Friday, November 24, 2017

A review of "Why Abortion is Immoral"

Commenter Publius pointed me to this paper by Don Marquis, which advances a secular argument that abortion is immoral.  It's a good paper with an unusually well-reasoned -- though nonetheless incorrect -- argument.  I recommend reading it.  Finding the flaw in Marquis's argument makes an interesting and worthwhile exercise.  Seriously, go read it.  I'l wait.

Publius posted this link in the comments of my post, "The utter absurdity of the pro-life position."  I want to make it clear that the intended target of that post was a political position, not a philosophical one.  The political position is the one being advanced in the United States by a loosely affiliated coalition of organizations who refer to themselves as "pro life" (as opposed to their detractors who refer to them as "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice").  My post was intended to point out the intellectual dishonesty of this political movement, not to make the argument that an intellectually honest argument against abortion is not possible.  I have made that argument against other political positions (e.g. gays should be denied the right to marry) but I do not take this position on abortion.  Gay marriage is completely cut-and-dried.  It cannot be be and never has been opposed on any grounds other than thinly disguised (and sometimes not so thinly disguised) bigotry.

Not so with abortion.  I believe that it is possible for a reasonable and right-minded person to come to the conclusion that abortion is wrong.  That is why I support choice rather than (say) actively promoting abortion as a form of birth control.  However, I believe that most of the people active in the anti-abortion movement are neither reasonable nor right-minded because most of them also oppose the active promotion of birth control, which is the totally no-brainer answer to reducing the number of abortions.  But that's not what this post is about.

What this post is about is Don Marquis's argument, which really deserves to be taken seriously, notwithstanding that (IMHO) it is wrong.  The reason it deserves to be taken seriously is that it is an example of what a sound argument for the immorality of abortion would look like were one ever to be found.  Merely proclaiming that a fetus is a baby and describing the mechanics of an abortion in the most horrific terms one can muster doesn't count.  Proof-by-horror-story is not sound reasoning.  Marquis's argument is sober and secular.  It does not appeal to God or the "sanctity of life".  It is based on premises that are widely accepted by both religious and non-religious people.  For that reason alone it has promise as a way of actually advancing the debate in this seemingly intractable conflict.

Marquis's argument is also worth taking seriously because it might be salvageable.  It might be possible to patch the flaw in his argument (though I don't think so) and this could represent a real advance in the theory of human morality.  It was not that long ago that the idea that slavery was immoral was still legitimately controversial, so progress can (and often does) happen.

With that to frame the discussion, let me start by summarizing the Marquis's argument.  He begins, to his credit, by asking the question why killing is wrong in the first place, a necessary step which is too often glossed over, probably because both sides agree that killing is generally wrong even if they don't agree on why.  This covers up the possibility that the different justifications of the wrongness of killing might be the source of intractable disagreement down the line.  Indeed, Marquis opens the paper by pointing our how a failure to nail down the reason that killing is wrong in the first place causes problems for both sides:
the pro-choicer wants to find a moral principle concerning the wrongness of killing which tends to be narrow in scope in order that fetuses will not fall under it. The problem with narrow principles is that they often do not embrace enough. Hence, the needed principles such as “It is prima facie seriously wrong to kill only persons” or “It is prima facie wrong to kill only rational agents” do not explain why it is wrong to kill infants or young children or the severely retarded or even perhaps the severely mentally ill.
...
Appeals to social utility will seem satisfactory only to those who resolve not to think of the enormous difficulties with a utilitarian account of the wrongness of killing and the significant social costs of preserving the lives of the unproductive. A pro-choice strategy that extends the definition of “person” to infants or even to young children seems just as arbitrary as an anti-abortion strategy that extends the definition of “human being” to fetuses.
...
The principle “Only persons have the right to life” also suffers from an ambiguity. The term “person” is typically defined in terms of psychological characteristics, although there will certainly be disagreement concerning which characteristics are most important. Supposing that this matter can be settled, the pro-choicer is left with the problem of explaining why psychological characteristics should make a moral difference.
As an aside, let me point out that as an idea-ist I do not have a problem explaining this: psychological characteristics make moral differences because my foundational moral principle is that the interests of memes are primary.  Hence in my moral system the value of human life is not a premise but a conclusion, and one that is contingent on a human being able to provide habitat for memes, and a pre-requisite for that is having a functioning brain.  But let's leave that aside for now because this is not about me, it's about Marquis.

