The Objective Morality of Transcendent Experience

Posted on March 9, 2023 by Facilitator

Human Defense Initiative originally published this article in March 2023, in two installments, here and here. A month later I decided that some reorganization would make the argument easier to follow, resulting in the version that appears below.

People have known for thousands of years that meditation offers tremendous relief. Some say that what it offers goes beyond mere relief. Some say that meditation is a path to infinite and eternal bliss. Besides various possibilities of what meditation results in on the subjective side, interpretations of what it results in physiologically, neurologically and cosmologically also vary. One model that would be plausible for the atheist or agnostic would be the idea that meditation is made possible by an accident in the shaping of the brain through evolution. The theory would be that evolution, though favoring a strong sense of self, accidentally left a door through which a human being, by directing his attention in a certain way, can escape for more or less prolonged periods from that sense of self and the suffering it entails (the idea will be further explained a little later).

I will first and mainly try to show that there can be objectively-correct moral principles grounded on the attainment of transcendent experience, and that an example of one is “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself.” I will argue as follows:

1. Many think of transcendent experience as the highest good possible for humans, and it is something empirical, and in principle measurable through advanced brain imaging. So reasoning tells us that a moral principle that can help lead to transcendent experience is an objectively-correct moral principle.

2. The principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” can help lead to transcendent experience.

3. Therefore, according to reasoning, the principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” is an objectively-correct moral principle.

4. An objectively-correct moral principle is not fully established by reasoning, but only if it is supported by a correct moral intuition.

5. The research of Paul Bloom and others indicates that the seeds of beliefs supporting principles similar to “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” are inborn in us. The seeds that are inborn in us will “sprout” into specific beliefs once we have enough information about the world and free ourselves from psychological weaknesses, so the specific beliefs are in effect inborn in us. Being inborn in us, they are intuitions. Their correctness is established if we have successfully established the correctness of the principles that they support, and such objectively-correct moral intuitions exist not only in theory, but in reality.

6. But we have established the correctness of the principles only through reasoning, and they can be fully established only through intuition.

7. If one has an intuition supporting the correctness of a correct moral principle, one will automatically intuit also that the intuition is correct. But that would be a circular proof of the correctness of an intuition. Yet when we try to establish the correctness of an intuition based on the correctness of the principle it supports, we run into 6. above.

8. So the correctness of a moral intuition cannot ultimately be established in any cognitive way. We can, however seek to eliminate, through meditation, and a selfless lifestyle, and a willingness to change, and sometimes psychotherapy, all the mental weaknesses that would cloud our intuitions, and thus find unclouded intuitions. It stands to reason that they will be correct intuitions. If according to this reasoning, added to the reasoning in 1. above, the moral principle “You ought to serve others . . .” is correct, then the intuition supporting it must also be correct.

9. I will also try to explain what a correct moral intuition is ontologically.

Between here and the heading “4. what do right and wrong actually consist of . . .,” I have sometimes paused to explain, in red, the significance that the immediately-preceding text has for the above 1–9 sequence. Thus by reading only the above points 1–9 and the below red sentences A through J, a reader will get a clear outline of the argument in this portion of the article.

Whatever one’s views of what occurs physiologically and neurologically, or one’s metaphysical views of what happens cosmologically (that is, whether we speculate about meditative experiences in the way that materialists do, as purely the functions of neurons, or in the way that spiritualists do, as a deepened apprehension of a non-material soul, or communion with a non-material higher power), those who have experienced the deep peace of meditation usually consider transcendent experience (or some final culmination thereof) to be the highest good possible for humans (“good” in the sense of “benefit” – the highest good being the most positive human experience).¹ And the experiences some people have of the highest good, which I offer as a standard for the determination of morality, are something empirical and measurable (at least theoretically measurable, perhaps through advanced brain imaging). Moreover, those people accept that some meditative technique or other is the best means of attaining such experience.

A step that follows from that is to ask what auxiliary behaviors can create the most conducive conditions for progress in meditation – what behaviors, what lifestyle choices, in terms of diet, hygiene, exercise – and in terms of morality? I think we can identify certain moral principles, adherence to which will best lead us to transcendent experience – that is, they will lead at least the individuals who practice them to transcendent experience. There can be broad agreement that if a moral principle leads a person to the highest good possible for any human being, sustained over a sufficient amount of that person’s life (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result), that moral principle can reasonably be defined as an objectively-correct moral principle, and there is such a thing as objective moral truth. The consensus will be even stronger if that moral principle not only leads its adherent to the highest good, but also leads to many attaining that highest good. (Further defense of this “broad agreement” idea later.)

A. So objectively-correct moral principles can exist, and if a principle that can lead toward transcendent experience for anyone (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result) does exist, it is an example of an objectively-correct moral principle.

(In thinking about transcendent experience as the highest good possible for humans, we should not make what atheist meditation teacher Sam Harris calls “one of two mistakes”: “Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky.”²)

I wrote, “The consensus will be even stronger if that moral principle . . . leads to many attaining that highest good.” The personal good of some individuals cannot be the absolute highest good, objectively the highest good of all, so though a moral principle that leads toward transcendent experience for any individual is an example of an objectively-correct moral principle, its correctness is not as strongly established as a principle which, if any individual adheres to it, will lead toward transcendent experience for many. However, it turns out that attaining that highest good of transcendent experience for oneself positions one to help others also attain that highest good, and in most cases if not all, those who have attained it will go on to help others attain it (and to some extent will automatically help others simply by their example of having attained it using particular methods). Thus if adherence by an individual to a certain moral principle will lead that individual to transcendent experience (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result), that will be an example not only of an objectively-correct moral principle, but of one of those objectively-correct moral principles whose correctness is most strongly established.

B. Those who have attained transcendent experience will likely go on to help others attain it, so if a principle that can lead toward transcendent experience for anyone (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result) does exist, it will be an example not only of an objectively-correct moral principle, but of one of those objectively-correct moral principles whose correctness is most strongly established.

Let’s ask a number of related questions together that will help us get a full picture of objectively-correct moral principles and how they are identified and established:

a. can we identify objectively-correct moral principles in advance (that is, other than by trying them out) – and also apart from identifying them through reasoning – and if so, how?

b. how can one explain the efficacy of those particular objectively-correct principles that lead to transcendent experience – how do they do that?

c. if they are identified in advance by correct moral intuitions, how did those intuitions originate, how to explain their existence?

d. what do right and wrong, the presumed freight carried by those principles, actually consist of – what are they metaphysically or ontologically?

My answers to questions a.-c. will be so intertwined that I will take those questions together.

a. Can we identify objectively-correct moral principles in advance (that is, other than by trying them out) – and also apart from identifying them through reasoning – and if so, how?

b. How can one explain the efficacy of those particular objectively-correct principles that lead toward transcendent experience – how do they do that?

c. If they are identified in advance by correct moral intuitions, how did those intuitions originate, how to explain their existence?

Suppose our moral intuitions support a moral principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself.” (The value of X need not be decided right now.) Since our intuitions exhort us in that way, we will have to follow that principle to get peace of mind, and more importantly, that principle will force us to experiment with selfless actions. We may initially follow that principle only to get peace from our nagging consciences, but then following the principle will become an experiment in which we learn about the further peace that comes from forgetting to worry about ourselves. That lesson will reinforce our intuitions about the principle, but not only that – that newfound calming of the choppy waters on the surfaces of our minds results in our seeing deeper into that “lake” than we had been able to before. As we lose identification with our normal mental ongoings and the “choppiness” they cause, that detachment enables us to see those thoughts, emotions, and perceptions (including our sense of self) as objects that are not really what we are. And then automatically we will want to lose even further our identification with those objects, and we will begin to learn to orient our minds, point our attention, in ways that will further that project – even if we have no meditation teacher. That is, through following that altruistic principle, experimenting with putting others first, we will learn that we can escape from our evolution-given sense of self, and will begin to understand the rewards of doing so. Adherence to that moral principle is one of the auxiliary behaviors that will create the most conducive conditions for progress in meditation.

It is well-known that worrying about oneself makes one unhappy, while self-forgetfulness constitutes a liberation from those worries. As the abstract of a 2008 psychology study said,

. . . we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater happiness both cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey study) and longitudinally (in a field study of windfall spending). Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves.³

We so often hear, correctly, that the main recipe for happiness in life is to lose oneself in a greater cause.

So self-sacrifice leads toward transcendent experience.

C. Behavior that will follow from the intuition “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” will lead toward transcendent experience, and thus the moral principle is an objectively-correct moral principle, and one of those objectively-correct moral principles whose correctness is most strongly established – according to reasoning. According to reasoning, objectively-correct moral principles do exist.

We have just found, through reasoning, an example of an objectively-correct moral principle. Another way, apart from such reasoning, to know whether any such moral principles do exist (and thus that an objective morality exists) is to identify one or more of them by trying to live such principles and observing the results. But it would be better if we can identify such principles in advance of trying them out. And if we can in any way identify such a principle, that principle will be priceless for us because it will help us attain transcendent experience. So is there any way that we can identify objectively-correct moral principles other than by trying them out – and also apart from identifying them through reasoning?

Moral Intuitions: I subscribe to an intuitionist view on moral issues, and think not only that moral intuitions are a way that we can identify objectively-correct moral principles in advance, but also that ultimately, correct moral principles of any kind (not only leading to transcendent experience) can be known only through correct moral intuitions (at the link, see especially Appendix B). The example we have given of a moral intuition is the feeling supporting the principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself”. “Right” and “wrong” are feelings, and reasoning, rational argumentation, is not a vehicle that can carry feeling. A moral intuition, correct or incorrect, is a pre-logical and pre-verbal sense of right or wrong that comes out of our unconscious, as a form of qualia, in some way we cannot understand. When we experience a feeling supporting a principle such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself,” we certainly can’t fully understand the origin introspectively, and the world can’t yet understand it neurologically. Our unconsciouses were likely influenced by the rational arguments we have heard, but ultimately we don’t know what shaped or influenced our unconsciouses. “Yes, through moral intuitions” is the answer to a. above.

D. Objectively-correct moral principles do in fact exist if we can identify some of them, and we would be able to come close to identifying some as meeting the reasoned criteria that I have given, but as I have now explained, ultimately we would be able to identify them only through correct moral intuitions.

Now regarding the origins of correct moral intuitions , I think that their seeds are inborn. Psychology researcher Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, said in an interview⁴ that while some moral ideals “are the product of culture and society” and “not in the genes,” “there also exist hardwired moral universals – moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality . . . that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.” Even if Bloom overestimates the role of the genes in the “hardwired” moral senses, and underestimates the role of culture in those moral senses, and overestimates how universal those moral senses are across cultures, it would be safe to say that most of us do have senses of right or wrong that come out of our unconsciouses in ways we cannot understand. Those senses are also sometimes called moral intuitions, or simply a conscience. And as Bloom shows, the principles identified by those moral intuitions are often altruistic in nature. And we have already seen that behavior proceeding from an altruistic intuition such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” will lead toward transcendent experience.

E. There are good scientific reasons to think that the seeds of moral intuitions (including any that support objectively-correct principles) are inborn and include some that support altruistic moral principles. And we have already seen that behavior proceeding from an altruistic intuition such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” will lead toward transcendent experience, the highest good.

The most obvious explanation for any universally-inborn moral intuitions of any kind would be Neo-Darwinian: that such intuitions are, or at one time were, of value in humans’ survival, or more specifically are or were of value in certain individuals’ propagating their genes (propagating all their genes, not only those behind all kinds of intuitions). Evolutionary success alone might not mean the success of any persons other than one’s own descendants, but in fact as we have seen, our inborn intuitions often identify principles that are altruistic in nature. Yet Bloom only seems to argue for altruistic principles or any principles that might promote the mere survival of others, and does not discuss the possibility of principles aimed at what I have called “the highest good possible for humans”, transcendent experience. I think our inborn moral intuitions of all kinds are indeed of value in humans’ survival, and it seems that some of them support principles that are altruistic in nature, but are there any intuitions that are also of value in the maximization of transcendent experience? Inborn intuitions programmed in us by some Neo-Darwinist process might largely answer the questions “how can we identify in advance principles that will lead us to live longer, more fertile lives” and “how did those intuitions originate,” but what about the questions “how can we identify in advance principles that will lead us to transcendent experience” and “how did those intuitions originate?”

We have seen how self-sacrifice teaches us new things about our minds that lead toward transcendent experience. And it’s reasonable to think transcendent experience, even if humans first only stumbled across it, is evolutionarily adaptive (in terms of natural selection operating at the group level, which we will get to), primarily because it serves as a reward for altruistic behavior, whose value Darwin defended (and perhaps secondarily because of the presence of beatific individuals in the society, offering moral guidance oriented toward altruism).

