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Rationally Speaking: October 2004
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A monthly e-column by
Massimo
Pigliucci
N. 54, October 2004
Abortion, a philosophical approach
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This column can be posted for free on any appropriate web site and reprinted
in hard copy by permission. If you are interested in receiving the html
code or the text, please send an email.
Abortion, a philosophical approach
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I have often remarked in this column that philosophy gets an unfair bad
wrap on the ground that it doesn’t solve problems. Indeed, the point of
philosophy is more to clarify concepts, ideas, and their consequences,
then to solve practical issues. However, it would seem that clarifying
things isn’t much of a goal if in turn it doesn’t help us make some
progress. So, let us consider one particularly sensitive debate -- the
one about the very idea of abortion -- where philosophy, by claryfying
our thoughts, can help reasonable people come to a compromise
(philosophy can do nothing for unreasonable people, so if you are among
those who scream “murder!” at the thought of someone masturbating, get
a life, and while you’re at it, make a point of watching Monty Python’s
Meaning of Life).
Much of the debate on abortion hinges upon what seems to be a
scientific question: when does a fertilized egg become a human being?
Of course, the answer cannot be entirely scientific, since it depends
in part on objective facts about the biology of human development, and
in part on what we mean by “human being.” Which is where philosophy
comes into play. Does a foetus become a human being when the heart
starts beating? When there is a recognizable central nervous system?
When it can react to external stimuli? When it can feel pain? Any of
those answers would put the boundary between unacceptable and
acceptable abortion practices at different times during pregnancy, but
it seems rather arbitrary to pick one of these developmental milestones
and use it as a universal yardstick for moral decisions. After all,
many other animals have a nervous system, a heartbit, respond to
external stimuli, and can feel pain, but most of us (vegetarians
excluded -- but most abortion opponents included) don’t seem to have
too many qualms about killing such animals.
No, the crucial point must focus on something else that characterizes
human beings. Plenty of philosophers, for example Julian Baggini (in
his excellent collection Making Sense: Philosophy Behind the Headlines)
have suggested that the important facts in the debate on abortion (and
the parallel one on euthanasia) are not found in the biology of
humans, but rather in our (philosophical) concept of personhood. In
other words, some of us think a foetus should be protected because it
is becoming a person, i.e. an entity that can eventually feel not just
pain, but suffering; that can have not just the urge to have sex and
reproduce, but may fall in love; a being that could one day write a
sonnet, a song, or a philosophical essay.
If the problem is actual or potential personhood, not the developmental
biology of our particular species of primates, then we have moved from
biology to philosophy, a much more tricky terrain to navigate. Being a
person is tightly linked to having the ability to lay down and recover
memories (which make up our “identity” as a person), as well as to
experience emotions (like love and suffering) and not just feelings
(like sexual urge and pain). These characteristics are in turn
dependent on being a member of a society, interacting with others,
communicating one’s thoughts and receiving and understanding
information about other people’s thoughts and emotions. Yes, all of
this is also a matter of biology (after all, these things are made
possible only by the presence of certain biological essentials, like a
functional body, and especially a complex brain), but taken together
they mean that personhood is most of all a question of psychology and
sociology.
The problem is that there are plenty of circumstances in which a human
being is not, in fact, a person. Foetuses are not persons, and neither
are people who survive in a vegetative state induced by a coma. Other
cases are more difficult to determine, but one can make a reasonable
argument that very young children are only on their way to become
persons, while patients affected by advanced stages of some mental
diseases like Alzheimer are well on their way out of full personhood.
So, while there is very little question that by performing an abortion
we are in fact killing a biological being that belongs to the human
species, it is an entirely different -- and much more difficult to
defend -- proposition to say that we are killing a person.
Abortion opponents may shrug all of this philosophical quibbling as
irrelevant on the ground that the procedure -- at whatever stage it is
practiced -- kills a potential person. But this is a rather odd
argument, with far reaching consequences that should be seriously
considered by whoever proposes it. For example, the mass of cells in
question will become a person only if many conditions other than
biological development are fulfilled, including being raised in a
proper physical, psychological and social environment. It is ironic,
therefore, that we spend so much energy debating abortion while most of
us are much less passionate about more apparently mundane issues such
as, say, health care and education for all those non-aborted foetuses.
Even more radically, if a fertilized egg is a potential person, so is
every single unfertilized one, and every sperm as well. After all, the
egg or sperm only needs a gamete of the opposite type to begin the
developmental process that will lead to the generation of another
person. I suppose that is why the most rabid religious fundamentalists
(including the current Pope) are against masturbation or sex that
doesn’t have the goal of reproduction. But it is hard to see what these
people could do to avoid the natural “waste” of unutilized human eggs.
Should we explant them from every woman and fertilize them
artificially? If your intuitive answer was “no,” and yet you are
against all types of abortion, you may want to consider the consistency
of your philosophy.
Do I have a better and clearer solution to offer that can help us
settle the abortion debate once and for all? No, as I acknowledged at
the beginning, that isn’t the point of a philosophical discussion.
Quite the opposite, I hope that people reading this column will feel a
bit less sure of their own positions because they have understood that
the issue is much more complex and difficult to settle than a simple
slogan, or even an introductory course on human developmental biology,
allow. And please do check out that Monty Python movie I mentioned in
the beginning.
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Massimo's other ramblings can be found at his Skeptic
Web.
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