Marquis's answer to the question of why killing is wrong is that it deprives someone of their future.
[K]illing someone is wrong, primarily because the killing inflicts (one of) the greatest possible losses on the victim.  To describe this as the loss of life can be misleading, however. The change in my biological state does not by itself make killing me wrong. The effect of the loss of my biological life is the loss to me of all those activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life. These activities, projects, experiences, and enjoyments are either valuable for their own sakes or are means to something else that is valuable for its own sake. Some parts of my future are not valued by me now, but will come to be valued by me as I grow older and as my values and capacities change. When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would come to value. Therefore, when I die, I am deprived of all of the value of my future. Inflicting this loss on me is ultimately what makes killing me wrong. This being the case, it would seem that what makes killing any adult human being prima facie seriously wrong is the loss of his other future.
Marquis calls this the future-of-value criterion, but sometimes refers to it as future-like-ours.  He cites four advantages of his theory, all of which I agree with: First, it's IA-proof.  Many theories of the wrongness of killing are human-centric and don't apply to intelligent aliens, but the future-of-value criterion does.  Second, it plausibly extends to animals.  Third, it does not imply that euthanasia is wrong (though it might be wrong for other reasons).  And fourth, it straightforwardly entails the wrongness of killing infants and children.

And, of course, it straightforwardly entails the wrongness of killing fetuses.

So what is wrong with this argument?

The problem is that the argument implies not only that abortion is wrong, but that contraception is wrong too, because it destroys the same future-of-value that abortion does.  Marquis addresses this issue towards the end of the paper:
But this analysis does not entail that contraception is wrong. Of course, contraception prevents the actualization of a possible future of value. Hence, it follows from the claim that futures of value should be maximized that contraception is prima facie immoral. This obligation to maximize does not exist, however; furthermore, nothing in the ethics of killing in this paper entails that it does. The ethics of killing in this essay would entail that contraception is wrong only if something were denied a human future of value by contraception. Nothing at all is denied such a future by contraception, however.
Candidates for a subject of harm by contraception fall into four categories: (1) some sperm or other, (2) some ovum or other, (3) a sperm and an ovum separately, and (4) a sperm and an ovum together. Assigning the harm to some sperm is utterly arbitrary, for no reason can be given for making a sperm the subject of harm rather than an ovum. Assigning the harm to some ovum is utterly arbitrary, for no reason can be given for making an ovum the subject of harm rather than a sperm. One might attempt to avoid these problems by insisting that contraception deprives both the sperm and the ovum separately of a valuable future like ours. On this alternative, too many futures are lost. Contraception was supposed to be wrong, because it deprived us of one future of value, not two. One might attempt to avoid this problem by holding that contraception deprives the combination of sperm and ovum of a valuable future like ours. But here the definite article misleads. At the time of contraception, there are hundreds of millions of sperm, one (released) ovum and millions of possible combinations of all of these. There is no actual combination at all. Is the subject of the loss to be a merely possible combination? Which one? This alternative does not yield an actual subject of harm either. Accordingly, the immorality of contraception is not entailed by the loss of a future-like-ours argument simply because there is no nonarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception.
Note, however, that Marquis has actually moved the goal posts here.  [UPDATE: I was wrong about this.  Marquis is not making a tacit change here, though it turns out not to matter.  Thanks to commenter Publius for pointing out my mistake.]  Before, he tried to move away from the problems associated with basing a moral judgement of abortion on the putative "value of human life" by basing it on a "future of value" instead, a criterion that applies to intelligent aliens as well as humans.  So far so good.  But now he has sneakily added an additional criterion to his quality metric, namely, that the future-of-value in question must be strongly bound to some thing.  He didn't actually say this before, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt.  At first blush it might seem that this little tweak actually does save the day because (he claims) the thing to which the future-of-value is bound has not yet come into existence before conception.

But in fact, his little tweak has changed an otherwise promising theory into one that merely begs the question.  It is far from clear that the thing to which the future-of-value is bound comes into existence at conception.  If there were consensus on this point there would be no argument.  Everyone would agree that an embryo is a human/person/whatever-it-is-you-want-to-call-a-thing-with-a-future-of-value and we'd be done.  But it is disagreement on this very point on which the whole controversy hangs.