Researcher Bloom opens his book with:

a writer living in Dallas heard that an acquaintance of hers was suffering from kidney disease. . . . Virginia Postrel . . . flew to Washington, D.C., and had her right kidney transplanted into Sally’s body. . . Virginia and Sally were not even close friends. . . . while I admit that I retain both of my kidneys, I have sacrificed to help others and taken risks for causes that I felt were right. In all of these regards, I am perfectly typical.⁵ [I quote this for the sake of the examples it provides of altruistic moral intuitions that we do have, not necessarily of those we should have.]

But were those moral intuitions inborn? In Bloom’s experiments, three-month-old babies, for instance (too young, he suggests, to have learned the attitudes from their parents), show a preference for a cartoon character who is serviceful (and automatically to an extent sacrificing) over one who hinders.⁶ For myself, I have had such intuitions for as long as I can remember, coming out of my unconscious in some way I could not understand – even if I have often not been good at listening to them. There is a very good basis for believing that many or all of us are born already with the seeds, for instance, of “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself.”

So we are likely indeed to have intuitions and genes for self-sacrifice that will lead us to seek and eventually find transcendent experience, which is the highest good, the grounding for an objectively-correct moral principle.

I am trying to show not only that the intuition supporting “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” would be a correct moral intuition if anyone had it, but that it is a correct moral intuition that is actually to be found within each of us, or at least most of us. (I think it is to be found in seed form within everyone who has the altruistic intuitions that Bloom speaks of). Above I have spoken of the “seeds” of correct moral intuitions, and Bloom in his book says that his experiments “suggest that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior” (italics added). Below we will refer to Jonathan Haidt; Haidt speaks of “moral foundations”, and, quoting Gary Marcus (The Birth of the Mind), uses also the term “first draft”. There is very good reason to believe that some general moral senses – generalized moral intuitions – are inborn in us. But “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” is more specific as a moral principle. I have said “ultimately, correct moral principles . . . can be known only through correct moral intuitions,” and though there may be very good reason to believe that some generalized moral intuitions are inborn in us, I have not yet shown that there is good reason to believe in the specific moral intuition supporting that principle. Yet I think there is good reason to believe in it.

In fact, I am not arguing that that specific moral intuition is within each of us fully formed from the start, but I think that it is present as a seed that is sure to sprout given the inborn foundation, the general intuition, supporting altruism, and given that a person will eventually understand that “You ought to serve others . . .” will lead toward transcendent experience for many in society.

Haidt quotes Marcus as saying, “Nature provides a ‘first draft’, which experience then revises.” Since people’s experience is different, their later drafts are different. But I think that given that common general foundation, then if any two persons were both free from what I will below call “psychological weaknesses” and had the same information about the world, they would both find within themselves that specific intuition. So everyone would be able to find it if they were able to go deep enough in themselves, and had enough information about the world. (See below under ii. where I discuss the role of psychological weaknesses, and also see ii-D. where I say “their moral intuitions will increasingly converge.”)

F. So since scientific research indicates that inborn in us are seeds of correct intuitions – correct intuitions identify in the best way, better than reasoning, moral principles that lead one to the highest good – and since such seeds will sprout when we free ourselves from psychological weaknesses, we have established that there are in fact such principles. Such principles are objectively-correct moral principles. Objectively-correct moral principles do in fact exist.

A few objections or questions might arise.

First, if some of our inborn intuitions are as I have described, then they will indeed “identify in advance” principles that will lead us to transcendent experience. But why, in the first place, would our evolutionarily-constructed inborn moral intuitions tell us to adopt behaviors (such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself”) that would seem actually to jeopardize our survival? Such behaviors on the part of individuals might indeed jeopardize the survival of those individuals, but natural selection might more importantly be operating here at the group level. Yaw (Mike) Amanpene has written:⁷

Darwin’s reasoning for the existence of altruistic behaviour could be conceptualised as follows. Given two groups, one comprised of selfish individuals and the other consisting of altruists, the latter would prosper better than the former – that is, they would be favoured by natural selection operating at the group level. This view is intellectually captured by Darwin (1981, 166) as follows:

“There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”

Reminder: “selected” means that tribes which accidental mutation had endowed with few if any such people were more likely to die off (if they survived, it was because they had other good genes).

G. But the question will arise why our evolutionarily-constructed inborn moral intuitions would tell us to adopt behaviors that would seem actually to jeopardize our survival. The idea of natural selection operating at the group level answers this question.

Another question: I have said “it’s reasonable to think transcendent experience . . . is evolutionarily adaptive” (helping to establish that moral intuitions leading to it are inborn). As mentioned earlier, most people who have attained transcendent experience will go on to help others attain it. And they will do so partly by teaching them altruistic moral principles that Darwin considered adaptive. But even if transcendent experience in a sufficient number of members of a group were not evolutionarily adaptive, our inborn intuitions might support moral principles that would be conducive to transcendent experience, due to an evolutionary mistake (not the same as the possible evolutionary accident I have also referred to): One might expect prima facie from basic natural-selection theory that an evolutionarily-programmed moral intuition goading one toward choices to act “for the common good” would goad one to act for the common good defined as the common survival, and the general fitness of people’s reproductive systems. But it seems clear that in terms of one’s individual survival and health, natural selection has provided us a steering mechanism designed for the attainment of those goals, and that steering mechanism is happiness. Overall it seems to be true that what tastes good will also be healthful for us (though there may be some serious pitfalls in relying on this). One eats a bunch of grapes thinking not “I must do this in order to survive,” but thinking rather “I’m sure getting a lot of fun from the taste of these grapes.” In short, the steering mechanism consists in assigning happiness as a “placeholder” for survival, a placeholder for “evolutionarily successful”.

So it seems quite likely that our innate moral intuitions goading us toward choices to act for the common good would interpret the maximum happiness, overall, of the tribe as the common good of the tribe – maybe even in situations where it did not represent the common survival good of the tribe. And “those who have experienced the deep peace of meditation usually consider transcendent experience (or some final culmination thereof) to be the highest good possible for humans,” the most positive human experience, the greatest happiness. So our innate moral intuitions would interpret the maximum transcendent experience of the tribe as the common good of the tribe.

H. Even if transcendent experience in a sufficient number of members of a group were not evolutionarily adaptive, our inborn intuitions might support moral principles that would be conducive to transcendent experience, due to happiness functioning as a “placeholder” for survival.

A third question: We may have shown that some moral intuitions lead toward the highest good for humans, but is that enough to show that such moral intuitions are necessarily philosophically correct? I claimed to have shown that they are through the reasoning “there can be broad agreement that if a moral principle leads to the highest good overall for living beings, that moral principle is indeed an objectively-correct moral principle, and there is such a thing as objective moral truth, and I added “Further defense of this ‘broad agreement’ idea later.” I will now first present that defense, which is also of a reasoned kind, and then get back to the topic of the limitations of reasoning.

There is and can be no scientific proof that happiness is morally better than misery. Though everyone may value their own happiness, at least, over their own misery, values are not a subject of science. So on what would a philosophical claim that happiness is morally better than misery rest? What we can say is that there is no one who subscribes to a philosophical school of skepticism or nihilism who manages to really live their beliefs. A nihilist is forced by his own beliefs to say there is nothing really good about being a nihilist, but he obviously thinks that it is good. No one can prove that a society abounding in transcendent experiences is morally better than a society of unending misery, but if we have to assume anything, we can assume that. So however our intuitions came to assert that maximizing happiness is good, which may have been due to the evolutionary “placeholder” mistake that I have posited, I think we should consider those intuitions correct.

Should the idea that intuitions promoting the maximization of transcendent experiences in society are correct intuitions be categorized as utilitarianism? I don’t think so. Utilitarianism may trip up because happiness of a kind, even a happiness widespread in society, can come about in very dubious ways, but transcendent experience is a kind of happiness that does not depend on any thing or event that is of the external world, and hence could not be attained by seeking anything in the external world

So if our unconsciouses, as constructed by evolution, consider happiness a good value and generate moral intuitions accordingly that support moral principles that lead to happiness and transcendent experience, I think it would be a cerebral academic exercise to debate with them. There is indeed an objective morality, and the compass as to that morality that we are all born with – our moral intuitions, a sense of right and wrong, a conscience – is correct.

I. Our early proposition “If a moral principle leads to the highest good overall for living beings, that moral principle is indeed an objectively-correct moral principle, and there is such a thing as objective moral truth,” until now supported only by the “broad agreement” idea, stands up to further philosophical examination.

And now let’s get back to the topic of the limitations of such philosophical examination, of reasoning, in answering the question whether I have adequately shown through reasoning that moral intuitions are necessarily philosophically correct if they lead toward the highest good for humans. I think that everyone is, most fundamentally, correct to follow their intuitions to seek happiness, but a kind of happiness can result for different people in very diverse ways. So though we have found there to be an objective morality, there is rampant imperfection in the actual expression of it when it comes to the many specific moral decisions we have to make, and there are dramatic disagreements among people about some principles that I would call objectively-correct. How to explain this? Let’s think about three factors.

i. We are still largely animals. Evolution hasn’t overcome the animal tendency toward selfishness. We have only begun to develop self-sacrifice.
ii. I have been referring to correct moral intuitions, our moral compass. But humans are certainly not endowed with correct moral intuitions only – many humans have incorrect ones. To get at our real compass for moral principles leading to transcendent experience, or even just to get at our most correct intuitions for the success of the species, we may have to peel away layers of ego protection in the forms of various psychological weaknesses – tribalism, projection, neurotic emotional needs, denial – in order for our consciences to emerge. Only those who are free from such weaknesses can have the really high level of moral sensitivity inherent in a really healthy mind, that we need to apply to any situation in life that may arise . (Ideally, our moral intuitions should operate and guide our decisions unique-situation-by-unique-situation.) We realize, not surprisingly, that peeling away those layers and moving toward transcendent experience go hand in hand. And in fact it will be impossible to fully abandon those mental mechanisms, which keep our cherished egos intact, until we start to taste the transcendent experiences that are the rewards for that abandonment – so that our own physical security, worldly pleasures, and self-congratulation come to seem cheap by comparison.

But this is the tough part. It may be that transcendent experiences can be explained entirely by certain patterns of synaptic firing in the physical matter of our brains, but nonetheless, such experiences are notoriously hard to come by because they require an escape from ego, an escape most reliably brought on by “a lifetime’s death in love, ardor and selflessness and self-surrender.” Meditation is the first part of the solution, but psychotherapy is often a more direct way than meditation to correct the downstream effects of childhood traumas, which both damage us psychologically and distort our perceptions of practically everything – right and wrong being not least among those things.

The developmental framework I have used here is the framework used by depth therapy, that is, a kind of psychodynamic therapy that tries to help the person reconnect with and thus get substantially free from childhood traumas. But though I have described this issue using this framework, I will not weigh in here on whether some form of depth therapy, or some other psychodynamic strategy, or some directive strategy, might work best for most individuals.

We can summarize as follows a path to find within ourselves, and to live out, the most correct moral intuitions:

ii-A. Correct moral principles are the principles supported by correct moral intuitions.
ii-B. The most correct moral intuitions are the moral intuitions of the most morally-developed people. Only a moral person can deeply understand morality.
ii-C. Anyone can develop morally through a determination to do so and a willingness to change, and constant thinking and discussion about morality, and a selfless lifestyle, and meditation, and psychotherapy. If there are no confounding factors, one’s moral development will proceed hand in hand with progress toward the deepest transcendent experiences.
ii-D. Morally-developed people will tend to recognize each other, and their moral intuitions will increasingly converge as they develop.
ii-E. Morally-developed people will not be reliably able to convince others through any rational process. The only way to the surest kind of knowledge of moral truth is as in ii-C above. Knowledge of moral truth does not require philosophical dexterity so much as it requires character.

My proposal has some strong similarities with virtue ethics, but also some dissimilarities. I won’t elaborate on this here.

iii. Evolution hasn’t always brought about specific, well-defined moral intuitions, therefore much depends on upbringing. According to moral psychology researcher Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, we are all born in innate agreement with six moral judgments which he calls, because of their lack of specificity, “moral foundations”. Two examples are, in my words, “Care is good and harm is bad,” and “Fairness is good and cheating is bad.” (Note that those two principles may sometimes work against each other.) So at bottom, the foundations, as I understand them, are a source of agreement of opinion among people, rather than a source of disagreement. But then what happens, Haidt says (as at 7:51 of this TED talk⁸), is that the first, inborn – and unifying, not dividing – “draft” of any child’s moral foundations gets “revised” by parental and community influences that differ from other parental and community influences into a new “draft” that will differ from those of other people – resulting in disagreement, division, and discord.

