too possible consequences) are that I have deprived that child of her future. I have deprived all of us, but above all the child, of the life she would have had. Underlying our sense of wrongdoing, this was the real wrong.

(Evolutionary psychology would explain our response as a successful adaptation. I think the two explanations are not inconsistent.)

Suppose I killed that child with a sudden blow from behind. She did not experience pain. She did not experience fear. Yet nevertheless what I did was wrong. Some would say that I frustrated the child’s desire to live, but in fact her desire to live was “cured” in the moment that it was frustrated, so that the child never actually experienced frustration. The frustration that those people (such as Peter Singer) claim to be crucial was in fact purely theoretical. My brutal act did not result in any frustration, will not result in any frustration, and could not result in any frustration. The real wrong was that I deprived the child of the life she would have had, her future.

Everyone agrees that to cause suffering is a form of harm, and if that harm is unnecessary, it is wrong to cause it. But if to cause suffering is wrong, then to deprive of pleasure, or the chance for pleasure, is also wrong. A “potentiality account” of the wrongness of killing is to be found in Indian philosophy, and has been developed in the West by Don Marquis.

As mentioned, we expected that the life of that conspicuously alive child would continue in the next moment (let’s call it moment A) and for many moments after that – B, C, and on and on. I deprived that individual of all that living, thus irreparably harming her, with a blow struck at moment A minus 1. But how else could I have caused that same harm to that same individual – or let’s say, how else could I have caused that same harm and even more to that same individual?

Obviously I could have caused that same harm and even more to that same individual with a blow struck at moment A minus 2, or at moment A minus 3. I could have caused that same harm and even more with a blow struck just after the child’s birth.

And, just as obviously, I could have caused such harm with a blow struck at the individual before the individual’s birth. I could have caused such harm with a blow struck at the individual just after fertilization. Whether or not we call that individual a “person” or a “human being” is completely irrelevant. I would be very comfortable calling it a “thingamajig.” The point is, whatever we may call it, if we kill it we clearly deprive it.

And the fact that there are big and identifiable differences between a toddler and a zygote doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how great the differences are, because once we have understood what exactly the harm is that is caused by killing, though the differences may be great, none of those differences are relevant to whether that harm is caused or not.

When I kill the toddler playing with her toys, the deprivation of moment A is in the future only by a moment, and when I kill the zygote, the deprivation of moment A is in the future by a couple of years, but what difference does that make? The deprivation is farther removed in time, but would not the toddler killed while still a zygote have lived moment A, soon enough, just as intensely as the toddler killed while a toddler? Of course she would have.

At either moment of killing, I have deprived that same individual of moment A and of a long string of moments, typically about eighty years of moments. They would not all have been moments of joy, certainly. Some would have been moments of great pain. But some would have been moments of joy, and all would have been moments of moral training and search for meaning. Whether I kill a particular human organism as a 3-year-old or as an embryo, the same human individual is deprived of the same thing and undergoes the same harm.

Could I also have caused such harm to that same individual earlier than fertilization? No. Because before fertilization there was no such individual. There was a sperm, and there was an egg. The maximum possible harm that I can do to a sperm is to deprive it of some moments of sperm life. (And the maximum possible harm that I can do to an egg is to deprive it of some moments of egg life.) I don’t think that we should kill a sperm just for the fun of killing it, but the moments that we deprive it of, in killing it, cannot be compared in value to the toddler’s moment A, B, etc.; so we can kill it for any utility of human beings, whereas there is very little that can justify depriving any individual of moments such as A and B.

But here we should distinguish carefully between harm and moral wrong. It may be that no moral wrong exists that does not cause harm to someone; and prima facie, causing harm to someone is morally wrong as well. What I think I have shown here is that if you kill an unborn child at any stage, you harm it as much as you harm a 3-year-old if you kill her; and therefore prima facie, killing an unborn child is as wrong as killing a 3-year-old.

But causing harm to someone is morally wrong only prima facie. Everyone will agree that killing that born girl is morally wrong as well as harmful, but some will say that killing an unborn child is often justified and that therefore even if the harm done to the unborn child is equal to that done to the born child, it is not wrong. In this article I can’t counter all the possible justifications  and thereby show that abortion is almost always wrong, but I think I have shown the presence of harm and therefore at least of prima facie wrong. (And I have countered what I consider the strongest of the claimed justifications, the bodily-rights argument, here.)

A sperm is an individual biological entity for whom, as an individual entity, there is no expectation that it will ever experience a moment like moment A. An egg is an individual biological entity for whom, as an individual entity, there is no expectation that it will ever experience a moment like moment A. So any harm done in killing a sperm or an egg is not comparable to that done in killing a zygote.