And indeed there are strong reasons to doubt the proposition that a blastocyst is a thing-with-a-future-of-value while the sperm and egg that create it are not.  For starters, there are an awful lot of additional ingredients that need to be added to the pot before a blastocyst becomes a baby.  In fact, pretty close to 100% of the material that ends up being the baby is not present in the blastocyst, or even the embryo.

That prosaic consideration alone is enough to sink Marquis's argument, but we are far from done.  The first thing that happens to a newly fertilized egg is that it divides into two cells.  Each of those divides again, and so on and so on until baby is born (and thereafter as well).  But up until the third or fourth division, every one of those cells is totipotent, that is, each one is capable of developing into a fully formed human being by itself.  And indeed this happens naturally on occasion; that's how identical twins are formed.  So up until the the blastocyst becomes an embryo, is it one thing with a future-of-value, or is it multiple things?  (This is actually a serious theological question for those who hold that a human receives their soul at conception: do identical twins share one soul?  If not, where does the second one come from?)

We're still not done, far from it.  Nowadays we have the technology to intentionally separate out the cells of a blastocyst.  By failing to do so, we are depriving the individual cells of the blastocyst of having individual futures-of-value.  Are we then morally obligated to separate them?

In point of fact, this whole idea that even a fully fledged adult human is a single thing with a continuity-of-identity that can survive any circumstance (other than death) is really just a reflection of our current technological limitations.  Some day we'll be able to clone humans.  When that day comes, every cell in your body will be a mere technological intervention away from becoming a fully fledged human being without ever having been conceived.  What is the moral status of all of those potential humans?  If you injure yourself to the point where some of your cells die, are you depriving thousands of potential humans of their futures-of-value?

There is absolutely no basis for stipulating that a blastocyst is a thing-with-a-future-of-value while sperm-and-egg separately are not.  Indeed, there are strong philosophical arguments that call into question the idea that the identity of a thing has any sharp boundaries at all, or even that the very concept of "thing" is logically coherent.

Marquis sweeps all this under the rug and just blithely assumes, with no justification whatsoever, that there is a bright line to be drawn at conception, or at least somewhere, to keep us away from the infinite regress of potentiality that dooms the future-of-value argument.  But not only is there no bright line here, there are no bright lines in the whole universe.  That is, and always has been, the whole problem.

20 comments:

Don Geddis said...

Yeah, I immediately (as soon as I got to his actual proposal) thought of the contraception thing too. Give him credit: he knows that counterargument is fatal, and attempts to address it at the end. But it's a poor patch, and it dooms his whole theory.

Peter Donis said...

I agree that Marquis doesn't adequately address your objection in his paper, but I see one obvious way to attempt to: put the bright line at implantation, rather than conception.

(Btw, I use the term "bright line" here to indicate a choice made for purposes of defining a moral standard, not a claim that there actually is a "real" intrinsic bright line. I agree with you that there are no truly sharp boundaries of categories.)

Why implantation? Because it is a reasonably "sharp" event at which the various valid objections you raise vanish. Splitting of a blastocyst into multiple embryos only happens before implantation. Cloning would still require implantation in a host mother in order to bring the baby to term. (If we advance technologically to the point where we can bring a baby to term in an artificial womb, then whatever in that process corresponds to implantation in an ordinary pregnancy would be the bright line.) What's more, putting the bright line at implantation addresses another objection you didn't make: that in the ordinary course of things, many embryos are conceived but don't implant, and are excreted with the next menstruation. On Marquis's view as presented in the paper, this would entail that such a menstruation would be equivalent to murder.

Don Geddis said...

But Peter, you seem to admit that reality doesn't actually have a "bright line", and so we're just making a choice for convenience, to balance the different moral intuitions. As long as you're willing to do that, there really shouldn't be much problem with the current US Supreme Court suggestion of various rights based on trimesters.

But Marquis had hopes for a philosophical defense, based on some kind of principle, not mere convenient utilitarianism. Unfortunately, taking his initial argument seriously, it seems immoral not to have as many children as physically possible. Every time you choose not to have a child that you were capable of having, you have prevented some "possible future of value". His contraceptive section makes it clear that he wants to try to weasel out of this conclusion, but the biology of life doesn't really support his philosophical needs. (Things change at every point in development, and there is nothing philosophically magically about conception, in terms of the very long process of creating a biological machine that has human adult capacity.)