J. Having looked at the fact “there are dramatic disagreements among people about some principles that I would call objective” and shown that it does not undermine our argument, we can take stock as follows –

Questions a.-c. have now been answered (how to identify objectively-correct moral principles, how to explain the principles’ efficacy, and how do the moral intuitions supporting them originate), and we are ready to get back to our original conditional proposition (“if a moral principle leads a person to the highest good possible . . . that moral principle can reasonably be defined as an objectively-correct moral principle . . .”) and conclude that there are indeed moral principles that lead to the highest good overall for living beings, and that therefore those moral principles are objectively-correct moral principles, and that there is such a thing as objective moral truth:

If I am correct that attainment of transcendent experience is the highest good; and correct that a moral principle that leads to that attainment by many in society is an objectively-correct moral principle; and correct that “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” leads to that attainment; then that principle is an objectively-correct moral principle – according to reasoning – and by definition an intuition supporting that principle would be an objectively-correct moral intuition, also according to reasoning. If I am correct about the foregoing and correct that an objectively-correct moral principle is not fully established by reasoning, but only if it is supported by a correct moral intuition; and correct that scientific research shows that the seeds of beliefs supporting principles similar to “You ought to serve others . . .” are inborn in us; and correct that a seed that is inborn in us will “sprout” into the specific intuition once we have enough information about the world and free ourselves from psychological weaknesses; and correct that the correctness of an intuition is established, to the extent reasoning can establish it, if we have successfully established the correctness of the principle that it supports (and if we have in fact established, in the previous sentence, such correctness for the principle “You ought to serve others . . .”); then the “You ought to serve others . . .” intuition is an objectively-correct moral intuition that exists not only in theory, but in reality. But if I am correct that the correctness of a moral intuition cannot be fully established through reasoning nor through intuition about the intuition, then it cannot ultimately be established in any cognitive way. We can, however seek to eliminate, through meditation, and a selfless lifestyle, and a willingness to change, and sometimes psychotherapy, all the mental weaknesses that would cloud our intuitions, and thus find unclouded intuitions. It stands to reason that they will be correct intuitions. If according to this reasoning, added to the reasoning in 1. above, the moral principle “You ought to serve others . . .” is correct, then the intuition supporting it must also be correct.

I think that the moral intuitions of those who make the effort to acquire enough information about the world and to free themselves from psychological weaknesses will increasingly converge, and that such people will recognize each other, regardless of their ability to convince others about the correctness of their intuitions.

A thought that is related but not necessary in order to arrive at the above conclusion:

“One model that would be plausible for the atheist or agnostic would be the idea that meditation is made possible by an accident in the shaping of the brain by evolution.” The idea would be that evolution favored the survival and success of humans who had a strong sense of self. Such a sense, though the self is illusory in terms of corresponding to any actual unitary brain function, would have an obvious survival value; and yet mystics have long understood that that sense of self is simultaneously the source of all our suffering. The theory would be that evolution accidentally left a door through which a human being, by directing his attention in a certain way, can escape from that sense of self for more or less prolonged periods – or maybe natural selection favored those in whom that door had been left open? It is undeniable that we can point our attention in ways that cause us to lose our identification with our mental objects, especially our sense of self.

d. What do right and wrong actually consist of – what are they metaphysically or ontologically?

I wrote above, “by following the principles we learn about the further peace that comes from forgetting to worry about ourselves.” I think it’s an empirical fact that selfishness is both the root of all wrong, and the root of all mental confinement and impoverishment – two aspects of the same thing.

I would argue that all human actions fall within a binary framework: some actions help us escape from the sense of self, some increase the sense of self. We all continually long for happiness. We all have a sense that there is a perfect and enduring and fulfilling happiness that is just out of reach, that just eludes our grasp. When our inborn moral intuitions or some other factor cause us to experiment with self-sacrificing actions (as discussed under b. above), we learn that such actions nudge us toward the attainment of that happiness. This creates in us a desire to escape from the sense of self, while at the same time most of the instincts from our animal pasts tell us to look out for number one, thus increasing the sense of self. I think that that binary is a fundamental dynamic of our minds. So there is in us this constant tension or tug-of-war. And within that binary, our moral intuitions, our moral compass, as discussed under b. above, tells us that the selfless actions are also morally right actions. Escaping from the self correlates with good, moral actions. Falling within a tighter grip of the self correlates with selfish actions. Selfish actions are at best morally neutral actions that strengthen the ego and sustain our suffering, and at worst, when they are harmful to others or confining or degenerating to ourselves, are bad, immoral actions. Thus actions which help us escape from our egos are right actions, and those actions which strengthen our egos AND also harm others (or confine/degenerate oneself) are wrong actions.

The instincts that tell us to look out for number one, and the motivations for self-sacrificing actions, are both forms of qualia proceeding from our unconsciouses and presumably underlain by certain neural mechanisms, certain patterns of synaptic firing. Those neural mechanisms have not yet been identified, but they are in principle identifiable and measurable.

So right, I think, is a multiplicity of natural phenomena – all those phenomena that consist of mental objects, objects that 1) are forms of qualia underlain by certain neural mechanisms that are in principle identifiable and measurable; 2) are caused by the force of selflessness, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms, operating within human minds; 3) can be characterized as psychically liberating and enriching, and 4) can be recognized by one’s own conscience, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms, or by the consciences of others (to some extent) – or (as an abstract noun) the concept of all that.

The idea that there is such a thing as objective moral truth is a view of moral realism, and the idea that right and wrong are natural phenomena is a view of moral naturalism.

And wrong, I think, is a multiplicity of natural phenomena – all those phenomena that consist of mental objects, objects that 1) are forms of qualia underlain by certain neural mechanisms that are in principle identifiable and measurable; 2) are caused by the force of selfishness, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms, operating within human minds; 3) can be characterized as psychically confining and impoverishing, and 4) can be recognized by one’s own conscience, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms or by the consciences of others (to some extent) – or (as an abstract noun) the concept of all that.

Footnotes

[1] http://interfaithradio.org/Story_Details/Sam_Harris__The_Full_Interview 01:06: “Spirituality really relates to the far end, the far positive end, of the continuum of human experience, so the deepest states of well-being, personally or collectively, that we can experience. I think that the project of finding out what those are and how to access them can be called spirituality. So we’re talking about experiences like self-transcendence, unconditional love, etc. Bliss, rapture . . .”

[2] Sam Harris, Waking Up, first chapter.

[3] Science 21 March 2008: Vol. 319 no. 5870 pp. 1687-1688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150952. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5870/1687

[4] https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-roots-of-good-and-evil

[5] Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (Broadway Books, 2013), p. 1.

[6] Ibid., p. 26.

[7] Yaw (Mike) Amanpene, “Is Developmental Systems Theory a Better Way of Seeing Evolution Than the Selfish Gene View?”, https://www.academia.edu/40858025/Is_Developmental_Systems_Theory_a_better_way_of_seeing_evolution_than_the_selfish_gene_view/

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc&list=PLFeEchalQAKqi_TOmk_IS6_IuN8SWVAQm

The Cure for Headache

Posted on June 17, 2021 by Facilitator

Consistent Life Network has published a poem of mine.

Here’s a note for the poem:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/dallas-police-officers-video-bodycam-tony-timpa

Timpa’s death was classified by an autopsy as a homicide, his death caused by sudden cardiac death due to “the toxic effects of cocaine and the stress associated with physical restraint”.

The Cocktail That Defeats Bodily-Rights Arguments

Posted on September 19, 2018 by Facilitator

In September 2021, Human Defense Initiative kindly reprinted this article. However, the “I would not question” disanalogy below is a later addition that does not appear on their blog.

The most convincing bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights say that everyone should be legally permitted to refuse to let their internal organs be used, even if such refusal will result in the death of an innocent person. Such arguments analogize legal prevention of abortion with compelled organ donation/use among born people. I feel that such arguments cannot be defeated by pointing to any single disanalogy or by any other single argument, but feel that they are defeated by a “cocktail” of disanalogies/arguments. My moral intuitions say that the cumulative force of the following set of disanalogies/arguments does clearly defeat such bodily-rights arguments:

• 99% of unborn children result from a voluntary act by two people who know that a child thus created will be dependent on the mother’s body. By that voluntary act, the two people incur an obligation toward that dependent child. It may be that neither any similar act in and of itself, nor any circumstance in and of itself, would be sufficient for anyone to incur an obligation to let one’s internal organs be used by a needy born person, but such an act would at least contribute toward such an obligation; and thus the voluntary act that results in an unborn child adds its weight on top of all the arguments that, taken together, I feel, disallow abortion even if there was no voluntary act –

• See “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version”

• Abortion is active killing of a child that would likely otherwise have lived, whereas when someone passively refuses to let their body be used by a sick person, the person dies of their own disease. I feel there has been a tendency in recent years for pro-life groups to over-rely on this one disanalogy, but nevertheless, the disanalogy should be identified.

• A person whose organ is demanded had rarely benefited from an organ transplant prior to the demand on themselves, so in a requirement to give blood or bone marrow or a kidney, there would be a lack of reciprocity. But in a country where abortion is legally prevented, all women who might think about aborting had themselves benefited from the protection of those laws when they were small and had perhaps survived only because of those laws, so there is reciprocity. (The benefit that women had received when small is a fact that women should reasonably remember, also, but it is a fact whether they remember it or not. And by the way, it cannot be claimed that under pro-life laws anyone has any special rights. “Under pro-life laws, everyone before they are born will have the right to use someone else’s body without consent, and everyone once they are born will lose that right.”)

• While it is true that a woman who gives birth to a child who needs her blood or bone marrow or kidney (hers and only hers) in order to live is not legally obliged to give it to the child, such cases are very rare, and the woman never knows that that will occur. If she knew that (given conception and birth) that would always occur and if the sexual act was consensual, the situation would be different. [Edit: She then likely would be legally obliged to give a kidney. (If pro-life laws were in effect, the likelihood might actually be less, because then society would consider the fact that she had by that time already been legally obligated to carry the pregnancy to term, and that giving a kidney would be piling one obligation on top of another. But the point would still stand that if a born child’s need for a bodily donation were as inevitable as an embryo’s need for a uterus – if such situations were more like pregnancy – the parents’ legal obligations would be greater than they actually are.)] Even presently, I would support legally obliging parents to give bone marrow to their born children in some cases, and would support legally obliging even unrelated persons to give blood in many cases, perhaps on a lottery basis.

• The younger and more defenseless a person is, the more protection they deserve, and taking advantage of another person’s helplessness is particularly ignoble.

• If the government forcibly seizes someone’s body part, it is the government who will initiate the use of force/violence, whereas if the government applies force against an abortionist or pill vendor (or even a pregnant woman, though pro-lifers do not propose that) to prevent an abortion, it is the woman (or someone coercing her) who proposed to initiate the violence.

• I would not question that a person whose body contains two kidneys is the sole owner of those kidneys. But a uterus is unlike a kidney in that a uterus is housing, and housing is a human right. Human rights are something that society as a whole has an interest in protecting, so housing is something that society as a whole has an interest in providing. And a uterus is in fact the only housing that will be adequate for any member of human society at one particular stage in their development.

Finally, a counter-analogy:

• If we ask whether one conjoined twin should be able to force a surgical separation that would kill their twin – even though waiting 6-9 months would ensure the survival of both – nobody will say the one twin’s right to bodily autonomy supersedes the other’s right to life. (Thanks to @DrSteveJacobs for this particular articulation. This counter-analogy too is not free from disanalogy. Between woman and unborn there is an asymmetry not present between the twins. The woman is clearly the host of the unborn, and had an existence prior to the unborn, and hence, through the conception, has lost something that she had once had. But how much importance should our moral intuitions give to that disanalogy?)

Our moral intuitions come out of our unconsciouses in some way we cannot understand, so ultimately no one knows why they hold the moral intuitions that they do. But I think that the above disanalogies/arguments are probably the reasons that I feel that abortions should normally be illegal, while I do not feel that organ donation/use should be legally compulsory.

The contribution that I hope this article will make to the defeat of bodily-rights arguments is to provide a foundation that can endure. It should have the power to endure, because there is flexibility for the specifics that rest on the foundation. The specific points can be added to or subtracted from or improved, while the understanding of the necessity of a cocktail remains.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

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

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version

Featured

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Facilitator

Four years after writing the first version of what I would later call
“Bodily Rights and a Better Idea” (12,000 words), I have finally found a way to write a short and easy version:

1. The pursuit of happiness, whether it is earthly happiness or another kind of happiness, really explains everything that people intentionally do. I think that society grants rights based on the idea that an unfettered pursuit of happiness ought to be allowed unless there is some reason to fetter it. Society feels it ought to grant people the rights that people desire to have, unless those rights come in conflict with the rights that others desire to have, or unless they should seemingly be limited for some other reason.

Those “ought to’s” stem from society’s members’ moral intuitions and perhaps also from an implicit social contract. (In the case of bodily rights, which we will get to below, the moral intuitions stem in turn from empathy with people’s psychological sense of body ownership, since everyone shares that sense.)

2. Setting aside all the other variables that might arise, the strength of a right that society grants will vary according to the strength/intensity of people’s desire for that right.

3. People have a strong psychological sense of individual body ownership. There is no scientific or necessary philosophical reason to think that each of us own our own bodies, but we have that strong psychological sense. (Philosophically, it would be equally coherent to say that there should be collective ownership of the body parts of everyone in society. If ants had the skills for organ transplants, presumably an ant colony would operate with collective ownership. I am not recommending this, but I’m making the point that bodily rights stem from an inborn psychological sense.)

