Topics Abortion

Question When there is no clear solution to an issue, it would seem to me that assessing risks would be the most reasonable way of dealing with it. In the case of abortion we risk a mother losing the civil right to address her pregnancy within her own moral reasoning, verses a child losing its fundamental right to live. The latter risk seems more pressing and with greater consequence. Can a struggle for justice be assessed upon risk?

Accepted:
February 20, 2008

Comments

You've raised an interesting question. The general approach you're suggesting sounds like a version of what's called "multi-attribute utility theory." Without going into detail, multi-attribute utility theory lets us make decisions even when different sorts of values are at stake. Acting in a certain way might carry a high risk of losing money, but a high likelihood of keeping a friend. Depending on my "trade-off weights" (roughly, how much I care about money vs. friendship), and depending on the possible results and their probabilities given various choices, the tools of multi-attribute utility theory might give me a way of picking a course of action. It seems at least plausible that we could reconstruct any rational way of making decisions within this framework, and so in principle, we might be able to represent the way we think about the case you've offered. But this is really just where all the hard questions start.

The first problem is that different people will weight different values differently. Some people will place a higher value on protecting autonomy of choice than others. So we might need to sort that out to make progress. But even if we assume that protecting human life is considerably more important than protecting the right to control one's body, we're still not through. Some people see the death of a fetus -- even a very early-stage fetus -- as the moral equivalent of the death of a full-fledged person such as you or I. Since abortion certainly leads to the death of the fetus, that would be a very high cost. Other people, however, just don't think about the fetus this way. In fact, they might find it difficult to imagine thinking of the death of a 6-week fetus as the same sort of tragedy as the death of someone whom we would all agree to be a full-fledged person. For these people, abortion will certainly lead to the death of the fetus, but not to the death of a person like you or me. This sort of person will weigh the costs and benefits quite differently.

Other people may be unsure just how to think about the status of the fetus, and hence about the costs and benefits of an abortion. The value of fetal life is problematic for this sort of person, and so the trade-off weights are unresolved. It's not just that they think the weight to be put on the fetus's life depends on the stage of the pregnancy. It's that at least for some stages of the pregnancy they simply aren't sure what to say. Worse, it's not clear how best to represent this sort of uncertainty. Probabilities don't really seem to capture it; it's not as though this sort of person thinks, for example, that there's a 10% chance that the 6-week fetus is a full-fledged person. Even if probabilities made sense here (and I'm not at all sure they do), it may turn out that there aren't any determinate probabilities to be had -- even so-called "subjective" probabilities.

Your general question had to do with whether we could answer questions about justice by reasoning about risk. My suggestion was that in the abstract, the answer may be yes; there are formal tools that might do the trick. But using the tools calls for putting in definite information, and we'll face two sorts of problems in cases like the problem of abortion. The first is that if we're trying to settle what the morally correct answer is, we'll find that people disagree fundamentally about what information to feed into the formal apparatus. One person's satisfactory answer will be another's "garbage in/garbage out." The second problem is that we may find ourselves unable to sort out just what we think the right trade-off weights or even the right description of the case should be. And so the upshot is that for the hard cases, we'll get dramatically different assessments of moral risk depending on what we think about the difficult questions that underly the controversy.

Just one comment, not really on the main thrust of Allen's response, but on his remark "Some people see the death of a fetus -- even a very early-stage fetus -- as the moral equivalent of the death of a full-fledged person such as you or I."

I think it is much more accurate to say that some people, when discussing abortion, proclaim that they see the death of a very early-stage fetus (we ought to say "embryo") as the moral equivalent of the death of a full-fledged person. But though some might proclaim that, very few indeed seem actually to believe it. And that is revealed by the fact that very few indeed think of the natural death of an embryo as the moral equivalent of the natural death of a full-fledged person (or indeed, of a neonate).

While the natural miscarriage in the very early weeks of a pregnancy may, for some, be a misfortune, very few people regard it as the moral equivalent of the death of a newly born baby (for example, if a woman is rather cheerfully relieved to find that she is no longer pregnant when she feared she was, then very few would regard her as morally on a par with a mother who is glad at the death of a healthy newborn). Again, who campaigns to reduce the rate of natural miscarriage in the very early weeks of pregnancy? It is estimated that 25% of all pregnancies are miscarried by the fourth week. Yet (almost) no one campaigns for medical intervention to reduce that figure in the way that they might campaign to reduce a high rate of neonatal deaths.

You will be able to multiple such examples. (Almost) no one in practice believes that the death of an embryo is in general straightforwardly the moral equivalent of the death of a full-fledged person.

Yet many claim to think that the intentional killing of an embryo is the moral equivalent of the intentional killing of a full-fledged person. It is a nice question whether that view about killing is consistent with the view about death in general.