Ron said...

@Don:

> Give him credit

I thought I did :-)

@Peter:

> I see one obvious way to attempt to: put the bright line at implantation

Well, that's an interesting idea. I've never heard anyone propose it before. But there's still an obvious problem: you still have to come up with some account of *why* it suddenly becomes morally wrong to kill an embryo when it is implanted. It's not enough to just have an easily demarcated event. If that's all it took, conception and birth would both suffice, but neither one does.

Peter Donis said...

@Ron:
> you still have to come up with some account of *why* it suddenly becomes morally wrong to kill an embryo when it is implanted

Because that's when its future, the future that it is morally wrong to take away, becomes well-defined enough to have moral weight. (Bear in mind that I'm not necessarily saying I agree with this; I'm still considering. But I think it's how Marquis would respond if he were trying to justify this modification of the view he presents.)

Consider the comparison between implantation and the two alternatives you mention:

Compared to conception, implantation is obviously better because there is a much tighter causal connection between the implanted embryo and its future as a human being than there is between a non-implanted embryo and its future as a human being. Implantation of an embryo often doesn't take place, and a given conception event might result in more than one implanted embryo; but once implantation takes place, the relation is one-to-one and it is much more justifiable to consider any break in the subsequent process as a mishap rather than the normal course of events.

Compared to birth, implantation is obviously better because the change in the "strength" of the causal connection to a human future, from an unborn fetus to a just-born baby, is much smaller than the corresponding change at implantation. This is even more true now than it was in the past, since various possible mishaps during childbirth are much rarer now and since our ability to bring a baby to term outside the womb now starts well before birth.

In fact, this last comment points at another way to characterize the unique feature of implantation that I'm relying on: it is the clearly demarcated event which makes the largest change, by a good margin, in the strength of the causal link between the developing human being and its future as a human being. That's what makes that connection well-defined enough to have moral weight at that particular event, rather than an earlier or later one.

Peter Donis said...

@Don:
> Things change at every point in development, and there is nothing philosophically magically about conception, in terms of the very long process of creating a biological machine that has human adult capacity.

I tried to capture what I think picks out implantation, in terms of this developmental process, in my response to Ron just now.

Ron said...

@Peter:

I must say I'm impressed. That is probably the most compelling argument I have ever heard on the anti-abortion side.

I'm curious, are you yourself convinced by it? (I'm not, but explaining why is going to take a whole 'nuther post.)

Peter Donis said...

@Ron:
> are you yourself convinced by it?

I'm not sure; as I said, I'm still considering. While I'm at it, I'll throw a few more observations in:

The pro-choice arguments that I've seen fall into two general categories, which I'll call "permissive" and "strict". The permissive argument is basically that a woman has a right to control over her own body, and the right to an abortion whenever the woman chooses is part of that, any other considerations notwithstanding. I don't agree with this argument, because it gives no weight at all to the interests of the fetus. Even if my argument about implantation being a reasonable bright line is not correct, it still seems obvious to me that *some* weight should be given to the fetus and its potential future, so any pro-choice argument that doesn't recognize that seems wrong to me.

The strict argument for pro-choice does recognize it: it is basically that, while an abortion is an undesirable thing to happen, there are cases where it is a valid choice, and which cases those are will depend strongly on individual details of the cases. The person in the best position to judge those individual details is the woman who is pregnant, so she is the one who should have the right to choose whether to abort the fetus or carry it to term. On this view, the mother has (or ought to have) a strong motivation to consider the interests of the fetus, so she will not choose to have an abortion unless she has a reason that is strong enough to outweigh those interests.

I like the fact that this argument recognizes (or at least appears to recognize) that a woman's right to choose carries with it a responsibility to choose carefully, weighing all valid interests and considerations appropriately. However, as I hinted with the qualifier I just gave, I'm not sure that actually happens in many cases of abortion. From a moral perspective, it seems wrong to me to make such a choice without careful consideration. However, from a legal perspective, I'm even more skeptical of the ability of governments to regulate such acts properly, so a pro-choice position might still be the lesser of two evils. (This, btw, is why I don't think I would advocate for a legal regime that defined human life as beginning at implantation and therefore defined abortion as presumptively equivalent to murder, even if I became convinced of the argument for that as a moral argument.)