4. Because of that strong psychological sense in everyone, our moral
intuitions tell us that we (society) should grant strong bodily rights.

5. That psychological sense is not a fixture but an occurrence. It occurs particularly when our bodily ownership is challenged or when we imagine it being challenged. Moreover, there is no reason that it should be equally strong in the face of every type of challenge. As mentioned, the strength of a right that society grants will vary according to the strength/intensity of people’s desire for that right.

6. There are reasons to think (see section 7 of “Bodily Rights and a Better
Idea”) that an attempt to prevent abortion does not normally and on average elicit in pregnant women as strong a sense of bodily ownership (there is not as strong an occurrence of that sense) as an attempt to forcibly remove or use a body organ elicits in people in general. For instance, a woman might well feel at some level of consciousness that the unborn shares with her ownership of “their” uterus.

At least, we should not assume that a woman whose abortion it is proposed to thwart will necessarily feel an equally strong offense to her sense of body ownership as will a person whose kidney it is proposed to seize. It is an open question. If I am correct about how rights originate in society, then analogical right-to-refuse arguments do implicitly make that assumption, but the burden of proof is on them. Neuroscience may answer the question in the future. For now we have to research the question in less technological ways, and society has to use its intuitions.

7. If we (society) consciously recognized, which we have not as yet, that the strength of the psychological sense of bodily ownership varies from situation to situation, and if we confirmed that it is not as strong in pregnant women when prevention of abortion is proposed as in people in general when forcible removal or use of a body organ is proposed, our moral intuitions would not tell us to grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ. Again, the burden of proof is on those who use analogical right-to-refuse arguments.

8. Once the role of the psychological sense of body ownership in society’s granting of bodily rights is understood, we can find a better ethics recognizing that role than the present concept of bodily rights. We can find a better idea.

The most convincing bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights say that everyone should be legally permitted to refuse to let their internal organs be used, even if such refusal will result in the death of an innocent person. Such arguments analogize legal prevention of abortion with compelled organ donation/use among born people. I feel that such arguments cannot be defeated by pointing to any single disanalogy or by any other single argument, but feel that they are defeated by a “cocktail” of disanalogies/arguments. My moral intuitions say that the cumulative force of several disanalogies/arguments does clearly defeat such bodily-rights arguments, and that the above-mentioned possible lesser strength of the sense of bodily ownership in pregnant women may qualify as one of them.

Appendix, July 2022:

If identity arguments and bodily-rights arguments can be defeated (if in the case of bodily rights, they exist and count for something, but they don’t outweigh the right to life), then killing an unborn is sufficiently like killing a three-year-old to make it impermissible Strong bodily-rights arguments depend on kidney-type analogies, so if such analogies can be defeated, abortion becomes a human-rights violation. There is no one disanalogy (not the above, in 7., “our moral intuitions would not tell us to grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ” or any other single disanalogy) that can defeat the analogies, but a constellation or “cocktail” of disanalogies can defeat them. Even if “not . . . grant as strong bodily rights to a pregnant woman faced with prevention of abortion as to people in general faced with forcible removal or use of a body organ” fails, the rest of the cocktail is enough to defeat them. Please see the above link to a cocktail of disanalogies/arguments.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

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

Judith Jarvis Thomson on Responsibility

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Facilitator

Though I do not think that a responsibility argument is necessary in order to dismantle the bodily-rights argument or other pro-choice arguments, the responsibility incurred in the creation of a new human being is a very important consideration in pregnancies other than rape pregnancies. I would like to take issue with an attempt to deny much of that importance:

If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, “Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house – for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.” It would be still more absurd to say this if I had had bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because of a defect in the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective, and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not – despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t do – for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home without a (reliable!) army.

The first thing to notice is that if we read this paragraph by Judith Jarvis Thomson literally, she finds her burglar analogy and her people-seeds analogy to lead to two quite different conclusions about responsibility. Since burglars are unwanted, a homeowner does not have to accept the presence of a burglar who does enter, even if the homeowner has voluntarily left the window open; and therefore Thomson reasons that if an unborn child is unwanted, the mother does not have to accept its presence, even if she has voluntarily had sex. It would be “absurd” to say that she did. It would be “still more absurd” if she had taken careful precautions (in the analogy, putting bars on the windows), but absurd even if she hadn’t.

But in the people-seeds analogy, her conclusion of non-acceptance – “Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not . . .” – depends on very careful precautions. “. . . fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy . . .” is a condition for “Surely not.” (“Surely not,” of course, means “You are surely not responsible, so the unborn child has no right.”)

So in the event of carelessness about contraception – according to the people-seeds argument – the woman does incur some responsibility.

We might think that perhaps Thomson’s underlying thought was not what she literally said, and perhaps her people-seeds argument was intended merely to expand on what she had already said about the burglar – despite the use of two different metaphors – and hence would not change her “absurd” conclusion about the burglar.

We might think that, if not for her “recapitulation” near the end of her paper:

if [parents] have taken all reasonable precautions against having a child, they do not simply by virtue of their biological relationship to the child who comes into existence have a special responsibility for it.

(The sentence refers literally to a born child, but this is a recapitulation of what she had said earlier about the unborn. So both of the moral principles – the “do not,” and the “if” condition without which the “do not” would become a “do” – apply to an unborn child as well.)

Another Kind of Responsibility

At this point we should mention a kind of responsibility other than the kind incurred simply in the act of creation of a new human being. Thomson in her paper considers the possibility of a right not to be killed, and, as we have seen above, also addresses the possibility that responsibility for another human being can be incurred in some way through the process of that person’s creation. Does she also consider the possibility of a responsibility that might be incumbent simply because a helpless person not only has a right not to be killed, but also a right to be taken care of? Yes, she does consider that possibility, though she does not say “responsibility” – she speaks of “Minimally Decent Samaritan laws.”

An argument for strong laws of this kind is the “de facto guardian” argument. The authors of “De Facto Guardian” find, within themselves, moral intuitions to the effect that an adult “in a situation in which she is the only person in the vicinity who can help a child in need. . . . now shoulders the same obligations of a parent or guardian . . . temporarily.” My intuition agrees at least up to this point. (I have explored correct and incorrect moral intuitions elsewhere.)

The farthest Thomson, however, seems willing to go is when she says:

It would [meaning with legal weight] be indecent in the woman to request an abortion, and indecent in a doctor to perform it, if she is in her seventh month, and wants the abortion just to avoid the nuisance of postponing a trip abroad.

So the only thing further that needs to be said about this kind of responsibility is that Thomson’s moral intuitions don’t allow it to extend as far as do my intuitions and those of some others.

Thomson does, however, take for granted the legitimate interest of the state in protecting unborn persons – and hence the state’s duty to protect them – though she thinks that that interest and duty should not usually prevail, due to lack of responsibility (as she sees it) and other considerations.

Getting back now to the burglar and the people-seeds, and looking at each of those arguments literally, we can say that Thomson’s burglar argument depends for its validity on four elements all working:

1. we must agree with the moral intuition that a homeowner need not tolerate a burglar in their house, even if they left the window open (I think Thomson has laid an effective groundwork here by picking a moral intuition we can certainly agree with)

2. we must agree that in assessing a homeowner’s or a pregnant woman’s responsibility – responsibility in terms of freedom to evict or a lack of such freedom – it does not make any difference what is being evicted – a burglar or an unborn child

3. we must agree that a pregnant woman is no more responsible for a sperm having entered her body than a homeowner is for a burglar having entered his/her house

4. we must agree that (analogous to the reasonableness of leaving a window open) it would be unreasonable to expect abstinence from sex – she says in the people-seeds analogy, but it would apply to the burglar as well: “Someone may argue that you are responsible . . . that [the people-seed] does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors” (an argument she rejects).

So her burglar argument depends for its validity on these four elements working; and her people-seeds argument depends basically on the same four working, except that with the people-seeds argument Thomson concedes more in the first element. So that element becomes:

1. we must agree with the moral intuition that a homeowner need not tolerate a people-seed in his/her house, if the homeowner has taken very careful precautions against it

Though we will all agree with the burglar version of 1, I don’t think we should fully agree with the people-seeds version of 1. And in the cases of both the burglar argument and the people-seeds argument, I don’t think we should agree with 2 or 3. And I think there is a logical flaw in 4.

But before I get to the people-seeds version of 1, let’s see what is wrong with 2, 3 and 4 in the burglar argument.

The problem with 2, of course, is that there is in fact a difference between a burglar and an unborn child. Anyone capable of burgling a house, if ushered out, will survive. An undeveloped child will die, unless some arrangement for it has been made. Here I feel that the de facto guardian concept should come into play. Thomson will eventually go on to speak of a very minimal (indeed) Minimally Decent Samaritanism, but here, where she uses the word “responsibility” itself, she does not concede even that much.

However, Thomson does here do the surprising segue from the burglar to the people-seeds. People-seeds, if the homeowner cannot turn them over to someone else, are dependent on the homeowner, and on the homeowner alone, for their survival. Perhaps Thomson does this segue out of some consciousness of the fact that many of us would expect an adult to be a de facto guardian for a child. Perhaps she is trying to have the best of both worlds in the reader’s intuitions – both our intuitive antipathy towards burglars (which militates toward our rejecting the idea of any responsibility), and our intuitive recognition that (unlike with a burglar) there is good analogousness between the vulnerability of an unborn child and the vulnerability of a people-seed – and that a child deserves some Samaritanism.

Thomson’s conscious or unconscious sleight of hand in 3 revolves around this choice of words: “If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it . . .” This is misleading because the woman’s role in becoming pregnant is greater than just that of a homeowner who leaves a window open for a purpose other than that which eventuates. If we really want to compare a homeowner’s behavior in opening a window “in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars” with a woman’s behavior in full knowledge of how babies are made, the nearest analogy would be to say:

“A homeowner who leaves their door unlocked and is burgled is like a woman who falls asleep in an unlocked room and is impregnated in her sleep.”

The homeowner in Thomson’s story opened the window for air, not to let the burglar in; therefore that homeowner is like a woman who has not consciously consented to sex. The homeowner is not like a woman who has consented, though Thomson tries to suggest that the homeowner is. So only the above “falls asleep” analogy is a good analogy with burglary. In the “falls asleep” version, I would agree that the woman, in spite of having left her room unlocked, is not responsible. She has been raped. But Thomson’s analogy is not like that.

And what about element 4, “we must agree that (analogous to the reasonableness of leaving a window open) it would be unreasonable to expect abstinence from sex”?

Let us accept Thomson’s contention that one cannot live without sex. Still there is a flaw in her argument, and it can be demonstrated with another analogy: One cannot live without food, either, yet we expect to pay for food. Hardly anyone gets it without some quid pro quo.

For sex, the quid pro quo is that one accepts responsibility for the possible outcome of the slight risk that one runs.

But if we are to apply a legal-contractual analysis like this in what is really a psychological and moral context, the transactions involved would be more complicated than when someone buys a sandwich.

First, think of a slot machine from the point of view of the casino. If the casino’s luck is bad on the occasion of one particular wager, the casino will have to pay big. That obligatory big payoff was compensated for by the probability of receiving regular benefits (small wagers that it won). In a similar way, a woman (or a man) who obtains the benefit of sex will run a risk of incurring a moral responsibility to make a big payoff sooner or later.

But you may object that the payoff for sex is owed only to nature, the giver of the benefit, and that since it is not owed to any person, it is not really owed at all in the normal sense. You might say that sex should be free of cost, like enjoying the beauty of nature.

However, what if enjoying the beauty of nature free of cost sometimes involved killing somebody along the way? That would change the equation.

You have received benefits that would cause you to incur a debt. Then someone comes along who needs that payoff, who cannot live without that payoff. That new person comes along produced by a sex act that was, for you, one of a series of benefits.

A woman who voluntarily has sex is getting something of value to her, and that something is part of the goods obtainable from nature. So that something may seem to be at the expense of no human being, and usually it is at the expense of no human being. But nature includes the ingredients for a child (a scientific fact), and the woman’s actions can help bring the ingredients together and produce that child. In those cases she is getting something that is part of the goods obtainable from nature, but in those cases it is not true that it is at the expense of no human being – in those cases she is getting something of value to her that is part of the goods obtainable from nature AND is at the expense of that child if one results (the child will have the misfortune of coming into existence in a state of dependency on her body).

So someone has come along who cannot live without the big payoff, and I think that the moral intuitions of everyone who really considers that “someone” to be a person, will say that that someone, the unborn child, deserves that big payoff. The debt gets called in. But the moral intuitions of those, like Thomson, who only consider that someone to be a person for the sake of argument, may not say that.

Enjoying sex free of cost involves killing an unborn child if one happens to eventuate and if one feels it as a burden. But it is not always free of cost; sometimes a debt is incurred. And if that alone does not create enough responsibility to require the woman – in the cases of many pregnancies, not all – to refrain from killing, remember that she is also in the position of a de facto guardian.