Of course if I kill a particular egg or the particular healthy sperm that is ahead of the pack in racing toward the egg, I prevent our toddler from coming into existence and thus prevent her moment A, B, etc. from ever occurring. But have I harmed anyone, have I wronged anyone – and if so, whom? Our intuitions say that harms can be done only to actual individual entities, not to theoretical individual entities. I have only harmed a theoretical individual entity, not any actual individual entity. (That is, the only actual individual that I harmed was the sperm or the egg, and as mentioned it had little to lose, so the harm wasn’t great.) By killing the individual toddler, or that individual toddler while still a zygote, did I take away from her those moments she was going to have, riding on the truck and laughing, and perhaps eighty or ninety years full of moments of conscious experience? Yes. By killing a sperm or an egg, did I take away from any individual even a few moments of riding on the truck and laughing? No, the individual we’re talking about, the individual who can be deprived of a moment on a toy truck, and of many more moments of pleasure and pain over the eighty years that follow that moment, never exists if the meeting of sperm and egg does not occur.

It is to be observed that those who argue “If killing zygotes is wrong, then killing sperms and eggs is also wrong” invariably think that it is not wrong to kill sperms and eggs. And yet they agree that we cannot kill toddlers, and as we have seen, the wrongness of killing toddlers cannot be explained by pain, fear, or desire to live. So they are left with no explanation as to what is wrong with killing a toddler.

Of course it is only moral intuitions that can ultimately determine a correct moral principle, so if someone says they really have a moral intuition that depriving a theoretical individual is as harmful to that individual as depriving an actual individual, we cannot completely disprove the correctness of that moral principle with rational argumentation. But everyone agrees that “we have to draw the line somewhere,” and before no other line except fertilization can a plausible argument be made, it seems to me, that killing does not deprive an individual of moments like moment A – that the prevention of moment A is not major deprivation for the individual who is killed.

(There are arguments about “psychological personhood”: personhood does not begin until the mind is somewhat formed, and therefore the organism that existed before that point and the organism that exists after – though the “before” organism and the “after” organism are biologically completely continuous – do not share the same personal identity; if we kill the “before” organism, we kill only an organism that will never be conscious, since it and the “after” organism are not the same organism. Identities are ultimately intuited, not proved with a modus ponens, so this idea can never be debunked with rational argumentation. But the idea that the identity of an organism with mind – mind being, in the belief of most scientists, a complex arrangement of physical matter – can be separated from the identity of the organism with the material DNA that has initiated and orchestrated all the material complexity, never seems to appeal to my intuitions. Barring [Edit: scientifically doubtful] mind-body dualism, for a “person” to have an identity different  from that of the original bearer of the DNA that has determined the eye color, musical aptitude, and all other traits of the person, including the traits that are part of the consciousness that supposedly makes the person a person, just seems strange. Strange and, for some proponents of the idea – I won’t say all – suspiciously convenient. [Edit: For further elaboration about psychological approaches to personal identity, please see “Was ‘I’ Never an Embryo?”])

 

February 2018 note

From the post: Of course if I kill a particular egg or the particular healthy sperm that is ahead of the pack in racing toward the egg. . . . have I harmed anyone, have I wronged anyone – and if so, whom? Our moral intuitions say that harms can be done only to actual individual entities, not to theoretical individual entities. I have only harmed a theoretical individual entity, not any actual individual entity. (That is, the only actual individual that I harmed was the sperm or the egg, and as mentioned it had little to lose, so the harm wasn’t great.)

What individual organisms are we talking about here? We are talking about a sperm and an egg, two individual organisms neither of which has much to lose, and a zygote – an individual organism who has much more to lose than either the sperm or the egg, or than the sum of both their losses. And the sperm and the egg are the only actual organisms, so only they (who can’t be harmed much) can possibly be harmed.

 

October 2022 update

I find that Alexander Pruss had basically the same idea that I expressed in my DNA argument above. His argument is perhaps better:

And there is a further objection [to the idea that I am a brain]. My brain developed out of earlier cells guided by the genetic information [in DNA] already present in the embryo. There was, first, a neural tube, and earlier there were precursors to that. Brain development was gradual, cells specializing more and more and arranging themselves. At which point did I come to exist? And why should the cells that were the precursors of the brain cells not be counted as having been the same organ as the brain, albeit in inchoate form? If so, then perhaps I was there from conception, even on this view.

 

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Some future posts:

Life Panels

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes Too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World