Publius said...

Don't like the conclusion? Argument must be wrong somehow!
(Part 1)

@Ron
>So what is wrong with this argument?

The problem is that the argument implies not only that abortion is wrong, but that contraception is wrong too, because it destroys the same future-of-value that abortion does.


This is what I hear you saying: "I don't like the conclusion, so the argument must be wrong."

Another option for you would be: "The argument is solid, I must change my views on contraception." Yet that is not even called for, as you misinterpret Marquis on contraception.

First, Marquis has not moved the goal posts by having future-of-value "strongly bound to some thing." He starts in paragraph 22 with "it is wrong to kill us" and in paragraph 23 discusses the how the "victim" is deprived of his future of value. Killing is always bound to something that can be killed.

>At first blush it might seem that this little tweak actually does save the day because (he claims) the thing to which the future-of-value is bound has not yet come into existence before conception.

Yes, without a victim, you can't have killing.

> It is far from clear that the thing to which the future-of-value is bound comes into existence at conception. Everyone would agree that an embryo is a human/person/whatever-it-is-you-want-to-call-a-thing-with-a-future-of-value and we'd be done. But it is disagreement on this very point on which the whole controversy hangs.

And indeed there are strong reasons to doubt the proposition that a blastocyst is a thing-with-a-future-of-value while the sperm and egg that create it are not.

Does this mean: you agree that sperm and eggs are not things with future-of-value?

>For starters, there are an awful lot of additional ingredients that need to be added to the pot before a blastocyst becomes a baby. In fact, pretty close to 100% of the material that ends up being the baby is not present in the blastocyst, or even the embryo.

And ... so what?

>That prosaic consideration alone is enough to sink Marquis's argument, but we are far from done.

How, exactly, would this sink his argument? Don't all living things need food to survive, develop, and grow?

> The first thing that happens to a newly fertilized egg is that it divides into two cells. Each of those divides again, and so on and so on until baby is born (and thereafter as well). But up until the third or fourth division, every one of those cells is totipotent, that is, each one is capable of developing into a fully formed human being by itself. And indeed this happens naturally on occasion; that's how identical twins are formed. So up until the the blastocyst becomes an embryo, is it one thing with a future-of-value, or is it multiple things?

Um, so what? If it doesn't split, it's 1 thing, and if it does split, it's 2 things.
I don't see how this affects the moral argument at all.

>We're still not done, far from it. Nowadays we have the technology to intentionally separate out the cells of a blastocyst. By failing to do so, we are depriving the individual cells of the blastocyst of having individual futures-of-value. Are we then morally obligated to separate them?

Apparently you missed the significance of this sentence in paragraph 63:

This obligation to maximize does not exist, however; furthermore, nothing in the ethics of killing in this paper entails that it does.

Therefore, no, you are not morally obligated to separate cells from a blastocyst to create more babies. Nor are you morally obligated to have as many children as possible.

>If you injure yourself to the point where some of your cells die, are you depriving thousands of potential humans of their futures-of-value?

No obligation to maximize. Therefore, no.

(see part 2)

Publius said...

This is the future calling
(part 2)

@Ron:
>There is absolutely no basis for stipulating that a blastocyst is a thing-with-a-future-of-value while sperm-and-egg separately are not.

Note that it is you that brings up blastocysts. Marquis discusses fetuses. In paragraph 65 he writes:

Since a fetus possesses a property, the possession of which adult human beings is sufficient to make killing an adult human being wrong, abortion is wrong.

Would you agree that a fetus possesses future-of-value? I'll assume yes for now.

Then if we move backward in time, does a blastocyst possess future-of-value? Does a single fertilized egg possess future-of-value? Under Marquis' framework, that is what has to be answered.

On this question, I think Peter is on the right track.

For a blastocyst to grow and develop into an embryo, then a fetus, then a neonate, etc., all the way to adulthood, it is necessary that it achieve implantation into the uterus. Just as adults need air to breath, the blastocyst needs the uterine wall to survive.