The father of an unborn child owes a payoff equal to that of the mother. For him the payoff will necessarily take the form of supporting the mother financially and emotionally, and shouldering many of the chores. Elaboration of his role, and also discussion of his possible avoidance, is in order, but would fall outside the framework of Thomson’s analysis and thus of this answer to her.

“Social contract” thinking may tell us that it is socially functional for a person to pay for a sandwich. But such thinking cannot tell us that it is right or just for a person to pay for a sandwich. Only our moral intuitions can tell us that. The sex-woman-child obligations that I have described may not presently be recognized in legal-contractual thinking, but they may become recognized in the more sophisticated legal-contractual thinking of the future. For now, those obligations are, whether described in my words or in some other words, the moral intuition of many, many people. (Just as the rightness of paying for a sandwich rests, ultimately, only on the moral intuition of many, many people.)

A quite different kind of legal-contractual analysis might be applied if we remember that humanity is more than just the sum of its parts, that it is also a collectivity, and that we all depend on it as such. Everyone begins their life by using the body of one representative of that collectivity – they may even use a body that has already been used by other children three or four or n times and might have started feeling tired. So everyone should be prepared, if the necessity ever arises, to pay back to that same representative or another representative. How a pregnant woman can pay back is obvious. Others should be prepared to pay back in other ways.

Really these two kinds of legal-contractual analysis should both be applied simultaneously.

Finally, now, to the people-seeds version of 1, which I had said that we should not fully agree with. Here Thomson concedes that those who have not been careful about contraception should bear responsibility. This is good as far as it goes. But her contention that those who have been careful need not bear responsibility depends, as in the burglar argument, on the contention that sex is a necessity that should be cost-free; and that I have discussed above.

This has all been about responsibility. Regarding the obvious next question, whether abortion should automatically be legal even when there is no responsibility, I have written in an essay
“Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument.”

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

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

“Pro-Lifers Don’t Really Believe That Zygotes Are Persons”

Posted on May 14, 2016 by Facilitator

A New Yorker review, summarizing a key argument of Katha Pollitt’s 2014 Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, proclaimed that “No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person.” (Meaning that certainly the pro-lifers who say that it is don’t actually imagine that.) The 2015 Newsweek article “America’s Abortion Wars (and How to End Them)” came to the same conclusion. A 2007 article by a law professor focused on pro-lifers who make an exception for rape; the logic offered in the article leads to the conclusion that some such pro-lifers (though not all) “take the position that abortion kills an entity that is something less than a full person. The earlier in pregnancy an abortion occurs, the greater the appeal of this position for many.” Under a Huffington Post article, the commenter CourtDecisions once told me that according to his legal knowledge, “. . . the advocates of fetal personhood don’t really believe in fetal personhood.”

While there is another segment of pro-choicers who go to the opposite extreme and claim that pro-lifers are a religious cult who worship fetuses, the above voices represent probably the bigger and more serious group, and advance a sometimes thought-provoking case. They usually adduce two kinds of evidence for their claim (but occasionally a third kind):

1. They say that pro-lifers’ actual public-policy recommendations, and pro-lifers’ claims about personhood, are deeply inconsistent.

After “No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person,” the New Yorker review goes on:

If they did, they would actually equate murder and abortion, and their conduct – only the tiniest fringe is willing to advertise comparable penalties for both – shows that they know perfectly well that they aren’t the same. . . . One would have to oppose capital punishment. . . . One would find it difficult to support any war or military action at all.

Meanwhile, the law professor opens her reasoning with the observation that pro-lifers who would allow the abortion of an unborn child of rape, would not allow the infanticide of a born child of rape. She then proceeds to eliminate some of what might appear to be explanations for this distinction, and at the end we find that out of all the possibilities of explanation she has provided, the explanation in the case of some such pro-lifers must be the view that the unborn is less than a full person. CourtDecisions wrote that “even the advocates of fetal personhood believe that abortion should be legal for rape, incest and fetal abnormalities. Consequently, the advocates of fetal personhood don’t really believe in fetal personhood.”

(The New Yorker and the law professor then proceed to think up reasons why pro-lifers may actually oppose abortion: “religious dogma,” “misogyny,” “intercourse as a sin.”)

I would agree that pro-lifers who would allow abortion for incest or fetal abnormalities, unless they would also allow euthanasia or eugenic killing of born children, don’t really believe that the unborn are persons. But the argument against those pro-lifers fails against pro-lifers who do not support those exceptions, and the arguments about capital punishment and war also fail against a particular group of those who don’t: they fail against the group of pro-lifers who support a consistent life ethic.

The argument about a rape exception, however, seems more challenging, at first sight, for those pro-lifers who happen to advocate that exception, and the “comparable penalties” argument is challenging for most pro-lifers.

At this point let me mention that I am only personally acquainted with a small number of active pro-lifers and not with hundreds or thousands, and I would not be surprised if there are some pro-lifers who genuinely do not perceive zygotes as equivalent in moral value to born persons. And I would not be surprised if out of those who do not, there are a few who claim that they do. But that is not the point. I don’t think that moral truth is always determined democratically. What I will aim to do here is to represent the views of very thoughtful pro-lifers, as I understand them.

I think that most such pro-lifers do not want to give prison sentences to women who abort – if they would even award such sentences to all abortionists without exception – comparable to the sentences they would give in cases of homicide of a born person. Let’s look now at that “inconsistency” (as compared to cases of homicide of born persons) in awarding penalties. I think there are five factors at work, any one of which explains that “inconsistency” better than does the idea that pro-lifers secretly devalue the unborn:

First, I think that many pro-lifers, particularly those who have arrived at their own pro-life thinking only through a process of study and reflection over a period of years, can understand that the humanity of the unborn may not be immediately obvious to all; moreover, they give due credit to the efficacious campaign of dehumanization of the unborn that has gone on, in the US and some other cultures, for the last fifty years. Author and abortion-rights advocate Naomi Wolf admitted 20 years ago that “Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the fetus isn’t a person, and this, over the years has developed into a lexicon of dehumanization. . . . service staffers referred to the fetus . . . as ‘material’ (as in ‘the amount of material that had to be removed…’)” Unmentioned by Wolf, but perhaps still more effective in dehumanizing or simply erasing the unborn, were cunning bits of verbal engineering that assured women that only one “body,” theirs, was involved in any abortion. I think that often pro-lifers feel that many pregnant women simply do not know, or have been misled not to know, what it is that they are aborting. Pro-lifers do not demand harsh treatment for that reason. (This obviousness-of-humanity factor is also discussed, along with some possible factors that I will not touch on here, by Christopher Kaczor in his article “Equal Rights, Unequal Wrongs,” and was the subject of a Secular Pro-Life blog post some time back.)

Second, it may more often be hard to determine that an abortion was not medically necessary than to determine that the killing of a born person was not self-defense. Abortion cases may more often be foggy in an evidentiary way, resulting in a cautious approach toward the prosecution of all abortion cases in general.

Third, when a crime of any kind is very common, prosecuting all cases might overwhelm the courts. An alternative might be to make examples by prosecuting only the “big fish” – in this case the abortionists (and abortion-pill vendors).

Fourth: In order to outlaw abortion in any country or state of the world in the first place, a sizeable part of the political jurisdiction’s population will have to feel that abortion is wrong; and I think outlawing abortion will contribute further to the perception that it is wrong, just as outlawing slavery must have contributed to the unanimous perception we now have that slavery is wrong. But it may take time for a consensus to develop that stiff penalties are in order even for abortionists, or that penalties of any kind are warranted for the women involved. Though in many US states the general public would now be willing to prosecute abortionists, they won’t so quickly feel the wrongness to the extent that they will be willing to prosecute women – even apart from the extra complexities of abortion cases mentioned in my first and second points above.

Fifth and perhaps most importantly, pro-lifers, like anyone else, respect the mental sense of body ownership that underlies the concept of bodily rights. The importance accorded to that sense rests on a kind of intuition, and hence the importance varies somewhat from person to person, but I don’t think there is a night-and-day difference in that regard between pro-lifers as a group and pro-choicers as a group. To put it simply, pro-lifers as well as pro-choicers believe in “bodily rights.” So pro-lifers feel that as a moral starting point, or as a default moral principle, everyone has a right to refuse to let their body be used unless they give permission. Certainly one’s body cannot be used for just any purpose under the sun. Where pro-lifers differ from pro-choicers is that pro-lifers are likely to feel that a woman does not have that right when her body is the only hope for survival of a new human being – a situation that they feel confers some degree of responsibility on her – and when her pregnancy is not expected to be unusually rough or dangerous. And the responsibility is all the greater if she became pregnant through consensual sex.

But the belief in a default principle of bodily rights has two important consequences:

a. Many pro-lifers, given that default belief, may feel that a woman does retain the right to refuse the use of her body if serious health consequences are expected for her – even though her situation is not life-threatening. Most pro-lifers might say that even in such a situation she should not abort, but many would feel that she has the right to do so. So many may be ready to permit abortion for the sake of the woman’s health, even at the cost of the baby’s life.

Does this mean that they deem the unborn to be less human than the woman? Not at all. Remember that the default principle is simply: anyone has a right to refuse to let their body be used. That one can lose that right under any circumstances at all (such as a pregnancy that is expected to be relatively smooth) testifies to the fact that the unborn is considered fully human. But even though the unborn is fully human, the woman’s bodily rights mean that she retains a right to refuse to let her body undergo truly dire kinds of suffering.

b. It is similar regarding the prosecution of abortion cases as something less than murder. Abortion is less than murder not because the victim is not fully human, but because everyone has bodily rights such that in many circumstances, one would have a right to kill in order to defend their body. We could almost say that by default, one does have a right to kill to prevent the unconsented use of one’s body. I have written elsewhere, and others also have written elsewhere, on why there should be no such right in the case of a normal pregnancy, but the point here is that there almost is such a right. Abortion is not extremely far removed from such self-defense. For a woman, the offense of abortion, once abortion is illegal, will be the offense of not letting her default right to kill be offset by other considerations present in a pregnancy. That offense may not even be defined as a crime; and if it is so defined, it will not be murder. Even what the abortionist (or pill vendor) himself does may or may not be murder, because the abortionist can be seen as simply assisting the woman in an excessive assertion of her bodily rights.

According to the moral intuitions of many pro-lifers, in the case of pregnancy the value of a human life (the child’s) does override what would normally be the woman’s bodily rights, and therefore abortion should be illegal. But if a pregnant woman violates the law and claims what would normally be her bodily rights, it is, though a defiance of the law, something less than murder.

(And the more so if the pregnancy resulted from rape. The law professor I have quoted actually mooted bodily rights as a possible explanation for why a pro-lifer might make a rape exception in spite of considering the unborn as a person, but rejected that explanation – too hastily, I think.)

And if a woman is sorely tempted to ease the anxieties of her own brain with alcohol at a time when she happens to have a child inside her, that is not morally the same as plying her newborn with alcohol without any similar temptation – though the results for the child may be the same.

Few pro-lifers would say that the validity of the pro-life position is an open-and-shut case. I think most feel that it involves a balancing of different legitimate values, in which the balance does not fall overwhelmingly on the pro-life side, though it falls clearly enough.

2. They claim that thought experiments reveal that pro-lifers do not highly value the early unborn.

The Newsweek article, which contained numerous bad arguments, also contained this thought experiment:

A building is on fire. On one floor, five healthy babies are in cribs. On another, 10,000 embryos are in petri dishes, being grown for 10,000 women who want them implanted (new scientific advances guarantee that all the embryos will survive until birth). Because of the rapidly advancing flames, you have time to evacuate only one floor: Either five babies will die or 10,000 future humans will be destroyed. Which do you choose?

Hopefully, the answer is obvious – anyone who decides to rescue globs of cells over living, breathing babies is a monster. But this hypothetical exposes the absurdity of the claim that women who choose abortion are “murdering” babies or that a human being pops into existence at conception, even though a zygote or embryo is no more sentient than a sperm.

The author clearly does “hope” that the answer is obvious, but also clearly understands that there may be those to whom it might not be obvious, and thinks he’d better ensure the obviousness. He proceeds to pull out the stops with pejoratives for the poor embryos, and hyperbolic insults for the poor reader who might see things differently than he does. Should all that fail, at the end he reminds us of the old sentience argument.

One reason the author is right to brace himself for disagreement is that his thought experiment has stacked the deck: despite the concession that all the embryos would survive until birth, he has selected a means of death that will be painful to the born babies and not to the embryos; and we are likely to imagine that some adults have already bonded with the born babies, unlike with the embryos.

But what if we leveled the playing field, so that the born babies as well as the embryos would die in some painless way, and so that none of the sadness that we might feel in either case comes from any personal bonds that have become strong over time?

First let me say that for myself, I would then definitely save the embryos – and the number of them would not have to be 10,000. For me the ratio could be very close to 1:1. And I would not hesitate. But I should explain that I have been exposed to this thought experiment for some years now, and I have had time to think about it. Had I found myself in that situation without such mental preparation, some emotions and instinctively-programmed protective impulses would have operated one-sidedly on behalf of the born babies, and might have determined the outcome.

It seems that we are biologically programmed to see babies and small children as cute and to feel protective toward them, and to feel emotional when they are threatened. I would guess we are also biologically programmed to feel protective toward a woman who is obviously pregnant – to feel protective, that is, toward anyone who seems to need protection, but more so toward a pregnant woman. Maybe we do not automatically feel equally protective when a woman shows us the results of a very recent pregnancy test, but then how could we be programmed in such a way? Our biological programming took place on the savannahs of Africa at a time when we lacked pregnancy tests, microscopes, and ultrasounds. Such programming would require cues (such as the cuteness of a born baby or the obvious bump of a developed unborn baby), while for embryos and zygotes there simply would not in those days have been any cues. Moreover, nature may have seen less need for such programming than in the case of the born, because for the unborn, the mother’s body was present as the first line of defense – unlike for born babies whom the mother or father might not tend at every moment.

But as Javier Cuadros has written:

Science is a process of knowledge in which we penetrate ever deeper. . . . As the observations multiply . . . it is typical that the original appearances . . . are shown to be incorrect. The reality is different. . . . many scientists . . . are for applying the simple criterion of appearances. No, [embryos] are not men and women, they say, because they do not look like a person. Agreed, they do not look like a developed human being. But the earth looks like it is stationary . . .

The Newsweek author wrote that “anyone who decides to rescue [embryos] is a monster.” If he had written, before 1492, “anyone who decides to go east by sailing west is an idiot,” it would have struck a chord with the people of that time. But in a century of frequent flyers, not only does it seems to us truthful that we can do exactly that, it seems to us so in a way that is reflexive and completely natural.

Some of us pro-lifers have been thinking about embryos and embryology for a long time, and I suspect that the Newsweek author had not. Though it did not happen in my thinking overnight, to me a human life seems like one seamless process that has to start somewhere. I no longer feel surprised to think that it may have to start small. If we set aside the possibility of feeling pain or fear, and set aside the memories about a child that may have formed in the minds of others who have bonded with it, then from my perspective, anyone who can see a big difference between the death of a 4-year-old and the death of someone who will be a 4-year-old soon enough, simply hasn’t thought about it or otherwise lacks vision in the matter. (Or applies a cerebral kind of identity argument that I find weak but will set aside here.)

(With some effort, I can see how someone could develop the idea that if there has never been any sense of self, then nothing can be lost to any individual. But neuroscience tells us that the self is an illusion anyway. So what actually counts is a bundle of independent pains and pleasures, fears and hopes, that has an illusion of self seemingly tying it all together. What counts is whether such a bundle that would have existed is lost. Whether or not a particular illusion has occurred is not something that can count.)

Above I have responded to the two main arguments that I have seen for the claim “Pro-lifers don’t really believe . . .” But there is another argument as well that deserves to be looked at.

3. Some point out that pro-lifers are not doing all that they could do to save zygotes from natural death.

In a blog post called “No 5k for the biggest killer – so does anyone really believe it’s a killer?,” Fred Clark quotes from a book called Broken Words –

. . . between 50 percent and 75 percent of embryos fail to implant in the uterus. . . . Surely, a moral response to a pandemic of this magnitude would be to rally the scientific community to devote the vast majority of its efforts to better understanding why this happens and trying to stop it. Yet the same pro-life leaders who declare that every embryo is morally equivalent to a fully developed child have done nothing to advocate such research. … One could say that this massive loss of human life is natural, and therefore, humans are under no obligation to end it. But it is not clear why the same argument could not be used to justify complacency in the face of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and other natural causes of human death

– and then comments:

That suggests one of two things. Either these pro-life advocates are complacent monsters every bit as callously unconcerned with saving unborn babies as those they oppose. Or else, just like those they oppose, these folks do not really believe that “every embryo is morally equivalent to a fully developed child.” [Emphasis mine.]

I think that Clark has a point, and I think that consistent pro-lifers should be much more alarmed about those deaths than they presently are. But I think that again, bodily rights is at work, and the rest is a partially pardonable lack of awareness; and triage; and an understandable, if not completely pardonable, tendency to shrink from what could be a monumental sacrifice. I do not think that pro-lifers “do not really believe.”

Unlike with any kind of cure for AIDS, cancer, etc., saving those zygotes and embryos would require treating not the body of the victim, but the body of another person – the victim’s mother. When abortion is proposed, pro-lifers feel that the life of the embryo should normally override the bodily rights of the woman, and therefore that a justified infringement of her bodily rights is appropriate. But that infringement by society takes the form of preventing a pro-active act of violence on the part of the woman – it is not society pro-actively obliging a woman (a woman who plans no conscious and pro-active act) to ingest some (yet-to-be-developed) chemical or undergo some treatment that would trick her uterus into being more receptive to an embryo. Such an act by society would be a more intrusive infringement on her rights. And even before that infringement, society would have to pro-actively oblige her to submit to tests for the presence of an embryo whose presence would not otherwise be known – probably not even known to her.

I think that we should R&D some treatment that many women might wish to undergo voluntarily. But this lack, on society’s part, of a right to make sure, once the treatment is developed, that it would ever be used and would ever save lives, would be one reason that we do not passionately pursue its development.

I mentioned a “partially pardonable lack of awareness.” There must be many pro-lifers who do not know enough embryology to be aware of these deaths at all. But the pro-life leadership must certainly be aware, and does nothing to educate people. They must certainly be aware; but I feel it may all remain somewhat abstract even for thinking people, because the knowledge is purely statistical. When a sidewalk counselor sees a woman walking into an abortion clinic, that counselor sees a specific case of a life that (seemingly, at least) need not be lost; but we would not even know that the “between 50 percent and 75 percent figure” (assuming that is correct) is a reality, had not technologically-enabled investigations been made, followed by extrapolation from the findings.

“Triage”: I think that we should respond to those little one-celled or 800-celled sisters and brothers of ours exactly as we would respond to our born little sisters and brothers if they were under any threat. But we can expect most of those children whom we will save to be born sickly, and if a billion of our born little sisters and brothers each required the most costly, resource-intensive, and personnel-intensive kind of medical support during their lifetimes of whatever length, our moral obligation to save them by depriving everyone else would have some limit. The pro-choice argument about quality of life is not wrong; their mistake is to apply it discriminatorily, saying that it is particularly one group who must die to free up resources for others.

And finally, I mentioned “an understandable, if not completely pardonable, tendency to shrink from what could be a huge sacrifice” (a mild version of Clark’s “callously unconcerned”). Triage would only justify inaction about those deaths up to a certain point. I think that consistent pro-lifers should be ready to minimize their own expenditure and recreation to do something about those unborn children and everyone else in the world who is seriously suffering, and I don’t know if we’re all ready to do that yet.

I think that consistent pro-lifers should be much more alarmed about the natural deaths of zygotes than they presently are. But I think that if we look for the reasons they are not alarmed, a failure to “really believe” that they are persons is not among those reasons.

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea

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Posted on April 10, 2016 by Facilitator

A positive review of the original version of “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea”, written by LMJ Deputy Editor C.J. Williams, appeared in Life Matters Journal Volume 5 Issue 1 — April 2016

I hope that this essay has only become clearer since 2016. It was last updated 30 December 2023.

You might first want to read “Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version.”

See also the Ownership of the Body section of “The Body, the Uterus, and the Question of Ownership”

Robert McFall clearly needed some of David Shimp’s bone marrow more than Shimp needed it. When Shimp – McFall’s first cousin – refused to give it, McFall took him to court.

The judge’s gavel came down. He wasn’t enthralled with Shimp as a person, but every speck of the bone marrow in Shimp’s body was, in the eyes of society, private property – Shimp’s private property. McFall’s eyes closed on the world, for the last time, before his 40^th birthday.

A caring society views both such persons as equally valuable. Such a society has an interest in seeing both thrive and not come to harm. It would seem completely logical for society to have instructed Shimp to hand over some bone marrow, and if he did not do so peacefully, to have taken it forcibly. Why doesn’t society do that? Is society wrong not to do that?

Society sometimes grants to its citizens surprisingly strong body-related rights – body-related rights that are out of proportion to what a rational fairness would seem to demand. In a moral framework, our bodies have a certain mystique. I don’t think that that is necessarily wrong. People are psychologically constructed with a strong sense of ownership of their bodies. Ownership of any kind has no foundation in science, and a strong principle of individual body ownership would be very debatable philosophically, but the psychological sense is a reality. And due to sharing that sense, which is to say, due to belief in the validity of that sense – or due at least to a pragmatic recognition of the strength of that sense – society sometimes grants to its citizens surprising rights such as those of Shimp that we have just seen. A belief in the validity of that sense could also be termed a moral intuition (whether or not it is a correct moral intuition) that near-inviolable body ownership ought to be respected.

I cannot think of a more likely explanation than this for the origin of that particular moral intuition. And I basically support such rights, at least in this part of this century. Perhaps Shimp should have been sentenced to a lot of community service for refusing to help McFall. But I say that I basically support such rights because I do not think he should have been tied down and his bone marrow removed forcibly.

It is important that the laws and conventions of society should give that psychological sense of ownership, and the actual ownership that society tends to think underlies it, its due. But is the current concept of bodily rights the most logical and coherent way to accomplish that? The value of the current concept of bodily rights is one of the first things we will examine.

The bodily-rights argument for legal abortion is usually advanced through thought experiments that create analogies with pregnancy – analogies in which our sympathies will be on the side of a right to refuse to let one’s body be used. And those arguments are usually contested by showing the disanalogies between the situations of the thought experiments, and the situation of actual pregnancy. This essay hopes to reveal that one’s bodily rights may not be as strong in the first place when abortion is being prevented as they are when organ donation is being compelled (which is in itself a disanalogy), but the main effort here will be to analyze the concept of bodily rights. I think that the resultant demystification of bodily rights will cause “bodily rights” to lose its power as a mantra and retain only a more rational kind of power – power in situations where that power serves justice, but not in situations where it doesn’t – and that that in itself will weaken bodily-rights arguments for abortion rights.

SYNOPSIS

Negative and even positive rights of different kinds can all be conceptualized in this way: they are rights not to be caused harm of different kinds. So what kind of harm can bodily rights, usefully conceived, protect us against? In order for the term “bodily rights” to be useful, such rights should not redundantly protect us in ways already covered by older and more obvious ethical notions (such as the right not to be punched in the face).

I find in this essay that the term “bodily rights” is useful only if it is confined to rights that aim to protect us against a certain kind of mental harm – offense to our psychological sense of body ownership. That form of mental harm is a real harm (a real mental harm), and it is caused by the trespass per se.

(Rather than a “sense of body ownership”, the sense may often be a sense more of identification with the body, and we also have a sense of dignity or indignity associated with the treatment of our body by others. For convenience, I will use “psychological sense of body ownership” to mean any balance among these different senses that an individual may have at any moment. In any case, they are all psychological senses that are susceptible to being offended.)

Current concepts of bodily rights do reflect some awareness of the sense of body ownership and of offenses to that sense, and they do aim to protect us against the harm of those offenses, but they also aim, redundantly, to protect us in other ways. Moreover, logically the strength of the right that protects us from that mental harm should vary in proportion to the degree of that mental harm. People advocating on the basis of the current concept of bodily rights may not (though they sometimes do) claim that bodily rights are absolute, but they do claim, at least implicitly, that the right is less than absolute only in that the strength of the right varies with the degree of trespass on the body, that is, on how deep in the body the proposed use of the body is to be. (They suggest that society may possibly require a person to use their arms and legs in some way, but it may not require them to surrender bone marrow, or to lend their uterus.) However, we find that in reality, the degree of that mental harm (consisting of offense to one’s psychological sense of body ownership) varies only partially and unpredictably in relation to the degree of trespass, so that really the degree of the harm can be ascertained only situation by situation.

This raises the possibility that a proposed use of the body, even if deep within the body, may not involve a high degree of the mental harm, and therefore may not justify a strong right to protect against it.

In relation to the abortion debate, it raises the possibility that a proposed use of the uterus may not involve an extremely high degree of the mental harm, and therefore may not justify a strong right to protect against that use. In the essay I discuss that possibility at some length. Bodily-rights arguments against abortion restrictions show us that denial of abortion is a degree of trespass on one’s bodily boundaries similar to the degree of trespass involved in other situations (such as the forcible appropriation of a body part) which nearly everyone’s moral intuitions agree are wrong. Bone marrow or a kidney is located deep within the body, and the uterus is located deep within the body. The arguments thus try to persuade us that denial of abortion is also wrong. However, they overlook the unpredictability of the mental harm, mentioned above.

I do not think that establishing the correctness of the pro-life position depends entirely on the possibility I mentioned about the degree of mental harm involved in a proposed use of the uterus. That possibility is the possibility of a big disanalogy between use of bone marrow or a kidney, on the one hand, and use of a uterus for gestation, on the other hand, but even without that disanalogy, I think that a “cocktail” of other, often better-known, disanalogies defeats bodily-rights arguments.