Consider the blastocyst prior to implantation. What can happen to it?
1. It never implants --> death
2. It implants in the fallopian tube --> death
3. It has some chromosomal abnormality and eventually kills it --> death
4. The mother dies --> death
5. It implants into the uterine wall at the wrong time --> death
6. It implants into the uterine wall at the right time --> future-of-value

The blastocyst aquires the property "future-of-value" upon implantation. After that point, it is immoral to abort.

Note this makes some controversal forms of birth control morally acceptable. "The pill" and condoms prevent fertilization and are morally permissable under Marquis' framework -- nothing is created that possesses future-of-value. "Plan B" (RU486) and IUDs function by making the uterine wall inhospitable for implantation -- they prevent implantation. Since one does not have a duty to maximize, these are morally acceptable.

Finally, it also solves the "freezer problem" you obseses about. Those frozen blastocysts do not posseses future-of-value. Therefore it is morally permissable to leave them frozen, or destroy them.

Ron said...

@Peter:

> it still seems obvious to me that *some* weight should be given to the fetus and its potential future

I don't think that has ever been in dispute. The only question is who gets to decide whether those interests have sufficient weight to justify forcing a woman to carry a fetus to term against her will.

Ron said...

@Publius:

[1 of 2]

> This is what I hear you saying: "I don't like the conclusion, so the argument must be wrong."

It's not just me who doesn't like this conclusion. The right to contraception has been established in the U.S. since 1965.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

> Another option for you would be: "The argument is solid, I must change my views on contraception."

You're right, that is absolutely an option. I didn't do that because 1) the argument is not solid, even independent of the conclusion w.r.t. contraception (but, as I said to Peter, explaining why requires another post), 2) there is an overwhelming societal consensus in the U.S. that contraception is not morally wrong (to the contrary, that denying access to contraception is morally wrong) and 3) even Marquis himself is not sufficiently swayed by his own argument to accept that contraception is morally wrong.

> Marquis has not moved the goal posts by having future-of-value "strongly bound to some thing." He starts in paragraph 22 with "it is wrong to kill us" and in paragraph 23 discusses the how the "victim" is deprived of his future of value. Killing is always bound to something that can be killed.

Good point. I'll have to go back and update that part.

> Does this mean: you agree that sperm and eggs are not things with future-of-value?

I reject the whole future-of-value criterion. I don't think that's the reason that killing is wrong. The reason that killing a human is wrong is because humans are life support systems for brains, and brains are habitat for memes, so by killing a human you are destroying meme habitat. Neither sperm-and-egg nor blastocyst nor embryo have brains, and so are not yet habitat for memes, and so destroying them is not morally wrong.

> > For starters, there are an awful lot of additional ingredients that need to be added to the pot before a blastocyst becomes a baby.

> And ... so what?

So that weakens the argument that combining sperm and egg is the bright line that brings the thing-with-a-future-of-value into being.

> How, exactly, would this sink his argument? Don't all living things need food to survive, develop, and grow?

Yes, but there is a lot more physical continuity day-to-day once you are fully fledged person than there was when you were a blastocyst. And in particular, there is day-to-day continuity in the information stored in your brain, which is (I claim) the essential ingredient that actually makes you you.

Ron said...

@Publius:

[2 of 2]

> Um, so what? If it doesn't split, it's 1 thing, and if it does split, it's 2 things. I don't see how this affects the moral argument at all.

It affects the argument because nature is full of weird edge cases that don't fit your tidy view of how the world works. Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined identical twins who share a single body. (Look them up if you've never heard of them. They are quite remarkable.) They were conceived, but they never split, so on your view they are still a single thing, and it would be justifiable to sacrifice one of them if that would improve the quality of life for the other. It would be no different than removing a tumor.

On idea-ism, this is rubbish. There are two brains, hence two people.

> > Apparently you missed the significance of this sentence in paragraph 63:

> This obligation to maximize does not exist,

No, I didn't miss it. I chose to ignore it because while Marquis does say this, he doesn't justify it. His justification is the same failed argument that he tries to advance for why future-of-value does not imply that contraception is immoral. Indeed, this sentence is in the very same paragraph.

> Note that it is you that brings up blastocysts. Marquis discusses fetuses.

That's true, but Marquis is being disingenuous by doing that. His entire argument hinges on there being a *thing* with a future-of-value (a "victim"), and that begs the question: when does this thing with a future-of-value come into being? Human development goes through at least two stages between sperm-and-egg and fetus (blastocyst, embryo). The fact that Marquis uses the term fetus doesn't change that, any more than using the term "baby" does.

> Would you agree that a fetus possesses future-of-value?

Yes, but this is a moot point because I reject the entire future-of-value criterion. ('nuther post, yada yada yada)

> On this question, I think Peter is on the right track.

Yes, I agree. *If* you accept Marquis's criterion. I don't.

> For a blastocyst to grow and develop into an embryo, then a fetus, then a neonate, etc., all the way to adulthood, it is necessary that it achieve implantation into the uterus.

That is just a reflection of our current technological limitations. One criterion for a sound moral theory is that it should be future-proof. You don't want to have to re-invent your entire moral framework when someone figures out a way to build an artificial uterus.

> Finally, it also solves the "freezer problem" you obseses about.

Indeed it does, which is one of the reasons I give Peter kudos for this solution.

We'll see if the anti-choice political movement adopts it. I'll give you long odds against. They are heavily invested in the life-begins-at-conception argument.

Peter Donis said...

@Ron:
> I don't think that has ever been in dispute.

Not by reasonably thoughtful pro-choice advocates, no; they are the ones who take what I called the "strict" position. But I don't think all pro-choice advocates are reasonably thoughtful.

Peter Donis said...

@Ron:
> Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined identical twins who share a single body. (Look them up if you've never heard of them. They are quite remarkable.) They were conceived, but they never split

Interesting; this is an edge case that means I wasn't quite correct when I said the relationship between an implanted embryo and a human future of value is always one-to-one; here it's one-to-two.

This also illustrates, btw, that the future-of-value criterion, at least for humans, is not independent of your meme host criterion. Abby and Brittany are two people, each of whom has a distinct human future of value, and each of whom is also a distinct meme host. In other words, if one were to ask *why* humans have a future of value, at least part of the answer would involve our brains and their capacity to host memes. (I don't think that would be all of the answer, but I'll save that for discussion of your follow-up post.)

Peter Donis said...

@Ron:
> You don't want to have to re-invent your entire moral framework when someone figures out a way to build an artificial uterus.

I already addressed this: look for the appropriate event in the process of developing a baby in an artificial uterus, the one that corresponds to implantation. (There would have to be one since an artificial uterus would have to provide an umbilical cord and nourishment, and the event of connecting the embryo to that source of nourishment should be pretty clearly marked.)

Ron said...

@Peter:

> I already addressed this

I was addressing a very specific comment that Publius made:

> it is necessary that it achieve implantation into the uterus

By which I presumed he meant a woman's uterus. That is necessary now, but it may not be necessary in the future. The process by which babies are incubated artificially may or may not involve something that resembles "implantation." Human facsimiles of natural process are often quite different from the originals. Airplane wings don't flap.

Peter Donis said...

@Ron:
> The process by which babies are incubated artificially may or may not involve something that resembles "implantation." Human facsimiles of natural process are often quite different from the originals. Airplane wings don't flap.

But airplane wings do provide lift; they have to or the airplane won't fly. Similarly, an artificial uterus would have to provide nourishment to the developing embryo; otherwise the embryo won't develop. That providing of nourishment has to start at some point; that point is what corresponds to implantation. Yes, the details of the process might be quite different from implantation in a woman's uterus. But it still has to serve the same function, and the function is what is important here.

Ron said...

@Peter:

See my follow-up post.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Neither sperm-and-egg nor blastocyst nor embryo have brains, and so are not yet habitat for memes, and so destroying them is not morally wrong.

That's rather short-sighted. If a choice now will result in less meme-habitat in one year, is it ok because the damage (or lack of … maximization?) is not immediate? But the whole point of moral systems is to take us beyond short-sighted, impulse-based action.

> > This obligation to maximize does not exist,

> No, I didn't miss it. I chose to ignore it because while Marquis does say this, he doesn't justify it.

I'm including this because it seems relevant to the above & idea-ism. What does idea-ism look like with an obligation to maximize? I'm not sure you'll like the result. If it doesn't apply to idea-ism, then it doesn't apply to Marquis' case. (This just goes to show that it's a lot harder to criticize a thing when you have to provide a better alternative.)