The moral intuition that body ownership ought to be respected seems to stem, as mentioned earlier, from the wish to spare our fellow human beings the mental harm of offense to their strong psychological sense of body ownership (which sense is an undeniable reality). So to answer the question whether there should be a right to refuse the use of one’s uterus – a right comparable in strength to the right to refuse to donate one’s bone marrow – one question that we in society have to answer is whether the mental harm to a woman when abortion is denied is really comparable to the mental harm that would occur if one’s bone marrow or kidney were taken forcibly. Since I think I will show that real mental harm is somewhat independent of the degree of trespass of one’s bodily boundaries, it is not enough, as mentioned, to show that the uterus is deep within one’s body. Rather, the degree of real mental harm when abortion is denied could be approximately determined only by psychological study focusing on the psychological phenomenon of harm in that specific class of situation, not by possible biological similarities with other classes of situation (normally I will just say “situations” rather than “classes of situation”). In the present undeveloped state of psychology and neuroscience, we in society will have to rely a lot on our intuitions, which will be discussed. To understand it in this way is to liberate our minds by demystifying bodily rights, as we seek our most correct moral intuitions about abortion.

I hope that producing a better understanding of what bodily rights really consist of and don’t consist of will in itself help in a general way to convince readers that in invoking bodily rights we have to approach different social situations in different ways. But beyond that, I hope to show that in the specific situation of a typical proposed abortion, the possibility I mentioned, that the harm caused by offending the pregnant woman’s sense of body ownership may be less than the harm caused by offending the pregnant woman’s sense of body ownership in some other situations, is likely a reality. In this essay alone I will not prove that abortion should be illegal, but I think that I can at least help show that there is no strong bodily-rights argument against making many abortions illegal.

(The entire argument of my essay can be outlined in ten points – see below. The foregoing nine paragraphs can be broken down into points 1-8 of the outline.)

Moreover, if society holds and sustains a “right not to be unjustly harmed physically or mentally,” and the idea of “harm” incorporates an understanding of the psychology of ownership, including body ownership, that will serve all purposes, and society can dispense with the off-target and therefore sometimes misleading idea of bodily rights. (This sentence can be broken down into points 9 and 10, i.e., the last points, of my outline.)

I would like to proceed now according to the following outline:

1. Rights are only meaningful and useful in terms of protection against wrongs, that is, against unjust harm, so the concept of bodily rights – “bodily” and “rights” – can be meaningful and useful only in situations where there is a potential for unjust harm to be done that is defined solely by trespass of one’s bodily boundaries; and only if protection by more obvious ethical notions is lacking.

2. Harm can be only harm to the body or harm to the mind, or both.

3. In terms of a right to freedom from harm to the body, the concept of bodily rights doesn’t realistically add anything to older and more obvious ethical notions. So though the current concept of bodily rights aims to protect against both physical and mental harm caused by trespass of bodily boundaries, in relation to bodily harm, the concept is superfluous and therefore not particularly useful.

4. In terms of a right to freedom from mental harm, the concept of bodily rights could be meaningful as one possible way of framing that right. (Even if it is not the best way – see 10.) People have a sense of ownership of their bodies, such that trespass on their bodily boundaries can be a source of mental harm, and “bodily rights” would be one way to protect from that mental harm.

5. Because of the sense of body ownership (and the assumption that actual ownership underlies it), in a situation of opposing interests between two innocent people that involves one person needing to use the body of the other, society does not make a simple decision in favor of the person who is likely to suffer the greater total harm of obvious kinds – that is, of kinds other than offense to the sense of ownership. It counts that kind of mental harm as harm, which weights its decision in the direction of the person whose body stands to be used by the other. (The total harm that can possibly be caused to any person by any action consists of the physical harm, the tangible mental harm, and that or some other intangible mental harm.)

6. Society weights its decision in this way so strongly, that in many cases it decrees that a particular offense against one person’s sense of body ownership is not justified even if the other person will die.

7. Although the concept of bodily rights is often expressed as a very simple principle, and sometimes as an absolute principle, when people actually apply it to different real-life situations, we see a patchwork of different attitudes, each depending on the situation. This renders the concept vague and confusing as a yardstick in any situation that has not yet been resolved, such as a proposal to abort. It turns out that the degree of mental harm caused by offense to one’s sense of ownership, which society believes to be morally relevant, is inconsistently related to the degree of trespass on the body – the degree of trespass being morally irrelevant apart from harm. Since it is inconsistently related to the degree of trespass, the degree of the mental harm when abortion is denied could be approximately determined only by psychological study focusing on the psychological phenomenon of harm in that specific situation – not simply by knowing the degree of trespass.We could speak of the situational nature of the strength of bodily rights.

8. Some actions that trespass a person’s bodily boundaries without the person’s consent are countenanced or supported by society in general (meaning that society in general does not take very seriously any offense to the sense of ownership in such cases). In my personal view, still more such actions should be countenanced or supported.

9. What matters, in terms of the rights that society should choose to sustain in this area of law and ethics, is that those rights should reflect a recognition of the sense of body ownership and its nuances – and of the possibilities of mental harm based on that sense of ownership and its nuances.

10. If society holds and sustains a “right not to be unjustly harmed physically or mentally,” and the idea of “harm” incorporates an understanding of the psychology of ownership, including body ownership, that will serve all purposes in this area of law and ethics, and society can dispense with the idea of bodily rights.

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The Psychological Morass of the Abortion Issue

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Facilitator

This essay was first published, with illustrations, in Life Matters Journal Volume 4 Issue 3 — February 2016.

morass: 2. a complicated or confused situation

Think of all the array of views related to abortion that you have ever encountered. It’s a lot, isn’t it? And now let’s try to imagine all the array of those contradictory views related to abortion as they have inhabited all the minds of all people through all of history. That array must be staggering. How could such a plethora of mutually exclusive ideas have originated? I think it is largely explained by the psychological morass on moral issues in general, and this issue in particular, that the human race somehow goes on living with. What we are up against is more about psychology than it is about dispassionate philosophy. Recognizing and trying to escape this psychological morass can allow us to find the truth about the morality of abortion.

In making this assertion, I am assuming that there are indeed moral truths to be found about abortion and other moral questions. Certain answers to the question of whether abortion is right or wrong, just or unjust, can be identified as truer or better than others. Further, I would argue that the answers to moral questions—the moral truths—must ultimately be found through our intuition rather than through intricate arguments or philosophies (although these are certainly a useful part of the process).

Psychology professor Paul Bloom, author of the recent Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, has offered some justification for an intuitive basis of morality. In an interview, he commented that while some moral values “are the product of culture and society” and “not in the genes,” “there also exist hardwired moral universals – moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality . . . that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.”[i] With this kind of psychological understanding as a basis, I will make one further assumption to start with: that not only are there indeed moral truths to be found, but that identical truths are to be found deep within all of us. (I discussed this in “Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate.”[ii]) In a similar vein, the journalist Christopher Hitchens described his understanding of human moral intuition in his work God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

Like murder and theft, this [incest] is usually found to be abhorrent to humans without any further explanation. . . . [the Golden Rule is] a sober and rational precept, which one can teach to any child with its innate sense of fairness . . . . [The Rule] is gradually learned, as part of the painfully slow evolution of the species, and once grasped is never forgotten. Ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it. . . . [C]onscience is innate. . . . Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent. . . .[iii]

Despite this conscience, or intuitive moral sense, that humans possess, an array of psychological factors obstruct our intuitive grasp of moral truths. This is a vast topic, but in this article I have selected twelve psychological factors that might work against our finding moral truth on any issue, as well as three factors that are specific to the abortion issue. I think of this article as sketching the broad outlines of how psychological factors interfere with moral intuition. My aim is to provide a basic framework to be filled out by further research.

The psychological factors are as follows:

1. The mental longing for simplicity. No elaboration is needed here. (I can keep it simple!)

2. Upbringing. In the long-standing nature-nurture debate, I would take the following position: we are born with intuitions of certain moral truths already within us in latent form, but various actions or inactions by parents and teachers can undermine the development of those moral intuitions, or create an overlay of false values, or both. Even a casual look is enough to show us the importance, in the development of our attitudes, of background and upbringing.

3. Tribalism. Even someone who switches, for example, from pro-choice to pro-life or vice-versa may immediately start demonizing the side they had just been on.

4. Projection. We expect others to view some things and value some things just as we do.

5. Neurotic emotional needs. Such needs can affect one’s moral and political views in a number of ways. One way – certainly not the only way – is when the needs result in commitments, sometimes fanatic commitments, to groups or ideologies.

6. Denial. We see only what we want to see. Or sometimes we see something, but compartmentalize it away from the part of our mind that would reject it.

7. Lack of introspection. If it is true that intuitions of moral truths exist within us and that they began to form in us before we were capable of rational analysis, then it should be clear that to find them we must look within and that this search within will not be a process of thinking up new ideas, but of rummaging through what is already there. We may need to make such efforts frequently, and with patience, over a period of time.

8. An excessive faith in the efficacy of logical argumentation to resolve moral issues. This faith seems to be borne out of a psychological need for an orderly understanding of our environment, perhaps borne in turn out of an illusion that such conceptual order gives us some kind of control over our environment.

(This is certainly not to say that there is no place in moral investigations for logic. I think that all the thought experiments and probing for inconsistency and arguments that go on are indispensable, but they are indispensable because they nudge us toward more accurate moral intuitions, which are not essentially based on logic.[iv])

9. The manufacture of perceptions. As just one example, if you hear “My body, my choice” enough times, and are not presented with alternative views, after a while you will come to really believe that there is only one body involved in an abortion.

10. Doctrinal baggage that comes along with the valuable elements of a religion. Atheism advocate Sam Harris has described a transcendent experience that he once underwent sitting by the Sea of Galilee. He writes:

If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. . . . If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman. . . . If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the “dharmakaya of emptiness.” [v]

The meditative and devotional techniques of various religions can bring about in us these transcendent states, arguably the most wonderful states we have ever experienced. Although Harris and others strive for totally non-religious forms of meditation, it must be admitted that religions are, today, still ahead of conventional science in the knowledge of such techniques. As a result, when someone experiments with such “religious” practices and discovers that they constitute a certain specialized wisdom that science seems to be lacking and that most directly leads to happiness, they are likely not only to adopt that valuable meditative practice, but also to buy the whole religious package, including whatever that religion teaches about astronomy and evolution—and the ensoulment of a newly-conceived baby. If the religion teaches that ensoulment does not take place for the first three months, for example, and that abortion before that point is permissible, then even if that teaching happens not to be correct, they will believe it.

This psychological factor is different from factor 5 above, in that I think it can occur even in a psychologically very healthy person.

11. Limited human intelligence.

12. Unlimited human ego. A big percentage of discussions about moral issues comes down to a garden-variety contest of egos. Discussions become more about winning, belittling, and mocking than about trying to understand clearly. People write on any topic partly because they want attention. It has been said, “More people write poetry than read it.” Similarly, it may be that more people talk than listen.

Most of the 12 factors listed above can contribute to different forms of cognitive dissonance: we sense a contradiction or incompatibility between the beliefs psychological factors move us toward and the beliefs our moral intuitions move us toward. We cope with cognitive dissonance by adopting ideas that violate our natural intuitions, and then shoring those ideas up with techniques such as confirmation bias.

Among the psychological factors that work against intuitively finding the moral truths within, there are also some differences of perception that do not come into play in relation to most moral issues, but do come into play in relation to the abortion issue:

13. Incorrect intuitions about the unborn. Some people see the unborn, especially the early unborn, as a snapshot, and some see it as part of a process. If a small embryo were to remain just as it is, frozen in time (a snapshot) we would have to say quite fairly that its life would not have much value.

Both ways of looking at the unborn are scientifically useful for different purposes. It is not science, but only pre-logical intuition, that identifies the unborn as an organism with little moral value or an organism with great moral value. If there are indeed moral truths to be found, however, one of these two intuitions must be less correct than the other.

14. Incorrect intuitions about the importance of bodily rights. One important source of variations in intuitions about the importance of bodily rights is different cultural senses of the relative weights to be given to the individual and to the collective. Almost the greatest relinquishing of bodily right imaginable is when a person submits to being conscripted into an army, where he or she will risk all his body organs being blown to bits. Different cultures vary greatly in their acceptance of military conscription. Yet if there are indeed moral truths to be found, one particular moral truth about bodily rights must be correct—not all of the diverse intuitions about bodily rights can reflect that truth. (I have written elsewhere about bodily rights.[vi])

15. Incorrect intuitions about what’s wrong with killing. Among all who get involved in discussions about moral issues, killing and violence seem to have, in general, a bad name. One would think that that would give us some common ground. But it turns out that although killing is universally disreputable, it’s disreputable in a nebulous way. We disagree on exactly what is wrong with killing.

My moral intuition is that what is most wrong with killing is that it deprives an organism of its future life. But in discussions about abortion, I have often encountered expressions such as this one: “I can’t imagine caring one way or the other being aborted if I didn’t possess a fully functional nervous system.” Here any harm to be done by killing seems to depend on the organism’s caring, at the time of the killing, about its future life (this view does not, after all, contest the fact that a currently unconscious embryo will have a fully functional nervous system soon and will eventually care about its future life). This view seems to exclude the possibility that any harm can be caused by depriving an organism of its future life, whether the organism deprived of life cares about it at this moment or not. Thus the only real harm that this view is willing to consider is the harm of frustrating a desire, on the part of the organism, to live.[vii]

This is one example of how there are different intuitions about what is wrong with killing. Yet if there are real moral truths to be found, then not all the intuitions can be correct.

By identifying 15 different psychological factors that interfere with moral intuition, I have tried to develop a kind of checklist. I think that if anyone can go through the checklist and neutralize in themselves each of the above-mentioned psychological factors, their thinking will become clear. Their minds will become cleared of endless clutter. And when other people encounter a clear mind like that, they in turn become forced to clear their own minds.

This clarification process (along with scientific progress) will decide the abortion issue. The grip of all the psychological factors enumerated above will be loosened. Arguments, thought experiments, and other philosophical approaches will play a part in breaking their grip; I think that the part that they will play will be a significant one, but not, alone, a decisive one.

Personally I expect that the truth that we will find through moral intuition will be mostly a pro-life truth. I expect that the issue will be decided to an important extent by the fuller recognition of the humanity of a previously dehumanized group. (The importance of psychological factor 13 above cannot be overestimated.) Do I expect all this due to some psychological blinders of my own? Time will tell.

[i] Sam Harris, “The Roots of Good and Evil: An Interview with Paul Bloom,” Sam Harris (blog), November 12, 2013, http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-roots-of-good-and-evil

[ii] Life Matters Journal 4 Issue 1 (June 2015): 24-29, also available at http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/moral-intuition-logic-and-the-abortion-debate/

[iii] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 53, 213-214, 256.

[iv] “Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate” in Life Matters Journal, Volume 4 Issue 1 (June 2015): 24-29, and http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/moral-intuition-logic-and-the-abortion-debate/

[v] Sam Harris, Waking Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 81-82.

[vi] “Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument,” July 8, 2014, http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/dismantling-the-bodily-rights-argument-without-using-the-responsibility-argument/

[vii] For a discussion of this issue, see Kelsey Hazzard and Acyutananda, “What Babies Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Them, Right?,” Secular ProLife (blog), January 4, 2016, http://blog.secularprolife.org/2016/01/what-babies-dont-know-cant-hurt-them.html.

Further thoughts on the above LMJ essay:

1. Psychological factor 4 above is “Neurotic emotional needs. Such needs can affect one’s felt or at least expressed moral and political views in a number of ways. One way – certainly not the only way – is when the needs result in commitments, sometimes fanatic commitments, to groups or ideologies.”

I think it would be safe to say that in the context of the abortion issue, the groups or ideologies most concerned in this way are the Catholic Church and evangelical churches on the pro-life side, and the pro-choice feminist movement on the pro-choice side. My point here is not to take issue with any Christian teachings as such, or with pro-choice feminism as such; and certainly not to say that commitment to either can stem only from neurosis. My point concerns unquestioning belief. I think that it is human nature always to question, but that those Christians who happen to be fanatic about their religion due to some psychological need, will be prone to believe that abortion is wrong without further examination, just because their religion says that that is God’s command. And I think that those pro-choice feminists who happen to be fanatic about their ideology due to some psychological need, will be prone to believe that protection of the unborn is wrong without further examination, just because their ideology teaches that it is somehow part of a system of oppression of women. (By the way, pro-life feminists have offered at least some clues as to how that belief became the majority belief within the feminist movement, which, apart from the embrace of abortion rights by its majority, must be the most inspiring revolutionary movement the world has ever seen. See Serrin Foster’s speech “The Feminist Case against Abortion.”

Again, to say that people who have neurotic emotional needs (more so than the fairly neurotic average in society) – angry people for instance – gravitate toward a particular movement does not necessarily reflect at all on the movement itself. Many of the most psychologically healthy, or even radiantly healthy, people I have met are to be found among the ranks of Catholics and evangelicals; and it’s likely that some of the finest people may be found in the ranks of pro-choice feminists also. The position of the latter on abortion rights may be based not on moral blindness, but simply on blindness about the reality of the unborn. And regarding Catholics and evangelicals, I am awed by what they have done in holding the line against abortion, as much as it could be held, for all these years.

2. Above I said, “I will make one further assumption to start with: that not only are there indeed moral truths to be found, but that identical truths are to be found deep within all of us.”

Slavery in the US was never proved to be morally wrong. If after all the years of harsh exploitation of the slaves and bitter strife among the whites, a formal paper in some philosophy journal had finally convinced everybody that slavery was wrong, that document and its philosophical proof would now be more famous than the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Thirteenth Amendment. But there was no such paper; rather, undoubtedly there was a multiplicity of contradictory papers, all of which together played only a modest role in the process. The collective moral sense simply evolved. Uncle Tom’s Cabin probably played a bigger role than any formal proof.

The politics – not least war, that “continuation of politics by other means” – and economics involved in the end of slavery were very complex. But moral evolution must have played its part. The chains of people’s psychological complexes faded over time so that the chains of slavery could more readily be broken. People who were incorrigible vessels of outmoded thinking died off.

And I said above:

“A similar process (along with scientific progress) will decide the abortion issue. The grip of all the psychological foibles enumerated above will be loosened. Logical syllogisms, thought experiments, and other philosophical approaches, within or without formal papers, will play a part in breaking their grip; I think that the part that they will play will be a significant one, but not, alone, a decisive one.

“Personally I expect that the truth that we will find will be mostly a pro-life truth. I expect that, as in the case of slavery, the issue will be decided to an important extent by the fuller recognition of the humanity of a previously-dehumanized group. (The importance of 13 above cannot be overestimated.) . . .”

The Wrong in Killing

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Facilitator

Among all who get involved in discussions about moral issues, killing and violence seem to have, in general, a bad name. How many times have you heard the remark, in refutation of some view, “By that logic, it would be okay to kill someone” – ? Killing is the default that we turn to when we need some example of doing wrong.

One would think that in the abortion debate, agreement on the wrong of killing would give us some common ground. But it turns out that although killing is universally disreputable, it’s disreputable in a nebulous way. When we say “Killing is wrong,” we don’t all mean the same thing. We disagree on exactly what is wrong with it.

1. To my moral intuitions, it is clear that what is most wrong with killing is that it deprives an organism of its future conscious life (which in the case of human beings usually includes a chance to improve morally). If I don’t deem it to have much of a future life or don’t deem that its future life will be very conscious, as I don’t in the case of a mosquito, then killing it is less wrong. I think it’s permissible to kill a mosquito for a provocation or even a threat that would not justify my killing a human being.

2. But many people think that what is most wrong about killing relates to the species of the victim without regard to its future conscious life. They say that the lives of all human beings are exactly equal in inherent value and that human lives are special. Thus the worst wrong is to kill any innocent human being. (Well, there are some who say only, “The lives of all born human beings are exactly equal in value;” but the fundamental assumption is the same – those who say that simply don’t apply the assumption to the unborn.) Thus the life of a person in an irreversible coma (even granting the assumption that we really know beyond doubt that the coma is complete and irreversible) is as valuable as your life or mine.

Many Christians think in this way because of a belief that any human being, yet only a human being, is an imago dei.

I disagree with vesting all belief in what is wrong with killing in the simple humanity of the victim, because my moral intuitions tell me that in a triage situation – for instance if that person in a coma were in a hospital where there was not sufficient life-support equipment for two patients, and there was another patient in need of the equipment who was conscious or expected to regain consciousness – I would clearly prioritize the second person, though that person is not more human.

I think I would even preserve the life of a dog who could expect to have years of conscious life ahead of it (I believe dogs to be among the animals with highest consciousness), rather than that of a human who was sure never to come out of a coma.

The life of any human being is very important to me. We should not take anyone off life support if we can help it (unless they wrote an advance directive). But I wonder if some of my concern for even a human being in an irreversible coma, stems from my knowledge that humans in general are highly conscious.

3. Some think that what’s wrong with killing is that it frustrates a desire, on the part of the organism, to live.

I was lucky enough not to have to try to analyze this particular view on my own. An analysis of it co-authored by Kelsey Hazzard of Secular Pro-Life, and me, appears as a post on the SPL blog. Here I will just add a couple of further comments:

In the blog post, we remarked about that view, What is being said here is that an organism’s caring about its future life is important, but the future life itself that the organism cares about is not important. One more way to put “what is being said” would be: “Beings’ future lives don’t matter, but if they cherish a desire to live based on the illusion that their lives really do matter, then that foolish desire matters.”

We have implied in the post an equation between caring about living (wanting to live) and caring about one’s future life; but can there really be much debate about that equation? For myself, I think that people who don’t want to live are invariably people who don’t want to go through the future life that they expect; and people who do want to live have at least a little hope for a little future happiness.

Also, in using expressions such as “the only harm that we can see in the frustration of a desire for one’s future life” in relation to the topic of the wrong of the killing, we have suggested that wrong involves harm. If there is any moral wrong unrelated to harming somebody, it seems to me that it would be a very abstract wrong compared to the wrong of harm.

And, it might be worth identifying a possible difference between the frustrates-a-desire-to-live view that we mainly discuss, and Peter Singer’s view, which we also mention. Singer focuses on the importance of a capacity to care (to hold preferences, as he puts it), but I’m not sure whether he ever singles out the importance of caring about life. Thus his thesis may not undermine itself as much as does the other, which inadvertently implies the importance of future life. Yet he equally ignores the relevance of future life when we consider killing someone.

(And lastly, in that article we said, “. . . okay, it’s true, embryos haven’t yet started to care about their future, and probably won’t for some years.” But were we 100% correct in saying that? The fact that they are biologically programmed to do everything possible to live, and that that biological longing is designed to ensure that the later conscious longing will have its day, means something to my personal moral intuitions. But let’s leave that aside for now.)

I think of the above as the three main competing views as to what is wrong with killing. In addition, there are some views as to what may at least add to the wrong of killing:

4. Killing may involve inflicting pain. On the wrong of inflicting avoidable pain, there is almost complete common ground in society. Even hunters who kill for fun do not find as much fun in it if they inflict significantly more pain than usual. Even pro-choicers who do not see anything wrong with killing the unborn in itself would like it to be done as painlessly as possible. Even if there really exist proponents of the “sovereign zone” bodily-rights argument who say that a pregnant woman should have a legal right to torture her unborn (because she is doing what she wants with her body and its contents), they would probably say that it would be morally wrong for her to do so.

5. Killing will often involve emotional distress for people other than the victim. It will particularly cause distress if the victim had in their life developed positive relationships. This has some small relevance in the abortion debate, because a born person, unlike an unborn, may have developed such relationships. Killing the unborn may be less wrong in that particular way.

6. Killing will often involve a loss of a utilitarian kind. And again, it is only born people who may be confirmed to be making a positive utilitarian contribution to society.

If we are to consider people’s utilitarian value in assessing their worthiness to live, we have to note that the utilitarian value of some born people will be greater than that of others, and that the contributions of certain born persons have been confirmed to be negative. Still, if carrying a pregnancy to term might negatively impact a woman’s ability to take care of her born children, that would assign a certain negative utilitarian value to her unborn child, and if there is no one who can help with the born children, that would be a factor to some degree, for the permissibility of abortion in that particular case.

In relation to the “frustrating a desire” belief about the wrong of killing, I wrote, “Ultimately we can’t argue logically with moral intuitions.” Logical arguments can be very important in helping people find better intuitions in themselves, but ultimately we can’t reject, on logical grounds, any of the above intuitions about the wrong of killing. I have written elsewhere regarding how I think differences in moral intuition ultimately resolve.

And I have said a number of things here indicating that I don’t give equal value to all human lives. Philosophically I don’t and probably many people don’t, but it would not be wise for society to try to implement, in practice, some objective calculation of value. Because if it were known that everybody was being rated in terms of their expendability, that would cause tremendous tension in society. We have to maintain the existing social convention “everyone’s life is of equal value,” and continue to codify that convention in terms of equal legal rights. (Except in a triage situation where the rubber meets the road and we have to make some differentiations.) Philosophically I don’t think that everyone has equal inherent value, but I think that society should assign everyone equal inherent value.

I also think that the existing social convention should be upgraded so that “everyone” includes the unborn. I think that mainly because the unborn, also, have a future conscious life.

Only a Potential Person?

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Facilitator

Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

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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

No Termination without Representation

raising consciousness about the unborn, and awakening our consciences about the rights of the unborn

Category Archives: Ethics / Morality

The Objective Morality of Transcendent Experience

Footnotes

The Cure for Headache

The Cocktail That Defeats Bodily-Rights Arguments

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea: the Short and Easy Version

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Judith Jarvis Thomson on Responsibility

“Pro-Lifers Don’t Really Believe That Zygotes Are Persons”

Bodily Rights and a Better Idea

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The Psychological Morass of the Abortion Issue

The Wrong in Killing

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